Darknet

Family Movie Act

ClearPlay has put together a site about the Family Movie Act of 2004.

I support the bill and ClearPlay's efforts to empower customers to watch Hollywood movies in any fashion they want in the privacy of their own homes.

'Apple's not on your side'

Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing: "If you're an iPod user, you would have done well to have availed yourself of iPod Download, an OS X app that made it easy to move your music from your iPod to your Mac. Of course, Apple hated that poor little app, so it was sometimes hard to find, as Apple devoted expensive laywer-hours to shutting down all the sites that were hosting copies of it."

Sony, Grokster may launch file-sharing venture

Associated Press:

Sony BMG Music Entertainment and online peer-to-peer software distributor Grokster are working on a new venture that is expected to offer paid and free song downloads over the Internet, sources say.

Details of the venture, dubbed Mashboxxx, haven't been finalized but the service would allow users to download promotional versions of songs by Sony BMG acts at no charge and buy licensed versions ...

FCC sends wrong signal on digital TV

Mike Langberg in today's San Jose Mercury News: FCC sends wrong signal on digital TV. Excerpt:

In a free market, consumers vote with their dollars. We regularly endorse new technology that is useful, easy to use and affordable -- everything from digital cameras to DVD players to cell phones.

DTV [digital television] is none of these things. That's why the FCC should focus more energy on fixing digital television's shortcomings, rather than pushing consumers in a direction they don't want to go.

I expect the FCC to be neutral in how citizens spend their money, not working on behalf of broadcasters who are increasingly nervous about the poor return on billions of dollars spent in upgrading to digital transmission -- the cost of a transition the broadcasters themselves eagerly sought.

Creating Podcast feeds

Via Jeff Jarvis: : Feedburner has started a service to create Podcast feeds.

Cory Doctorow on DRM: reloaded

p2pnet.net: In June, Electronic Frontier Foundation European affairs coordinator Cory Doctorow gave a talk to the Microsoft Research Group at Microsoft's Redmond HQ. The talk was eventually turned into a video and, "They say it's the most downloaded video on the internal training network," Cory says.

If DRM was a hot topic then, it's blazing now. Excerpt:

Raise your hand if you're a co-author of the [Microsoft] Darknet paper.

Everyone in the first group, meet the co-authors of the Darknet paper. This is a paper that says, among other things, that DRM will fail for this very reason. Put your hands down, guys.

Here's the social reason that DRM fails: keeping an honest user honest is like keeping a tall user tall. DRM vendors tell us that their technology is meant to be proof against average users, not organized criminal gangs like the Ukranian pirates who stamp out millions of high-quality counterfeits. It's not meant to be proof against sophisticated college kids. It's not meant to be proof against anyone who knows how to edit her registry, or hold down the shift key at the right moment, or use a search engine. At the end of the day, the user DRM is meant to defend against is the most unsophisticated and least capable among us.

Here's a true story about a user I know who was stopped by DRM. She's smart, college educated, and knows nothing about electronics. She has three kids. She has a DVD in the living room and an old VHS deck in the kids' playroom. One day, she brought home the Toy Story DVD for the kids. That's a substantial investment, and given the generally jam-smeared character of everything the kids get their paws on, she decided to tape the DVD off to VHS and give that to the kids -- that way she could make a fresh VHS copy when the first one went south. She cabled her DVD into her VHS and pressed play on the DVD and record on the VCR and waited.

Hilary loves Larry

Hilary Rosen in Wired magazine: How I Learned to Love Larry Lessig. She was the champion of the music industry. He was the voice of the people. It was a deathmatch made in heaven - but they found common ground.

Sure, now that she's left the RIAA.

NPR on the Wired CD

Here's Chris Anderson, Wired magazine editor in chief, and Kathleen Hannah of the band Le Tigre on yesterday's Talk of the Nation on NPR discussing The Wired CD, which encourages listeners to trade, remix and sample music tracks.

Podcasting and the rise of personal media

Over at E-Media Tidbits, Steve Yelvington does a great job of explaining the Podcasting phenomenon:

Podcasting and the Rise of Personal Media

I've been looking at podcasting these last few days. Podcasting is a rip/mix/burn term -- ripped from iPod, mixed with broadcasting, and burned into new types of RSS readers such as iPodder, Doppler, and for Mac users, iPodderX.

[I don't think Steve means to suggest that the iPod is necessarily a part of podcasting; it's not. And broadcasting is perhaps the wrong word here: it's about webcasts. Podcasting is about time-shifted audio, often on a portable device. Here's Wikipedia's definition.]

Podcasting, like RSS, is simple. RSS2.0 feeds can contain "enclosures," which are little more than the URL of a downloadable media file. A reader who knows about enclosures can automatically download audio (or potentially video) files overnight and synch them to an iPod or MP3 player, or on a desktop computer. It's portable and helps solve some of the irritating practical problems of fat media over the Internet, but more importantly, it feeds a new phenomenon called "personal media."

People are creating their own media space with these devices, disintegrating other peoples' products (such as music albums) and reintegrating the parts in new ways. That's rip/mix/burn. It cuts broadcasting out of the loop. I talked with a woman the other day who has not listened to radio since she got an iPod two years ago. "How do you learn about new things?" I asked. "From friends who are DJs," she explained. Not all of us have such friends, and we do need some sort of outside input into our personal space.

Podcasting adds that input: value-added programming, new information, news ... chosen by the consumer, heard on the user's schedule, in the personal-media environment. Much of the early experiments documented at audio.weblogs.com are terrible, self-indulgent dreck, but quality programming also is emerging.

Seattle's KOMO, Boston's WGBH, and Future Tense (Minnesota Public Radio) program host Jon Gordon have been experimenting with podcasting of programs and segments. This is not radio, and it's not yet clear how programs should be presented and packaged in this medium, but broadcasters that want a future in this personal-media space should take heed. If you're conducting such an experiment, I'd like to know about it.

ourmedia, too, is interested in posting podcasts on the Internet Archive's servers, so if anyone comes across podcast programs with a Creative Commons license attached, please let me know.

I write at considerable length about personal media in Darknet (in fact, it makes up the bulk of Chapter 1), but this is the first time I've seen it used by a writer (Steve's a friend) in the media space rather than in the tech gadget sector. You'll be seeing tons more about personal media in the coming years. As Steve smartly discerned, it's about taking media into your own hands.

Rip, sample, mash, share

Creative Commons offers the Wired CD: Rip. Sample. Mash. Share.