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It’s been a big week in digital music, and I spent some time yesterday playing around and enjoying it. Not everything I did was new…I bought some music from the Amie Street music store, which has been around for awhile now. But things have changed…Amazon’s entry into this space, in my (and many others) opinion is the straw that’s going to break the back of DRM in the music industry. It’s the beginning of the end.

Amazon’s made most of the right moves here. They have a great brand already that people know and trust, and they used it rather than buying or creating some other service. (Though the URL sucks to copy and paste…can anyone find a short one that resolves, or am I going to have to tinyurl it?) MP3s, of course; no worries with format compatibility or player license renewal. And while I’m not the world’s biggest fan of their little helper download app (why not just a zip?), the purpose appears to be to help iTunes and WMP users seamlessly integrate the music into their libraries, and that is a good idea.

In a development that might appear at first glance to be unrelated, Apple’s newest iPhone update is removing unauthorized 3rd party apps and has potentially bricked some unlocked phones (it’s possible this is eventually fixable…one can hope, for the sake of the device owners). Note: I don’t think it’s illegal for Apple to do this, based on the Terms of Service…it’s just a bad deal for their customers. And it’s about control, which is how it relates to the earlier points.

Amazon has made a business calculation that reducing their control over their customers will increase customer satisfaction in a way that will ultimately increase profitability. It’s a great move, IMO, and it brings Amazon into good company with folks like Magnatune, MP3tunes, Amie Street, and eMusic. One could argubably add Apple to that group as well, since they’re selling MP3s…but I don’t.

Apple’s focus on consumer satisfaction is legendary, but they do it by increasing their control, not reducing it. In my opinion, they’re slowly, slowly painting themselves into a corner that will be really hard to get out of. The iTunes music experience (player, iTunes app, iTMS) is a wonder, as long as you’re following all the rules…which are MOSTLY pretty easy to follow. But step outside the boundaries, add unauthorized apps to a player, hack on your library db, etc…and you’re on your own. Uncool. Companies like Neuros, Chumby, and OpenMoko are where I hope the future lies; hardware companies that aren’t afraid to give the customer control of what they buy. Economies of scale presently give the price advantage to folks like Apple, who can outscale their open hardware competitors, but that gap is ever-diminishing. As it does, more and more people wake up to the advantages of owning, REALLY owning, their own stuff.

And as things change, you can look to the Free Software world to see where this leads us. Great operating systems, applications of all kinds, and development frameworks that are unencumbered by control. We get innovation and choice.

In the meantime, I’ll be over here, re-discovering some old favorite songs at Amazon, and trying out new artists at places like Amie Street and Magnatune. I still listen to more podcasts than anything else, but having increasing amounts of music that I can control is great. And I like to code to music, vs. podcasts…isn’t choice great?

UPDATE — Here’s a couple of links to share my…um…eclectic? (I like that better than just saying haphazard) musical tastes:

  • My Amie Street profile — link
  • My Last.fm profile (another music site I dig) — link

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Peter Watts is the man. I love his fiction, and his blog rocks pretty hard too. This latest post is a must-read: You Won’t Get Elected If You Don’t Speak Klingon — Both Law and Economics, in other words, are human artifacts. They’re like Gibsonian cyberspace, a consensual hallucination that only works because everybody agrees to stay inside the playground. They’re Klingon Summer Camp, they’re Dungeons and Dragons for geeks with MBAs: beautifully arcane, deeply developed, honed and crafted by decades of game play..

PS: you can get most of his work for free (PDF/online format) via the fiction link above, but PLEASE PLEASE go buy anything you find in print in a store. The more we buy, the more he can sell in the future!

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Military commissions’ powers broadened — If I’m reading this correctly, I think I’m pretty happy with this. It is true that the appeals court decided that the technicality preventing the lower court from moving forward (namely, the conclusion that a CSRT [or another competent tribunal] determination of ‘unlawful enemy combatant’ status was a prerequisite to referral of charges to a military commission) was incorrect. This means that charges can move forward. However…from the first time I read the reasoning on that technicality, I thought it was a bit stretched. And more importantly, I think the appeals court did clarify several good points.

I’m no fan of the Military Commissions Act of 2006; I think that Congress did a terrible, and almost certainly unconstitional, disservice to the rule of law in invalidating habeas challenges by those incarcerated at Guantanamo. That being said, the clarifications by the appeals court within the context of the MCA are important: 1) …it rejected the Pentagon argument that there was no legal difference between a finding of an enemy combatant by a CSRT and an unlawful enemy combatant. The former can be captured and held during a conflict, but cannot be charged with crimes, it ruled. Only an unlawful enemy combatant may be charged, it concluded, citing the well recognized body of customary international law. — That’s a big deal, and I’m very glad that we’re making some attempt to abide by established international laws that we expect everyone else to adhere to.

2) The appeals court also upheld Judge Brownback’s conclusion that the CSRT finding of enemy combatant was not sufficient to set up a trial before a commission. It thus rejected the Pentagon conclusion that prior statements by President Bush and other high officials were sufficient to turn anyone accused of ties to the Al Qaeda terrorist network or to the Taliban into an unlawful enemy combatant. — Very, very important! We actually need to prove our accusations, which is kinda nifty when you’re living in a…whatcha call it…yeah, democracy. Winner here, definitely.

3) Moreover, the appeals court said, Congress did not mean to validate all prior CSRT determinations so as to turn those into findings into unlawful status. — Oy vey. Not a rubber stamp. Whoda thunk?

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the results here (again, assuming I’m not missing anything blatently obvious to a lawyer type). The military legal system (in particular) seems to once again be pretty serious about following the rules, which is something I give them a lot of credit for, for the most part. There have been some exceptions, but they’ve mostly been in the forefront of trying to do things the right way, and for that I give them credit.

Note: my so-called legal analysis is piss-poor layman stuff…much better to go read the entire post. Even better…stay up to date on the entire process, as it’s an important one.

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LOL…The Sideshow generally provides some good links, and today was no exception. An excellent example: State legislators go insane, threaten to punish Columbia University for allowing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at their World Leaders Forum. Man, it’s busting out all over. (Of course, Ahmadinejad claiming there were no homosexuals in Iran didn’t exactly shore up his rep as a statesman. No wonder his own people hate him for being a crackpot.)

And yes, I chose that particular paragraph to point out that while the blog is certainly progressive, it’s not some love America’s enemies just because nutfest. Really. I swear. (And, btw, Ahmadinejad is definitely a total crackpot. Yeppers. I just wish he were the only one…*sigh*)

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Damn. This is cool. — Fixing two additional light sensors to a normal CD or DVD drive can transform it into a highly accurate scanner for chemical or medical tests, Spanish researchers have shown. The team has developed a modified CD drive that detected tiny quantities of pesticide in samples placed on top of an ordinary compact disk.

Thanks to Hack A Day for the link!

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Cory Doctorow gave a great rant on privacy at OSCON 2007, entitled Privacy Isn’t Dead — Let’s Not Kill It”. He talks about the dangers of letting software control us (and the attendant privacy issues), rather than controlling the software ourselves. Cory is a visionary in this space; listening to him exhort on this subject is eye-opening, if you’re not completely up to date on it.

I’ve long thought that David Brin’s Transparent Society was (and is) a great treatise on the dangers of asymmetric control. in fact, I try to re-read it every couple of years (it’s almost 10 years old now), just to keep all the memes hot. Cory is another great, great mind writing about this. He has a new book coming out next spring, Little Brother, that I expect will be a wonderful (fiction) entry into this space. Much like his recent short-short Scroogled, I expect this book will weave a realistic, gripping story out of the consequences of the technological, political, and cultural choices we’ve made so far this century…hopefully giving us a chance to learn from our mistakes without actually making ALL of them. Can’t wait. And Little Brother is targeted as young adult fiction (though I know I’ll be buying it regardless), so maybe it’ll make an impact in the younger generations as well.