The DMCA Is Fucking Idiocy
A while back, I posted a rant about our local UPN affiliate for not airing the Star Trek: Enterprise episode called “The Council.” This was a pivotal episode near the end of the third season which contained details critical to the story arc. (As you recall, on Wednesday, when the show was supposed to be aired, it was pre-empted by coverage of ECHL hockey, then on Sunday, instead of the usual Enterprise rerun, UPN showed a fitness infomercial instead.)
Well, I mentioned that I was going to have to go online and find a digitized copy of the episode to download if I wanted to see it. Using the eMule file sharing network, I grabbed a DivX rip of the episode, burned it to a VCD and watched it in all its graininess on my big screen TV. That was it. Now, I check my Comcast master account email today—only by accident, mind you, since I don’t receive email there and rarely ever check for any—and discovered that on June 28th, Comcast sent me an official Notice of Action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In other words, SCOLDING ME FOR SHARING THE ENTERPRISE EPISODE! Sure enough, the “infringement timestamp” is May 17th, the same day I posted that rant about UPN from the office. While I was ranting, my eMule client was crunching away on the Enterprise episode at home. It wasn’t even fucking finished transferring.
Text of the email follows.
Come In, Corneria!
1993 Star Fox soundtrack album cover
Back in 1993 I remember buying a Super Nintendo game and excitedly reading the manual in the car on the way home. That game was Star Fox. One of the forgotten classics produced for the SNES, Star Fox has, in my opinion, the absolute best soundtrack of any game released on that platform, period. Composer Hajime Hirasawa did things with the SNES sound hardware that I thought couldn’t be done, things that gave the game a true orchestral feel. High-quality samples of orchestra strikes, timpanis and echoing synthetic strings were hallmarks of the game’s 39 tunes.
Being a fan of that kind of marriage of synth stuff, dramatic cues and military-like snare drum rhythms, I loved it. It’s music like this that can keep a Nintendo game from being just more of the usual “kid’s stuff,” and instead propel it to the next level. Nevermind you were playing the character of a mascot-looking humanoid fox and listening to a toad, a hare and a falcon blab incomprehensively in your ear. That music is telling you that this is serious business, so you better pay attention!
I always wanted a pure rip of the soundtrack from Star Fox—without all the sound effects and crap—but couldn’t quite get it. A soundtrack CD was released in Japan in 1993 by Teichiku Records, but as with most Japanese media, went out of print relatively quickly and is now, eleven years later, categorized as “extinct” (impossible to find, even in preowned channels). Once I got the ZSNES emulator, I tried disabling various sound channels in the hopes that I could isolate the music, but failed.
