The Diaspora open-source social network
is supposed to release code tomorrow! Should be interesting; I’m looking forward to it. Still seriously in developer mode at that point; basically, they’re flipping on the public bit to their git repository. Nothing yet for non-geeks.
But it’s an interesting project…worth checking out if you’re into controlling your own info:
I just made a wonderful find, thanks to EFF Deeplinks: the Musopen symphony project on Kickstarter.
Musopen has a great mission; to create an online library of music available in the public domain. Many great musical works have expired copyrights, but most of the modern sound recordings of these works ARE under copyright. Musopen solicits donations in order to make (or obtain the copyright to) recordings that they can then release these into the public domain, for all to enjoy.
For their latest project, they are using Kickstarter to try to raise $11,000; if they can raise that amount, they will be able to fund a recording of the symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky! Amazing.
I’ve made my donation, and I wish them luck. I also find Kickstarter to be a really interesting funding approach. It’s an all or nothing
model…the donations are aggregated and tallied by Kickstarter, but no money changes hands unless the project is fully funded before it’s time expires. Great concept; it allows for experimentation with low risk for both sides. I’m poking about the site looking at some of the other projects. Some cool stuff.
So, another DRM scheme bites the dust. Last night, I got an email from Napster, whom I’ve bought music from over the years not a lot, but there were times when they were the only site I could find a song on, and most of the [non-iPod] mainstream MP3 players sold during the mid 2000’s supported the WMA Secure digital formats pretty transparently).
I’ve always known, however, that those formats can have issues if you buy new PC hardware and try to move songs, etc. Napster has since moved to MP3s…and then one just waits for the other shoe to drop, as it did last night.
Important Information About Your Secure WMA Digital Music Purchases ... We're writing you with an important message about any music downloads you purchased from Napster prior to May 2008. Due to evolving digital music technology and related rights, Napster will no longer be able to provide support for these downloads as of Sept. 1, 2010.
((nice!!! Thanks, Napster!))
... Be aware of reasons your DRM-encoded WMA downloads may stop playing: * Changing or reinstalling your operating system * Purchasing a new PC * System crash or failure * DRM corruption
((ok…I’ll just keep this 8 year old desktop around…forever. Yeah.))
... Back up your WMA files. If you haven't already, we strongly recommend that you back up all of your DRM-encoded WMA files by burning them to audio CDs. Doing this will allow you access to your music on any CD player and generally have a maintenance free permanent copy. Please note that if you don't back up your files, you risk permanently losing access to your purchased music.
((and if you _do_ back up and re-rip your files, you lose your ID3 tags. FTW!! Oh, they didn’t mention that, did they…?))
... Thank you for your understanding as we make this transition and strive to bring you the best subscription services and download store possible. And as always, thanks for listening.
((*sigh*))
In fact, a DMCA exemption for breaking these files for precisely this reason was requested at this year’s review process, but turned down. Thanks for waiting just long enough that you weren’t another example, Napster!
Note: I always back everything up to CD, so I’m set; but you do lose your ID3 tags when doing that (the custom playlisted CD you burn won’t be found on CDDB-type databases.)
There are ways to fix this; last.fm recently updated their song fingerprinting api, and I’m just about finished with a little python wrapper app that lets me identify, rename, and tag (at least with artist and title) the songs ripped off on these custom CDs. It’s pretty neat to watch 01 Track.mp3
become Cutting Crew – One For The Mockingbird
! There are other tools that do this, but the last.fm API is easy to use and pretty accurate; I’ll upload my utility script to my gitorious account over the weekend, if anyone wants to check it out.
Short of it: get anything DRM’d burnt and re-ripped ASAP. Those servers ARE going away, and content providers don’t see any problem with it. MP3 or Ogg Vorbis FTW!
UPDATE: My git repository for this tool is here: http://gitorious.org/pyfmid/pyfmid
*grr* I’m sorry, but I just flat-out don’t believe what some of my friends and fellow travelers seem to; that the reason the publishers want to control and initially raise the prices of e-books is that they need that control and increase…in order to DECREASE prices in some indeterminate future. Not buying it, folks.
What I’m seeing on the ground is that they could do that now if they wanted to, but they don’t. I had been waiting to buy So Damn Much Money by Robert Kaiser (had heard good things) until it dropped to $9.99 for my Kindle, but I failed to catch that text-to-speech is disabled. So in car last weekend, and wanted to just listen…no joy. Yes, I know publishers have to protect audio-book sales
. Spare me.
So, already irritated by that this morning, nevertheless I thought about buying a digital copy of a book I already own, in hardback; Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America. I’ve started the book several times, and I always get so angry I have to put it down…not a good choice of book to carry physically and double my bag weight. But dumped on the Kindle and available whenever? I just might get through it.
I found it in the Kindle store; excellent! Then, all downhill: “Digital list price”, $30; crazy! Kindle price, $16.50; insane! “Text to speech, disabled”; not going to happen. I’ll finish it in physical form, someday. I suppose.
Note: this book was published in 2001. It’s no longer in print, as far as I can tell. I bought it as a hardback on a bargain shelf a couple of years ago for I think about $7. I would have bought the book AGAIN if it had been available for the Kindle for $7 (with text-to-speech enabled; without it, either no-go, or maybe $4.99 or less). There’s no hardcover in print for e-book sales to parasitize
; this e-book pricing makes no sense whatsoever, in my opinion. They just lost a sale is all I know…and at a current ranking of 140,479 in the Kindle store, they’re not exactly making a huge case for the price discrimination strategy.
As for the text-to-speech issue; yes, I know I can crack the DRM and listen to these books…that’s not the point. Get a clue for how I might want to use a book, and I might even pay more! (O’Reilly, for example, sells technical books without DRM, in multiple formats whenever possible, allows you lifetime updates, and use on any supported device. The last e-book I bought there was almost $21 on sale…but with copies I can put on my phone and my Kindle, and updates forever, I was OK with that.)
An inspiring publishing experiment continues to move forwards:Cory Doctorow’s pending release of With A Little Help.
Cory has long been at the forefront of experimentation regarding the future of writing; he was the first novelist to release a work under a Creative Commons license, and he continues to release all his novels as such. With this newest experiment, he not only explores the tipjar, micropayment, and print-on-demand possibilities that are now available, he also opens the books
on his efforts and allow others to see his results. Should be great data for other authors.
His January status update showed that his release schedule may have been a tad optimistic, but that’s ok. I look forward to both reading the stories, and to seeing the underbelly of the process.
Zoinks! I was offline for much of Saturday, so it wasn’t until Sunday morning until I caught up on the Amazon – Macmillan feud: Amazon and Macmillan go to war: readers and writers are the civilian casualties. Amazon, in a disagreement with Macmillan over a change in pricing model (brought on primarily, IMO, by the sense of increased leverage that the release of the iPad has given Macmillan) has temporarily removed ALL Macmillan books, both printed and electronic, from the Amazon website. Panic ensues. *grin* (UPDATE: Amazon has already [as of Sunday night] acknowledged that they’ll have to capitulate to Macmillan’s new [and higher, in some cases] pricing model.)
It’s been REALLY interesting to watch the reactions, though. One of the main US science fiction publishers (Tor) is a Macmillan line…so they were affected. And a number of the bloggers that I read online are science fiction writers; many for Tor! So the comments have been flying fast and furious; some of the best at Charlie Stross’ blog. First, Charlie wrote up his own thoughts, which begat a giant, interesting thread of comments. Then he went and gathered up links to several other thoughtful responses (mostly authors, but also lawyers, editors, etc.). Great stuff.
I love most of these guys, but I do find it interesting to see them dealing with business model changes, technology shifts, digital rights management, etc. within their own industry, after having seen them discuss the issues from a safer, more objective vantage point for years with regard to music and movies. Not to suggest that these guys have never talked about how this will affect publishing; they have. But now…I think the enormity of the change is starting to sink in. Think about this passage from Cory Doctorow’s essay Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet in Content. (note: I wouldn’t say that Cory speaks for all authors here, but the point, to me, is clearly relevant)
Technology giveth and technology taketh away. Seventy years later, Napster showed us that, as William Gibson noted, “We may be at the end of the brief period during which it is possible to charge for recorded music.” Surely we’re at the end of the period where it’s possible to exclude those who don’t wish to pay. Every song released can be downloaded gratis from a peer-to-peer network (and will shortly get easier to download, as hard-drive price/performance curves take us to a place where all the music ever recorded will fit on a disposable pocket-drive that you can just walk over to a friend’s place and copy).
But have no fear: the Internet makes it possible for recording artists to reach a wider audience than ever dreamt of before. Your potential fans may be spread in a thin, even coat over the world, in a configuration that could never be cost-effective to reach with traditional marketing. But the Internet’s ability to lower the costs for artists to reach their audiences and for audiences to find artists suddenly renders possible more variety in music than ever before.
Those artists can use the Internet to bring people back to the live performances that characterized the heyday of Vaudeville. Use your recordings — which you can’t control — to drive admissions to your performances, which you can control. It’s a model that’s worked great for jam bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish. It’s also a model that won’t work for many of today’s artists; 70 years of evolutionary pressure has selected for artists who are more virtuoso than charismatic, artists optimized for recording-based income instead of performance-based income. “How dare you tell us that we are to be trained monkeys, capering on a stage for your amusement? We’re not charismatics, we’re white-collar workers. We commune with our muses behind closed doors and deliver up our work product when it’s done, through plastic, laser-etched discs. You have no right to demand that we convert to a live-performance economy.”
Technology giveth and technology taketh away. As bands on MySpace — who can fill houses and sell hundreds of thousands of discs without a record deal, by connecting individually with fans — have shown, there’s a new market aborning on the Internet for music, one with fewer gatekeepers to creativity than ever before.
Point that same argument at authors rather than musicians, and I see a lot of resonance. It seems to me I read a lot of statements from authors that want the status quo to remain in place; who want what technology giveth, but not what it taketh away. But honestly…I’d love to see some of them strike out with really wild ideas, things outside the status quo. Maybe Amazon’s new Terms and Conditions for ebooks; maybe Cory’s experiment With A Little Help
...I don’t know. But I know that, for example, I’d much rather see Peter Watts get State of Grace
published on Lulu, or in Amazon’s e-bookstore, than not at all!
And I don’t think all the criticism of Amazon is wrong, by any means. This is a complicated story. But times, they are a-changin’.
Along with many others, I sat and watched the announcement of the iPad earlier this week. If nothing else, Apple certainly knows how to hype and put on a show! It’s a pretty device, certainly, but I have no plans on purchasing one. And as for being a Kindle-killer? I think not, and certainly hope not, being a pretty happy Kindle user. I think a comparison of the two contrasts both the differing ideas on device functionality that Amazon and Apple espouse, and also the “openness” question that has troubled the Kindle. If the Kindle is closed, what about the iPad?
The most obvious difference between the devices is the simplest: the screen. The Kindle screen is a low-power reflective e-ink screen that only displays black, white, and shades of gray; the iPad is a full-color, touch-sensitive backlit (emissive) screen that is designed for all sorts of media consumption, including music, movies, full-color magazines, and web browsing.
The Kindle is designed and optimized for reading books and text-focused periodicals. While it does have a (free) 3G wireless connection, said connection is focused on easily delivering content to the device, and light browsing of sites like Wikipedia. The Kindle is a reading device; it tries to get out of the way of the reader, and just provide the words (honestly, once I get into the flow of a work, I often forget I’m reading on a “device”). Even with the recent release of a SDK that will allow app development, I maintain that the Kindle is a limited function device, and I like that. Reading is best done on a device with limited distractions, and the Kindle is just that.
The iPad is designed and marketed for a completely different experience. It’s really more of a “netbook without a keyboard”; I can definitely see it being more of a threat to some of the devices in that market segment. Multimedia from the get-go. For me, it’s not as attractive; I read and listen to more than I watch. I use my phone (Android G1) for podcasts, audio streams, and music, and the Kindle for text (with the G1 as a fairly capable backup). I’m not a big movie and TV consumer.
Another difference, for me, is the Kindle’s ability to stand alone
. A Kindle never actually needs ANY connection to a PC whatsoever; you can use the USB connector to charge the device from a computer, and when connected in that way, it can be mounted as a USB Mass Storage device. This means you can drag and drop files both ways…you can copy off your books as a backup strategy, and you can put books on the device that you didn’t get from Amazon. It’s great; but none of that is necessary. You do, of course, have to have an Amazon account to purchase things via WhisperNet, but that’s the limit. You can purchase on the device and have it immediately delivered, or open up a Linux-based netbook, buy the book via browser at Amazon, copy it down to the filesystem, and mount the Kindle as a USB device and copy it over. Works just the same.
The iPad, on the other hand, is tied completely to the same Apple iTunes software stack that the iPod and iPhone are. All purchases and media are sync’d via iTunes…which doesn’t run on Linux, for example. You can’t backup your media (in a supported way) without involving iTunes. You can’t purchase media without involving iTunes. You and iTunes are joined at the hip…at minimum.
The strategies of the companies involved (Apple and Amazon) are interesting as well, and the jockeying between them continues even as I’ve been editing this post. More to come on that and the openness question.
OK, the new privacy controls are completely borked. There’s been plenty of discussion already around the Net about how this privacy enhancement
can actually open up more of your info to the entire Internet, without you even realizing it. But it gets worse. Even one of the things I actually liked about the new system is broken.
The new settings promise to allow you to set each status update to your wall with a personalized setting; allowing some to be seen by all friends, some by only a few people, some by the entire FB community (or maybe whole Internet, I can’t really tell). I use a fairly customized setup, and I’d been waiting for this feature to be enabled (it was demo’d during the summer); I have friends broken into groups…very close, close, acquaintances. I set my default setting to let “very close” and “close” friends see status updates, but not acquaintances. Tried it out with a test via the web page…worked! So far, so good.
Since I like to make things complicated, I do most of my FB status updates via the identi.ca FB sync application. I wondered how that would work, so I tried it out with fingers crossed…worked! Sweet!
Except it doesn’t, completely. As near as I can tell, there’s some weird difference in Facebook between a pure status update and something with a link attached. When identi.ca posts come in with a URL in them, that URL becomes an attached link…and suddenly the post goes from something viewable only by my default group to a post viewable by any friend!
That’s more serious, in my opinion, than it sounds to some people…”why would you be upset about your friends
seeing posts, Ken?”. Because a friend is not a friend is not a friend, regardless of what Facebook and LinkedIn and Plaxo and everyone want you to think. Some people I share political links with, for example…some people I don’t. We’re friends, but we don’t see eye to eye on some topics, and it’s not worth risking a friendship, so we avoid it. Which works fine, until a setting that I think will let me be flexible and do exactly this doesn’t. Uncool, Facebook.
And other apps have problems too. The Facebook for Android app seems to do the same thing…whatever process it uses for updates appears to ignore the new default privacy settings, and shows update to all friends (and maybe friends of friends…I wouldn’t know how to tell. It’s not all of FB, at least…I can check that.)
Yes, it’s possible that I’ve missed settings. I’ve spent time tweaking some settings on the identi.ca app for permisisons, didn’t seem to make a difference. But it shouldn’t be this hard. And ultimately, one would think that my EXPLICIT default setting would override pretty much anything an app did. Ha! So much for privacy.
My connection to this SN is tenuous at best…they’d better unravel this mess pretty quick. I’ve got better things to do.
I’m in shock…Peter Watts, one of my absolute favorite sci-fi authors, an unfailingly nice guy, and someone I’d count as an online pal, was arrested at the US border returning to Canada earlier this week (Peter is Canadian). He’s commented on his own blog as well now, and other sf authors have picked up the story.
While we don’t know the details from every perspective, I’m certainly in the camp of those that believe that Peter is innocent of the charge that’s been made. Last I checked, we did the innocent until proven guilty
thing in these parts. Regardless, this will be EXPENSIVE. I’ve already dropped some money in the legal defense fund (which is currently being organized ad-hoc on his backlist page until something more concrete is set up). I’d suggest all of you do the same.
Peter’s an amazing author, a stand-up guy, a well-spoken defender of liberty, freedom, and science…and a bit of a cranky soul. Which means we’re a lot alike, except he’s a much, much better writer. *grin* This sort of thing can happen to practically anyone nowadays…we’ve lost our way, for the sake of security
. I hope things get straightened out, and in the meantime, please let us know if we can do anything at all, Peter!!
Grrr…I knew going to read the full text of Dan Glickman’s letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee would get my blood boiling. The Wired article describing it made me mad enough, highlighting the money quote:
“Opponents of ACTA are either indifferent to this situation [Internet piracy], or actively hostile toward efforts to improve copyright enforcement worldwide,” Glickman wrote.
Them’s fightin’ words, Dan. You don’t get to tell me what I think. I am VERY against ACTA, not only because secret treaties are bad government policy, but also on the merits. That does *not* mean that I hate kittens, or do not believe in copyright enforcement at all. So stop saying what I think, how about it?
This isn’t a 10 word, “you’re with us or against us” situation. It’s a complicated issue in which you are, in my opinion, mostly in the wrong. (note: I’m not putting words in your mouth there…I’m judging your words and actions. Different thing. You’re free to do the same with me.)
I agree that you work in, and are paid very handsomely by, an industry that is being transformed and hugely affected by the impact of the Internet, cheap computing, the remix culture, and ubiquituous communication. Your business model is in trouble. But that does NOT mean that you’re automatically right for defending the status quo. You have no magic moral high ground, Mr. Glickman.
These technologies that you are trying to fight are the grandchildren of the transforming tools of 100 years ago; tools that CREATED your industry. As Cory Doctorow likes to say, “technology giveth, and technology taketh away”. You have no natural right
to allowing certain technologies (example: encryption for DRM; good, you say) while outlawing others (example:, encryption [hey, same thing!] for DarkNet distribution; oooh, bad, you say). Your way of doing business has been hugely profitable while it lasted…but that time is nearly over. You must innvoate, you must change…or you will fail. Simple as that.
And even today, without ACTA, you are the beneficiary of decades of copyright legislation that has seriously unbalanced the nature of the bargain that copyright represents. Even today, media companies are able to sue families for hundreds of thousands of dollars for sharing a directory of songs, or threaten students who write the wrong
software tools…only failing in that attempt through shame brought down on them via that very Internet you find so threatening.
With the ACTA treaty, it would be even worse. The treaty provides for criminal prosecution of commerical scale
copyright infringement (whatever that means), even if it it does not involve financial gain. What does that mean for, say, a P2P system? The users ARE the distributors; conceivably everyone logged into the system is culpable. Add the 3 strikes [via assertion, no less, not even a requirement of legal proof!] and your Internet can be cut off
provisions, and the consequences of this treaty look pretty disastrous. I’d negotiate it in secret too, if it was my idea!
Making secret wishlist treaties in back rooms (and yes, that’s what you’re doing…it doesn’t make it not so just because you happen to be in the back room) isn’t the way to reform copyright policy in a democracy. Letting giant corporations who’ve already twisted copyright law into something it was never intended to be dictate the terms of ANY treaty, open or not, is not in the interests of our society.
Let’s get things out in the open, stop calling each other enemies of apple pie
and such, and accept the nuance. I’ll admit, that will harder for the media companies that for people like me, because that’s VERY different than the way they’ve handled things for a long time. But it’s the right way.
