DeWitt Clinton

The mission statement at Loca Records resonates with our concerns about copyrights. In an attempt to address these issues, they are using a licensing structure called the Creative Commons, which similar in spirit to the GNU Public License, the license frequently applied to Open Source Software. Loca’s plan is intriguing, as they will offer the [...]

Clear Channel is apparently behind another assault on our personal space, this time here at home in New York City. According to the New York Press the city is considering a ban on street vendors and newspaper concessions. The proposal is sponsored by Business Improvement Districts, which are city-sanctioned organizations authorized to access dues from [...]

As if controlling three quarters of a million outdoor advertising spaces and over 1,200 radio stations wasn’t enough for Clear Channel, they want to own space inside your car. As an article on “A New Form of Radio Marketing” in the New York Times is reporting, Clear Channel and Infinity Broadcasting are developing techniques to [...]

Lars Ulrich of Metallica made headlines, way too many headlines, over the past year or two regarding his comments to congress on filesharing (which helped back up the DMCA) and his band’s widely publicized lawsuit against Napster. Right or wrong in their arguments, Lars and Metallica undoubtedly did far more harm than good to [...]

HispanicBusiness.Com is running a news brief on Clear Channel’s launch of a new Spanish language radio station in Arizona. At 97.1 FM, the new station, Que Suave (yes, Clear Channel is actually calling it that), will feature such artists as Ricky Martin and Shakira (both on Sony Records).
Not only is it too much to hope [...]

In 1981, four kids from Boston released what is arguably the the best indie rock 12″ of all time. Simply 20 minutes of impossibly catchy pop hooks twisted around barbed-wire basslines, sandpaper guitars, and battlefield drumming, each note, each word just one notch beyond the breaking point. It was punk, but it was unexpectedly competent [...]

An insightful article over at Progressive Trail discusses the implications of a “Jane Doe” lawsuit in which a French company was able to file a discovery lawsuit against Time Warner Cable to obtain the name of an individual suspected of posting defamatory comments. So while the recent court decision regarding Verizon and the RIAA shows [...]

As reported last Friday at the New York Times, News.com is carrying a reprint about how the Motion Picture Association of America is acting considerably more reasonably than the RIAA when it comes to file sharing. As has been widely covered, the RIAA has been employing the tactic of suing file-traders suspected of sharing copyrighted [...]

Most people probably associate independent music with indie rock and shoe-gazing college kids who wear their hair in their eyes and their hearts ironically thumbtacked to the sleeves of their academy blazers as they debate the etymology of the word “emo” while trying to get the perfect lo-fi sound out of a homemade stompbox built [...]

Issue #59 of Punk Planet has a short piece on old-school subversives Negativland and their light-hearted attack on a Clear Channel radio station in Seattle. As if Clear Channel’s monopoly over the airwaves, concert venues, and outdoor advertising wasn’t enough, apparently one of the stations they own in Seattle (KJR-FM) has been guilty of a [...]