Culturite

Oh snap! Look at how many rappers sampled the same Joe Farrell track without clearing it? Kanye, Common, Redman, and Meth — and that’s just for starters.

Hip-hop artists love to recycle…but they seem to forget that recycling costs money too. Those hot grooves don’t come for free, homey.

Rappers Kanye West, Method Man, Redman, Common and their record companies were sued on Thursday by late U.S. jazz musician Joe Farrell’s daughter, who accused them of using her father’s music without approval.

The lawsuit, filed by Kathleen Firrantello in the U.S. District Court in New York, names the rappers and Island Def Jam Music Group and its label Roc-A-Fella Records, Universal Music Group, its labels Interscope Records, Geffen Records and A&M Records and its parent company Vivendi.

None of the record companies or representatives for the rappers were immediately available for comment.

The lawsuit said all the rappers used portions of Farrell’s 1974 musical composition “Upon This Rock” in three separate songs — West in “Gone,” Common in “Chi-City” and Method Man and Redman in their song “Run 4 Cover.”

Firrantello is seeking punitive damages of at least $1 million and asked that no further copies of the songs be made, sold or performed, according to the lawsuit.

Source: news.yahoo.com via Jarrett Martineau

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Tags: A&M | cleared | common | copyright | Culture | culturite | def jam | hip-hop | Interscope | jazz | joe farrell | Kanye | lawsuit | method man | Music | musician | rapper | RECORDS | Redman | Roc-A-Fella | sample

Good for Twitter. It’s one of the few web 2.0 success stories that, despite its ongoing downtime and wide-ranging technical glitches, outages, and problems, is still insatiably in demand by its fast-growing user base.

After this morning’s announcement that the company received a second round of funding totalling $15 million, and a corporate valuation of $80 million, it is encouraging to see the company come clean about its architectural problems – and how it’s trying to solve them.

This is a considerable act of goodwill toward maintaing positive Twitterati relations and I’m sure it will stand them well as the company continues its rapid growth.

With increasing attention, continuing outages and new funding of $15 million, Twitter is providing more insight into its operations. In a recent blog post, the company shared the technical problems it is facing and how it plans to make Twitter more stable.

Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency’s sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system. Over the last year and a half we’ve tried to make our system behave like a messaging system as much as possible, but that’s introduced a great deal of complexity and unpredictability. When we’re in crisis mode, adding more instrumentation to help us navigate the web of interdependencies in our current architecture is often our primary recourse. This is, clearly, not optimal.

Our direction going forward is to replace our existing system, component-by-component, with parts that are designed from the ground up to meet the requirements that have emerged as Twitter has grown. First and foremost amongst those requirements is stability. We’re planning for a gradual transition; our existing system will be maintained while new parts are built, and old parts swapped out for new as they’re completed. The alternative – scrapping everything for “the big rewrite” – is untenable, particularly given our small (but growing!) engineering and operations team.

Providing this kind of disclosure will go a long way toward appeasing the frustrated fans, as long as the dialog continues…and Twitter performance shows some ongoing improvements.

Source: news.cnet.com via Jarrett Martineau

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Tags: culturite | Funding | investment | microblogging | problems | Tech & Biz | TECHNICAL | Technology | twitter | twitterati | Web 2.0

NowPublic is in attendance at the 2008 edition of Vidfest, which runs from May 21-24, 2008, here in Vancouver.

The festival kicked off at the Vancouver Art Gallery Wednesday evening with an opening gathering held in conjuction with the VAG’s new anime and comic exhibit Krazy. This year’s Vidfest offers a great line-up of events, parties, conference sessions and guests including a keynote by Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired.

NowPublic will be live-blogging the festival’s keynotes and conference sessions (both here and over on the Vidfest site) — and our very own Michael Tippett, founder and CMO of NowPublic, will be interviewing Dr. Eric McLuhan (son of the esteemed media and cultural theorist Marshall) on Friday.

We invite NowPublic members to suggest questions for Michael to ask McLuhan, by posting them as comments to this story.

Keep an eye for our liveblogging and festival updates through Saturday. Here’s more on Vidfest:

VIDFEST is celebrating its fifth year and has built a reputation for excellent programming, visionary speakers, thought-provoking discussion, deal making, and gala events. The digital media industry in BC is one of the world’s finest and thousands have converged at VIDFEST in Vancouver. The Festival is organized by the industry association, New Media BC, which works to strategically promote and grow BC’s digital media companies. Due to VIDFEST and other events, New Media BC is internationally consulted on developing exceptionally organized and successful events for the digital media community.

Source: 2008.vidfest.com via Jarrett Martineau

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Tags: MARSHALL | Media | Vancouver | Chris Anderson | Culture | culturite | Digital | eric | festival | McLuhan | New Media BC | Tippett | Vidfest

It’s very emotional being a fan of My Chemical Romance. You have to fight for your melodramatic emo youth tribe. You have to fight against those who don’t understand your pain. And when The Media tries to convince the world around you that your pain is part of a “suicidal cult”, you have to take to the streets.  You have to be polite. You have to pick up your litter. And, whatever happens, try not to cry.

Hundreds of black-clad fans of “emo” band My Chemical Romance are planning to march on the Daily Mail’s headquarters in Kensington, London, to protest at what they see as an unjustified media attack on the group and its fans.

The fans, furious at a string of articles that they claim wrongly portray followers of the emo youth tribe as a “suicide cult”, plan to stage a peaceful protest outside Northcliffe House on May 31.

Organisers said yesterday that they had already signed up 300 protesters and hoped to at least double that. They urged protesters to be polite and pick up their litter.

Source: guardian.co.uk via Jarrett Martineau

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Tags: emo | London | Media | Rock | United States | band | Culture | culturite | daily mail | Fans | Music | My Chemical Romance | UK

More than 16 million RFID chips will be embedded in the bodies — I mean, tickets — of Olympic fans in Beijing this summer. Crazy that they’ll be able to scan them from more than five metres away, no? I wonder what other data they’ll be able to store — perhaps some biometric information on the ticket holder? Or might that have to wait until the 2010 games in Vancouver?

For the first time at an Olympic Games, RFID chips will be embedded in more than 16 million tickets. The technology for the RFID chips was developed by China’s leading engineering university, Tsinghua, and will allow tickets to be identifiable from five meters away.

Source: psfk.com via Jarrett Martineau

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Tags: Beijing | China | CHIPS | culturite | data | EMBEDDED | Games | Olympics | RFID | sport | Tech & Biz | tickets

Mickey D’s is finally catching up to the rest of its fast food competitors and phasing out its use of trans-fats in North America.

Now we can all eat unlimited amounts of McMeals, right? What harm could they do us now that the trans-fats are gone? Oh right.

Chicago— McDonald’s french fries are now trans-fat-free in all its restaurants in the United States and Canada, the fast-food restaurant chain said Thursday.

McDonald’s has lagged other restaurant operators in switching over to a zero-trans-fat cooking oil out of worries it would compromise the taste of its trademark fries. It has been under increasing pressure from consumer advocates and some public officials to make the change.

The new oil is canola-based and includes corn and soy oils.

CEO Jim Skinner told shareholders at the annual meeting at its headquarters in Oak Brook, Ill., that the new oil has been in use in U.S. restaurants for a few months now for french fries, hash browns, chicken, filet of fish and biscuits.

He said McDonald’s is on schedule to convert to the new oil by year’s end for its remaining baked items, pies and cookies.

Skinner said the company decided not to advertise the changes.

Source: newsvine.com

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Tags: Health | McDonald's

The Billy Corgan train just keeps on rolling. Guess it’s time to shave my head again, rev up the Ice Cream van, and break out that old, ratty Zero t-shirt.

Smashing Pumpkins are to celebrate their 20th anniversary with a set of special shows.

The band, who reunited in 2006, will tour the US to mark the milestone.

Writing on their website, the group said: ” target=”_blank”To celebrate the band’s 20th anniversary, Smashing Pumpkins will be playing select US cities in August and September of 2008.

“No dates or cities have been announced but expect the band to revisit a few specific places that were missed during the last US tour.”

Source: nme.com

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Tags: Culture | pumpkins | smashing

Aerosmith’s singin’, swaggerin’, rock & roll sensation Steven Tyler has sashayed his way into rehab. After being “Back in the Saddle” for almost 20 years, it looks like he’s…er…fallen off the horse again.

Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler, a poster boy for rock ‘n’ roll decadence in the 1970s, has entered a Los Angeles rehab facility after two decades as a passionate advocate of sobriety, according to an report.

The Web site TMZ.com reported on Wednesday the 60-year-old rocker sought treatment for an unspecified substance abuse problem at Aurora Las Encinas Hospital. The Pasadena clinic’s physicians include high-profile addiction medicine specialist Drew Pinsky.

A publicist for Aerosmith said she did not know about the report.

Source: news.yahoo.com

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Tags: Culture

Just saw this on the Twitter wire…

BREAKING NEWS — US SENATE APPROVES $165 BILLION ADDITIONAL WAR FUNDING FOR IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN. DETAILS SOON.

Source: twitter.com

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Tags: World