Until recently, the music industry provided artists one path, and one path only, to reach and connect with their fans and monetize their pre-recorded music. Artists had to sign to a record label, transferring ownership of copyrights, relinquishing exclusive artistic control, and giving up most of the revenue from the sale of their recordings. Fans could only buy pre-recorded music in physical form from retail outlets from the limited number of artists that labels chose to anoint. Labels were aware of their unique position and took full advantage of it by gouging both artists and music fans.

Four main reasons: barriers to recording, manufacturing, distributing, and marketing music were virtually insurmountable.

First, it’s far cheaper to record now than it ever has been before. In addition, the level of expertise needed to record has dropped considerably. With a laptop, some one-time purchases of software and some hours to learn how to use it, a home recording studio can be created for the cost of one day’s recording at a high-end studio.

Second, in the digital world there is no up front cost or risk to manufacture inventory. The music is available in unlimited quantity as a digital file that replicates on demand only after it’s bought or accessed to stream.

Third, music fans have shifted from buying CDs in stores to buying/streaming music on-line. Now an artist, for a nominal fee and the click of a button on a website, gets an unlimited amount of self-replicating inventory with no up front cost into the world’s largest music retail stores (i.e. iTunes is larger than Walmart ever was), all while keeping their copyrights.

Fourth, there is now equal access to music discovery outlets – YouTube, blogs, Slacker, Pandora, Spotify, digital music stores’ discovery features, Twitter, Facebook and other social networking applications are open to everyone, not just the elite few artists signed to labels. The only media outlet not open to everyone is commercial radio, but with that going the way of the 8-Track over the next few years, the last stranglehold of the traditional music industry will be gone.

• Sue music fans for copyright infringement
• Create more onerous agreements between labels and artists requiring them to give up even more of their copyrights, not fewer (the infamous “360deals”) while providing less value.
• Use antiquated royalty accounting systems and provisions to slow down or reduce royalty payments owed.
• Stifle innovation under the guise of “protecting” copyright (As one example, the majors made it a condition that they must own a piece of Spotify in order for Spotify to have access to their music).  
• Killed artist development and long term careers in a mad dash attempt to make money as quickly as possible.  
• Feed the media as much false information as possible (i.e. the entire music industry is dying) in an attempt to discredit, slow down and delegitimize the new emerging industry. 

• The mother of humanity lived approximately 200,000 years ago, according to a statistical analysis of a sampling of our genes that could be linked to a "mitochondrial Eve." Note that dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago. [url]
• Red Deer Cave people lived in China thousands of years ago and seemed to like eating cooked venison meat (so they were nicknamed after their meals). These Stone Aged people could be a new species in human evolution, and they show that Neanderthals had plenty of company in Asia. [url]
• Homo floresiensis is another human ancestor who lived in Asia and could possibly have met Homo sapiens about 13,000 years ago. These folks were nicknamed 'Hobbits' because they're the smallest human species ever discovered. [url]
• Recently discovered fossils show that Homo erectus wasn't alone in East Africa, and at least two other Homo species lived nearby around the same time. These findings suggest that the evolution of Homo sapiens wasn't a linear progression (as depicted in many cartoons), and there's no "missing link" in the human family tree. [url]

• Here's a list of 9 other species that exhibit some form of intelligence that we've actually observed. It'd be a more impressive list if there were a way to really quantify and rank the varying degrees of intelligence, but then humans might not look so good on such a scale... [url]
• I think someone snuck in their pet dog into this photo gallery of smart animals (all with human-granted names). Apsalah the orangutan seems a bit over-represented, too. [url]
• A few types of parasitic fungus can turn ants into zombie-slaves. Maybe it's not intelligence, but these fungi are often cited as an example of intelligent design (though doesn't explain why an intelligent designer would ever create such a roundabout process). [url]
• To discover more biological phenomena, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

Current intellectual property law frowns on "copying" as opposed to mere "influence." If I write and record a song that is manifestly influenced by the sound of the Beatles, that's just how culture works; if I remix or reperform a medley of their songs, that's infringing. One way to think about the distinction is to ask how much mutation of the original work has occurred in my head before I send it out into the world. We can imagine my sitting with a guitar playing "Taxman," beginning by improvising new lyrics, and gradually altering the melody until I've produced a song that is sufficiently transformed to count as an original work, though perhaps still a recognizably Beatlesesque one. I'm free and clear under copyright law just so long as I only record and distribute the final product, which consists of enough of my own contribution that it no longer counts as a "copy."

Implicit in this model is the premise that creativity is fundamentally an individual enterprise--an act of intelligent design. Yet so much of our culture, historically, has not been produced in this way, but by a collective process of mutation and evolution, by the selection of many small tweaks that (whether by chance or owing to some stroke of insight) improve the work, at least in the eyes of the next person to take it up. Perhaps ironically, this is the kind of evolutionary process by which myths evolve--myths of life breathed into mud, or of Athena springing full-grown from the head of Zeus. Our legal system now takes these evolved myths as its paradigm of creation.

The Romantic model of creativity as an individual act of genius excludes the form cultural creation has taken throughout most of human history, and the legal regime best suited to promote and incentivize individual acts of creation on the Romantic model may be quite hostile to the aggregative process of creation on an evolutionary or peer-produced model. The law says, in effect, that we will protect creativity that occurs all at once, in one brain, or at least as the upshot of a planned and organized effort--but at the cost of forbidding the individually derivative elements of distributed and spontaneous creation.