My counterclaim against the takedown of the public domain film The Lost World, was successful. The video is back up on YouTube.
I’m inclined to let sleeping dogs lie, so I won’t say much more. I hope that someday a court ruling will clearly establish that restoring an out-of-copyright film to its original state doesn’t create a new copyright on it, but I’m not the person to pursue the fight.
I am furious at the Democrats. They are cowards who won’t stand up to a president grabbing as much power as he can. To a man who has literally portrayed himself as king and pope. To a man who says he doesn’t know if he needs to uphold the Constitution.
To be precise, I mean the office holders and leaders in the party. Voters have to choose a party if they want to vote in primaries, and they choose where they think they’ll have a positive effect. They don’t necessarily like what the leaders are doing. But I have utter contempt for nearly all the Democrats in Congress.
The Republicans in Congress are despicable, with rare exceptions like Rand Paul. They’re actively collaborating with Trump to enable abductions of people and maintain a fake “emergency” so he can impose ruinous taxes on us. But that’s not the topic here. The Democrats are supposed to fight this. They don’t feel like it.
(more…)
This week I went to my mailbox and got an alarming item. The return address said:
2025 NATIONAL CENSUS
U.S. Citizen Census Record Transmission
Form 1983 (2025) 72 hour return enclosed
OFFICIAL USE ONLY
www.judicialwatch.org
In the past few days, I’ve been working on accompaniment for the 1928 public domain silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc. I uploaded it to YouTube, but you won’t be able to see it. When the upload finished, YouTube informed me:
Copyrighted content has been detected in your video “The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) with new accompaniment”. As a result, your video can no longer be monetized and has been blocked in 243 territories. The copyright owner may be either monetizing it, or receiving analytics about it in other territories. This is not a copyright strike and does not affect your channel.
This is the second installment in my overview of Louis Spohr’s string quartets. I’ll update this post to link to the other parts as I post them. Here I talk about the ones numbered 11 through 19.
Just how many quartets Spohr wrote is an interesting question. I came across a discussion of the quartets’ numbering while trying to find information on the missing opus numbers. According to the article, Spohr published 34 quartets with opus numbers, and there are two quartets in the WoO section of the catalogue, both of which Spohr numbered 34. Both of the WoO quartets exist in two different versions. That makes 36 distinct quartets. I’ll look at the last ones more closely when I get there.
I’m looking forward to seeing the new seasons of Andor. With it has come a new round of claims that the Empire is a prime example of fascism. But there are several kinds of totalitarian systems, and the Empire doesn’t really fit the fascist model. Using the term too loosely takes something away from identification of the real thing. In an earlier post, I discussed the nature of fascism. You may want to read that article before continuing here.
(more…)
In January, I posted the 1925 silent film The Lost World to my YouTube channel together with my original accompaniment. A hundred-year-old movie is supposed to be out of copyright. The video is downloaded from the Internet Archive, which I took as confirmation of its public-domain status. Last week YouTube took it down, citing a copyright complaint by Flicker Alley. The issue is that Flicker Alley claims to hold copyright on the restoration of the movie which I downloaded.
So far I’ve taken two steps. I contacted Flicker Alley disputing the copyright claim. They responded promptly, insisting their copyright is valid. I then submitted a counter-claim to YouTube. What happens next depends on Flicker Alley’s next response. If they persist, I’ll have no choice but to keep the movie permanently off the Internet. Accompanying silent movies is a hobby that I don’t make a cent from, and it isn’t worth it to me to pay a lawyer to dispute the matter in court.
(more…)
This has been a bad year for freedom of expression in the United States. ICE thugs have hauled people away without charges for expressing views that the government doesn’t like. In New Hampshire, a federal judge has delivered an outrageous decision regarding a protest in Bow, New Hampshire.
The ruling by Judge Steven McAuliffe is full of absurdities and disregard for the First Amendment. The basic argument is that school athletic events are a limited public forum, and the schools retain some control over types of expression at them. This is true, but it doesn’t mean they can arbitrarily decide what people can say or can’t. The restrictions have to serve a legitimate purpose and be viewpoint-neutral, and they have to be enforced evenly.
(more…)
Louis Spohr wrote 36 string quartets, more than Mozart or Beethoven, and none of them are very well known. Fortunately, all are available for listening, thanks to a complete set from Marco Polo recorded by several different groups. I’ve started listening to them in numerical order, with plans to write a little about each one. As far as I’ve been able to tell, there’s no such overview on the public Web. Probably someone has written a graduate thesis on the quartets, but I can’t find anything.
While I’m not a professional musician, I’m one of the more activate Spohr fans on the Internet, so I’m giving it a try. The scores on IMSLP and Clive Brown’s Louis Spohr: A Critical Biography have been very helpful.
This post covers the first ten quartets, published between 1807 and 1814.
(more…)
My rear windshield has a decal with the text, “My cat is smarter than your president.” On Monday I noticed that several letters were no longer on the windshield. Some were still on the car, in the gap between the windshield and the trunk lid. Given that so many letters came off at once, It was most likely vandalism. I don’t think any of my neighbors did it. The day before, I parked in a large public lot in Massachusetts for several hours. Most likely it happened then, and I didn’t notice till the next day.
![Windshield sticker with missing letters indicated by brackets: "My [c]a[t] is sm[art]e[r] than your president"](https://garymcgath.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/VandalizedDecal-300x169.jpg)