This Website is brought to you by Chicken Little and Bad Cop. Much of the debate online about the record industry has devolved – with quite a lot of help from the misguided message of the US trade group, the RIAA – into a debate about piracy. It winds up being something dumb, like, “Piracy […]

Harvard’s Legion of Legal Super-Heroes. They can lock arms and emit a powerful beam of Legal Logic that can defeat any foe. Yeah, okay, I’m glad I’m not in law; these look like the sorts of people who would beat me. What happens when people targeted by record industry legal intimidation fight back? What if […]

Reflecting Harvard: a bike passes through Cambridge. Photo (CC) sandcastlematt. Music DRM may be a thing of the past, online sales may be growing, but that doesn’t mean the U.S. record industry has missed a beat in its ongoing legal and lobbying campaign against music piracy online. The latest battle starts today in Rhode Island […]

Mickey Mann from Matti Niinimäki on Vimeo. MATTI NIINIMÄKI, aka Original Hamsters, has been hacking away with the fantastic new, open-source animation package Animata. Using OpenSoundControl (OSC), he can control live animation with two other open source tools: “Pure Data” Pd (which opens up all sorts of other sonic and control capabilities) and the Arduino […]

Let’s start with the important bit: the Traveler really is a mobile interface. It weighs under four pounds and fits into a backpack; it’s actually a little lighter and more compact than a typical 15” laptop. Now, if your input and output needs are limited (a mic in, headphone out, and stereo out do suit […]

moiré (piano and organ) from defetto on Vimeo. I expect I’m not alone in this: I use to spend time as a kid listening to long records of Beethoven and other stuff I loved, doodling endlessly in a sketchbook. I immediately found stimulation in the challenges of synesthesia: did that squiggle that was so much […]

Slice of Winter from Bjorn Vayner on Vimeo. Hate soundware and generic downloaded samples? You’ll love this. The “Slice of Winter” sound pack created by Covert Operators for CDM doesn’t have a single sound in it – not one; you bring your own. Instead, install this pack and you get a whole mess of slicing […]

Mike Payne sends this our way, from a blog post he just wrote: it’s a pillow rendition of the legendary Roland TR-808, courtesy Gwendolin Taegert of Berlin. (Being Berlin, I could imagine them soon having their own IKEA-style furniture store, exclusively for synth and music geeks.) Now 808 fans have something on which to cry […]

Having been published the old-fashioned way, I’m really interested to see what on-demand printing will make possible in publishing and content – and, particularly, what it will mean for Web entities like CDM. (We need a new term: Web Treeware?) On-demand isn’t as fast as a retail outlet with a book in stock, but they’re […]

From top: a simple, accessible creation by Eoin – now just imagine this pulsing around and some effects and you’ve got a VJ project, too. And a video shows Google really is hoping to bring 3D to the masses. Visualists entering the world of 3D face a major hurdle: making 3D models. Google SketchUp is […]