Father of 808 and founder of Roland Ikutaro Kakehashi has died — Peter Kim at CDM writes, “Few people loom over electronic music instruments quite like Ikutaro Kakehashi. As founder of Japanese giant Roland, at Roland’s helm through decades of its most historic creations, and as an engineer, Kakehashi has had a hand in the evolution of electronic music instruments – and particularly the notion of the electronic drum machine – as we now know it.”
Announcing the Release of Over 2,000 Pages of Lost Pre-1870 Copyright Records — Very cool and monumental effort from former US Copyright Office Kaminstein Fellow Zvi Rosen. Prior to 1870, copyright records were maintained by individual Federal District Courts throughout the US, so it was no easy task to locate and digitize them all.
Critics Build House of Canards to Trash USCO Bill — David Newhoff at Illusion of More responds to critics who “feel the next Register [of Copyrights] could ‘go to eleven’ and be even more extra totally double-secret ‘captured’ by Hollywood. And the way this will happen is by reorganizing the USCO relative to the LOC. It’s an argument based on innuendo, laced with emotional triggers for readers (see references to SOPA & Disney); but there is no substantive case being made as to why this reorganization will increase the potential for inappropriate deference to major rights holders.”
Newspaper publishers lose over half their employment from January 2001 to September 2016 — The latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show the troubling decline. But there’s plenty of fake news to fill the gap.
Uber said to use “sophisticated†software to defraud drivers, passengers — It’s amazing the types of disruptive things you can do with technology.