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> I realized it would make a pretty neat demo just by itself, so I built that in too, to the dulcet tones of Selah Sue—whose last name I hope is not indicative.
by skue 13y ago
> I realized it would make a pretty neat demo just by itself, so I built that in too, to the dulcet tones of Selah Sue—whose last name I hope is not indicative.
The demo and technology are amazing, and he should be proud of his hard work. But I was a bit surprised by his appropriation of someone else's work to add a soundtrack. Why not try to reach out to the artist and ask permission first?
Now before you hit the downvote icon, here's a thought exercise: What do you think HN's reaction would be if a random musician used this web visualization in a music video without asking permission first? How often do we get irate about design theft, and why is doing the reverse in this case okay?
> The songs are used here entirely for educational purposes of course. Not that it matters, since they're all on YouTube anyway.
This is simply untrue. Although the blog entry has educational value, the music itself serves no purpose other than to provide a soundtrack. It's being used for entertainment value, and if the developer does professional web design and references this work on a resume or contract offerings, then it arguably serves a commercial marketing purpose as well.
And saying that the video is available elsewhere? That's again no different than appropriating images or artwork from elsewhere on the web and reusing them for other purposes.
It's good that he credited the music, and I'm glad he thought about reuse issues. But again, why not ask permission first? And if it can't be obtained, why not find a musician who needs the exposure and would be happy to have their music included?
- marknutter 13y agoThis is absurd. For demos of this nature people "rip off" we'll known designs all the time. Think of every corporate logo "done entirely in CSS3" or "Facebook style widget using angular.js" type demos, all of which don't bother asking permission because it's a demo. Derailing this thread because of a pedantic point about copyright protection is unproductive and distracting.
- skue 13y agoRecreating a logo is not the same as reusing a logo, especially when we are talking about music. What you are describing would be akin to recreating a song by using different sounds, instruments, algorithms, etc. In other words, a new performance or "cover." That's very different than reusing the original, unedited work wholesale.
- chii 13y agoYep. It should fall under fair use - even tho i know the law actually doesn't include this as fair use unfortunately.
- unconed 13y agoThe music does serve a specific purpose. The Seba track is chosen for its 80s style synths (itself a reuse of Vangelis' Blade Runner soundtrack), which separates cleanly in the FFT and enables the audio response to follow individual notes. The Selah Sue track is chosen for its low bpm and jazz style vocals, which can easily be synced to a 6 DOF camera running at a constant speed on spline tracks without causing significant motion sickness. Trust me, you don't want to ride that thing on dubstep. Neither demo could be accomplished without specific requirements in music, whether it's these songs or others, and each is a novel demonstration of web technology. The full source is on github, there's commentary and accurate, live diagrams of the internal mechanisms. I don't deny that this is skirting the rules a bit, but the educational goal is genuine. I'm a DSP engineer. What's the difference between me slapping a commercial MP3 on a research project involving real-time graphics and audio processing, and a colleague using a copyrighted Playboy centerfold (1) to demonstrate their image processing algorithm? Also chosen for specific purposes: it contains a complex mix of textures that shows flaws in algorithms well, and is a plausible real world use case too. For an encore, the server is configured to make pirating the songs from me as inconvenient as possible without compromising the demonstration. (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lena_Söderberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lena_Söderberg