The recording industry on Friday fought to preserve a preliminary courtroom victory, arguing that Verizon Communications has no choice but to hand over the identity of an alleged Kazaa music pirate
Why hasn't anyone heard of Jazzanova? I know, I know, this is my second column about them in almost as many months. But I just purchased The Remixes 1997-2000, and my CD player has not been able to part with it for weeks now. Maybe a review of it will serve as a kind of exorcism, and make way for another album in my boom box.
In case you don't know, (and you probably don't, unless you're from either Munich, Berlin, or Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where the people seem to know everything about good music) Jazzanova are a DJ collective comprised of six men with entertaining names like Jurgen von Knoblauch and Roskoe Kretschmann. They began playing and remixing records together in 1995. They describe their music as a hybrid of jazz, bossanova, (hence the name) soul, disco, R&B, and a little bit of everything else. They radically reinvent other artists' tracks, giving them the unique Jazzanova sound.
If I have any complaint about this album, it's that the aforesaid sound can get a bit samey. As background music, it's peppered with standout moments where you lean in and listen, curious to hear exactly what's going on. If you're playing it on your Discman/Walkman/MP3 player, you might find yourself skipping some tracks.
The two-CD set starts off with 4 Hero's We Who Are Not As Others. Eerie synth chimes immediately give you the feeling that what you're about to listen to is going to kick ass. It does, but with a whisper, not a scream. Jazzanova turn the track into what sounds like a robot band playing fusion. It's calm, intricate, and undeniably electronic.
Marschmellows' Soulpower is pure pop-funk, complete with slap-bassline, hand-claps, and squelching synths. They even break it down and add whooshing Seventies sounds at the end. Jazzanova manage to replicate an entire decade's worth of music in one song, and still make it their own cool blend.
Truby Trio's Carajillo melds Afro-pop with drum-pad beats and a simple, jazzy house piano line. The singers' voices call and answer to each other. It's music you want to turn up full volume and clamp headphones over your ears, but it's also perfect as background.
High Priestess, by Karma, has a big-band-shuffle feel that swings even when it turns into a bongo-ridden ¾ voodoo beat. Lazy upright bass and blasts of brass punctuate this swampy mire till it sounds like there's a full-on tribal ritual going on somewhere in the bayou. Every so often the heat breaks, but it always comes back full force before long.
Azymuth's Amazon Adventure starts with a beat that sounds as if it came straight off a Casio pre-programmed selection. It's soon accented with more organic instruments; a high piano, another upright bass, live drumming. It's intelligent hold music.
Absolute Space, by Koop, is more of the same Casio-on-ecstasy spasmodic jazz drumming and chiming piano, this time with a fair Bjork impression over the top. Although the drumming occasionally breaks the monotony by leaning toward an exhilarating Brazilian beat, this isn't one of my favorites. The same formula's applied in Ian Pooley's What's Your Number, but now something other than nonchalance is in the mix, as a woman's voice declares emotionally that "things change". This is one of the only songs in a minor key on the two-disc set.
Visit Venus's Planet of Breaks takes the frenetic jazz pace down to a nice steady dub. The drums flow, every once in a while broken by a little eddy of beats and beeps. Toward the end, however, the drummer once again gets carried away with himself. He might try listening to some Metallica, change the mood a little.
In a strongly worded brief filed in federal district court in Washington, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) assailed Verizon's request for a stay of a 21 January order as a brazen attempt by the telecommunications firm to "evade its responsibilities under the law".
The lawsuit, filed last August, pits the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against Internet users' right to remain anonymous online. With the vocal assistance of civil liberties groups, Verizon has argued that the DMCA's turbocharged subpoena process is not sufficiently privacy-protective, because it can be used to glean the identities of hundreds or thousands of suspected peer-to-peer pirates at a time.
Matthew Oppenheim, a senior vice president at the RIAA, said in a conference call Friday that Verizon was exaggerating the privacy risks of complying with requests made under the DMCA. Verizon and its allies, including a former Clinton administration privacy official, have suggested that copyright holders should file a "John Doe" lawsuit to unmask suspected peer-to-peer infringers instead of wielding DMCA subpoenas.
"In private conversations with the RIAA, Verizon has made it very clear that this is not a privacy issue," Oppenheim said. "They said they would be happy to turn over the names of some of their customers, as long as they don't have to turn over the names of a lot of their customers."
At issue in the RIAA's request is section 512 of the DMCA, which permits a copyright owner to send a subpoena ordering a "service provider" to turn over information about a subscriber. The service provider must promptly comply with that order, and no judge's approval is required first. In August, the RIAA asked a federal court for an order under the DMCA compelling Verizon Communications to reveal the name of a Kazaa subscriber accused of illegally trading hundreds of songs.
Oppenheim said that Congress had created a careful balance between privacy and copyright when drafting the DMCA, and Verizon's argument that the DMCA applies only to material hosted on its own servers is specious. "They're not engaged in private conduct," Oppenheim said about peer-to-peer users. "They're on public networks making available hundreds of music recordings to millions of other users. They're not doing anything in private. They don't have the right to anonymously commit a crime."
Sarah Deutsch, a Verizon vice president and associate general counsel, said: "This is just the RIAA's desperate attempt to divert public attention from the fact that they want unlimited access to private communications. They're trying to divert attention from some of the bad publicity that this case has garnered."
Deutsch said the RIAA had spurned a compromise proposal. "We offered that while the case was pending, we would forward cease-and-desist letters to our subscribers, at our own cost, without revealing our customers' identities," Deutsch said. "But RIAA refused."
Verizon has appealed last month's order to comply with the DMCA subpoena, but the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will not hear the case until US district judge John Bates decides, possibly in the next few weeks, to grant a stay or not.
In last month's 37-page decision, Bates ruled that Congress used "language that is clear" when crafting the DMCA. "Under Verizon's reading of the act, a significant amount of potential copyright infringement would be shielded from the subpoena authority of the DMCA," Bates wrote. "That would, in effect, give Internet copyright infringers shelter from the long arm of the DMCA subpoena power, and allow infringement to flourish."
In another court filing Friday, the RIAA moved to strike a declaration last Thursday from Peter Swire, an Ohio State University law professor and former Clinton administration official, as irrelevant. "Mr. Swire's declaration boils down to nothing more than a twelve-paragraph legal brief, largely derived from speculation -- most, if not all, of which directly contradicts this court's prior ruling," stated the RIAA in its legal filing. "While his 'sworn' statements may have a place in law review articles and policy debates, they have no place in a court of law."
If the RIAA prevails in this legal skirmish, it seems intent on pursuing DMCA subpoenas against other Internet providers. In a third court filing Friday, the trade group filed a statement from Jonathan Whitehead, an antipiracy vice president at the RIAA. Whitehead's statement said he sent Internet service provider EarthLink a DMCA subpoena on Wednesday for the identification of a single peer-to-peer user.
I have both a gripe and a rave about this record, and they're one and the same. As I began to review this album, sometimes I would let a track play, begin to write about it, and turn to my CD player to find another track had started playing without my being aware the song had changed. This is disconcerting if you're trying to listen to the album as a collection of songs, which is how it's presented. I think it would sound fantastic as a continuous mix, without the usual two or three seconds of silent space separating songs. Chill-out music, which is what this is, sounds better without interruptions. I'd like to experience a Jazzanova live set to see if I'm right about this album sounding better as one huge song. Because if I view it that way, it's stellar.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/itmanagement/0,1000000308,2130153,00.htm
