Seeing as WMC (Winter Music Conference in Miami, FL) is through I won’t add it to my list, therefore leaving space for other honorable mentions… (special thanks to Tanaz Irani, Tanz Agency for creating this list).

1. Movement, aka DEMF (Detroit, US) – Housed in Detroit’s dissonant downtown of decay and delight, one will encounter one of the largest congregations of techno lovers, old and new fashioning everything from proper three-piece suits appreciatively nodding alongside the dj booth, to candied-out fun fur legs and arms flailing in all colours of ringed bracelets. This festival is of many ages with a historic echo that reverberates through the derelict buildings and across the waters to the north. Not to mention the most interesting and ‘educational’ taxi rides you may ever experience.

2. Mutek (Montreal, Canada) – Eleven years running, Mutek is more a celebration of the art of electronic music than the typical dj-dancer feedback-loop one generally encounters at festivals. Patrons will surely find driving beats and relentless productions pulsating through the bodies of dancers at the club-held events, however they will also find a world of techno ‘heads’ attending day lectures and unique performances of visual and sonic sensory astonishment, all in a beautiful 117-year-old theatre (Monument National). Also, if the weather holds up, patrons can dance outdoors under a giant statuesque piece of contemporary art to the compelling beats of Picnik Electronik’s artists, overlooking the cityscape as night falls from the island.

3. Sonar (Barcelona, Spain) – Definitely one of the most highly attended festivals of the year for techno enthusiasts. Unlike other festivals that have a more organic, outdoor feel to them, Sonar is very much a ‘city’ event. Crowds of party people navigate the tiny, captivating streets of Barcelona for the week surrounding the event – making if feel like the whole city is there to unite in their affiliation to this electronic subculture. Residents routinely keep away from the main strip (Las Ramblas) even more so than during the regularly busy tourist season. This is Sonar Week and it’s all about networking, partying and after partying, and when there’s no more to be had… Chiringuito parties on the beach lure you in for days into nights into days.

4. I Love Techno (Ghent, Belgium) – One of the longer-running and more popular festivals in the world of techno tourism, I Love Techno, held at the Flanders Exposition grounds in Ghent, Belgium is on its 15th round this year. The festival maintains its grass-roots beginnings by bringing in hundreds of volunteers to do everything from promotion, organization and design to the creation of the ‘official track’ of this year’s event which will be featured on the ILT promo cd.

5. ADE – Amsterdam Dance Event (Amsterdam, Netherlands) – Also in its 15th year, ADE, with its corporate kick of serious sponsorship and support is expected to draw even more than the 90,000 party people it pulled in last year, with over 700 artists in 41+ venues this festival takes its small but decadent home town to a whole new level of dissipation and dance.

There is no copyright in an idea and I’m glad. Imagine a world where ideas were controlled. Books have been written on the topic. “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury is one. Do we care? Maybe we should. All through history regimes have tried to control ideas. I thought this was something we were trying to get away from in 2010. Whether the control is religious, cultural or political – diabolical or paternalistic, it comes down to the same thing. Control. What I think – and I’m glad that I can – is that ideas want to be free.

The Internet has given platforms to a lot of pundits, many of whom have small points of view but big voices, to howl about the theft of ideas. Especially in the area of advertising – which occupies public, accessible space – a lot of people get attracted to the noise, cheerleading the trend to “out” copycat styles, imagery, lighting, themes, techniques, etc. This may be short-term fun, but it’s narrow thinking for the longer term. It’s regressive. Sadly, the misanthropic view is that individuals and societies tend to make the same mistakes over and over. In this case, just as the Internet has given us give the tools to set ourselves free, we clamor to constrain ourselves. Sites like http://www.joelapompe.fr.st/ and blog posts like Ryan Healy’s “The Ethics of Idea Theft” are a grand meeting place for idea-cops worldwide. Get over it people. The point is that original ideas don’t hardly, ever-ever exist. Culture ought to be a dynamic accretion of ideas. There is no such thing as a completely new idea. Please, how naïve! There are only wonderful, endless manifestations of ideas built on each other, mirroring and referencing each other.

Imagine a big open public room. Nothing is confidential. Everyone can see what everyone else is doing. A hundred people come in, stand at easels, grip their pencils. They are asked by a woman at the front to sketch a picture of an apple on a table. They can clearly see each other’s work. When they’re done, each one owns the copyright to their sketch, but they don’t own the idea of an apple on a table. Copyright protects the maker of a work from having it reproduced by someone else. If the best, most beautiful sketch of the apple on the table was scanned by someone and then used without permission, that would an infringement – rightly so. But to protect the rights of the person who came up with the idea of the apple on the table? Of course not – that would be totalitarian. What about a person who suggested the apple should be green instead of red, or the person who thought the apple should have a happy looking worm in it? Should they get a credit on someone else’s sketch if the other person wants to draw a green apple with a worm? Where do you draw the line? Simple. Ideas want to be free. Why do we insist on giving them ownership?

I enjoy a good clean fight as much as the next guy, but watching Canadian cable companies simultaneously laying a social media beating on television broadcasters while showboating to seem to be on the side of consumers, while the broadcasters return blows from behind a human shield of local programming cuts is, well, too much for me. I prefer tuning into the UFC and if I want to go-Canadian, Georges St-Pierre, because the opponents seem to have more respect for each other.  As Corus Entertainment president, John Cassaday notes today to Canada’s broadcasting and telecommunications regulator, the CRTC, at hearings in Gatineau, QC, the current crisis mentality in the Canadian broadcast industry is in turn fostering cynicism, animosity and a risk of a rush to the exit for advertisers. Enjoy the CRTC hearings, if you can stomach them.

“Culture is impossible without a rich public domain – culture grows by accretion, with new forms building off the old,” is the compelling mantra of Nate Harrison in his modest-but-powerful video posted on  You Tube about the ownership of sound samples.

Harrison casts light on the issues and implications of copyright in music (specifically, musical samples) through the history of the “Amen Break,” a six-second drum sample from the B-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. This sample was used extensively in early hip hop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum n bass and jungle music… a six-second clip that “spawned several entire subcultures.”

The original creators of the Amen Break have never sought legal action to claim ownership of this notable six-seconds of sound. It seems that by the overall amount of its appropriation by producers and Dj’s after the advent of sampling technology in the early 1980s the break had entered into the public domain. Harrison notes, “to trace the history of the Amen Break is to trace the history of a brief period of time when it seemed digital tools offered a potentially unlimited amount of new forms of expression; where cultural production at least musically was full of possibility by virtue of being able to freely appropriate from the musical past, to make new combinations and thus new meanings.”

There are two copyrights involved in the Amen Break. The first is the copyright in the sound recording: if the owners of the masters could prove copying of their recording, then this could be the basis for an infringement claim. However, it appears most uses have been re-recorded (e.g. the drum tab on Wikipedia is readily available, and certainly electronic kits would involve a re-recording – not only to ‘clean up’ the sound quality, but also to chop it up, space out the individual beats and create a new sound conducive to drum n bass).

The second copyright is in the musical composition. This is the interesting part. When the original recording was first released, the break was not what would at the time have been classified as a hook. It was a break, which by the standards of the day, I would argue, was not unique enough to attract copyright protection. Since then the break has been sampled and used to the point where it has attracted an independent identity (with the help of advancements in sampling, recording, and production technology). The interesting part is, who owns the new identity? Does a new identity accrue back to the original copyright holder? Is it something that one of the early appropriators could claim copyright in? Is it a public domain identity? Seems it’s the latter, in that its use is ubiquitous and no one person can step forward as being the original user of the same four bar beat used in a manner that now by more contemporary standards is unique.

When I read in the Globe and Mail that Pirate Bay was being purchased for $9-million, I figured this could be a good example of how innovators, who often are branded as outsiders or scofflaws, eventually find their niche. Well, that still may be a path to success on the Internet, but apparently not in the case of Pirate Bay, where the new owners are attempting to set up a business that would sell the metrics of illegal file sharing back to the victims (i.e. to sell information back to movie, record and software companies about content uploads and downloads by the site’s estimated 20 million users). So far there has been a particularly frosty reception from the owners of those rights.

Started by a group of pro-piracy Swedes in 2003, Pirate Bay soon became one of the largest bit torrent trackers in the world.  From then until now the site has been involved in a number of lawsuits, which eventually led to the 2009 arrest and sentencing of the four main operators of the site. In June 2009 Global Gaming Factory GGF (a Swedish advertising company) announced they would buy Pirate Bay for approximately $9-million, a deal that was set for August 2009.  The time has arrived and as one might have expected GGF is facing criticism. Seems the only value to be extracted from this business model is notoriety.