rare pattern thoughts in a blog

Update on my RIAA post yesterday: Via Techdirt:

Back at the beginning of December, we helped debunk a story making the rounds claiming that the RIAA was going after a guy named Jeffrey Howell for ripping his own CDs to his computer. That story was misleading, at best. While we know that the RIAA is constantly pushing to extend both the meaning and scope of copyright law, in this case the details were pretty clear that they were not going after Howell for just ripping his CDs, but for putting those ripped files into a shared Kazaa folder. Now you can (and we do!) disagree that simply putting files into a shared folder are infringement, but that's different than just claiming that ripping the CDs is illegal or that he was being targeted just for ripping the CDs. Unfortunately (and for reasons unclear to me), the Washington Post has revived the story, again repeating that Howell is being targeted for ripping his own CDs. That's simply not true, and it's nice to see a true copyright expert like William Patry question the Washington Post on this as well.

Good news -- or not the bad news we thought -- at least so far.

That's right. The RIAA lawyers are claiming you cannot legally copy for your own use music you bought and paid for. Via Elisa Camahort, I returned from the holidays to read this:

The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

"I couldn't believe it when I read that," says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who represents six clients who have been sued by the RIAA. "The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation."

Maybe I'm just unique, but I feel that it's this kind of hostility and contempt for the consumer that is doing in the music business.

Elisa writes:

Let me tell you how many CDs I own: somewhere between 1000 and 1500.

Let me tell you how many hours out of the day I listen to my music (my every-single-song-was-legally-acquired music) via my iPod or computer: at least 10 hours a day in my car, at work and at home.

Let me tell you how many of my CDs I would listen to if not for my iPod: probably very VERY few. Even a multi-CD player would be too inconvenient to rely on during the work day. I like being able to turn on Shuffle on my computer or iPod and have music all day without thinking about it or messing with it. Pre-iPod I did not listen to CDs at work ever. I did listen to CDs in my car, but tended to have the same 6 CDs in there for weeks without changing them.

Let me tell you how that would affect my music-buying habits: It would greatly diminish them. I would forget about artists I liked, I would fall into a musical rut, instead of maintaining the really quite broad musical taste I have. And broad taste leads to broad music-buying habits. iTunes has already massively increased my music-buying habits by being so simple and so immediate. By exposing me to more music. And by making it easy for a constant variety of music to accompany my life most of my waking hours.

So, here's what the RIAA is just begging me to do: Never buy another physical CD, ever.

Radiohead just might be onto something.

The new BBC site attempts to present a kind of online rock'n'roll hall of fame, and I have to admit the scrolling timeline is kind of fun.

But....

...perhaps the developers were too young to know how to spell Led Zeppelin?

At least they got the, um, undertone right.

[Via Stylegala]

So says Thomas Hesse, president of global digital business and US sales for Sony BMG. That's right, the company that betrayed such contempt for the consumer by deliberately infecting its music CDs with its Rootkit, before stopping when it faced major PR and legal backlash, still has plenty of contempt for the consumer.

The article on the Forbes website -- itself littered with interstitial and numerous pop-up ads that make you just want to hurry back and experience more -- covers how music industry executives are fretting over life in the digital age.

“No intellectual property business is going to cross the digital divide without figuring out how to protect its content and to ensure that transactions are associated with the acquisition of content,’’ Nash said. “The music industry simply has to solve the content security problem or risk the obsolescence of its business model.’’

So says Warner's senior vice president of digital strategy and business development. In other words, the world must conform to their business model, not the other way around.

At issue is that people who buy and download music might do what they have been able to do for decades: copy it and share it, which is something you still can do if you buy a CD.

Says MacDailyNews:

The horse left the barn decades ago when the music industry opened the doors wide and began selling billions of Compact Discs without DRM. Hence, most of the music sold today is already without DRM and, we can get any new release for free - just like being in a college dorm - on the day of release via P2P. Don't steal music.

Lastly, it doesn't matter what the music labels' agendas are, the only agenda that really matters is Steve Jobs' - and his seems focused like a laser on DRM-free music sales.

DRM-free music is already here via CDs and P2P. There is no logical reason to try to restrict legal online downloads with DRM - all you are doing is turning people towards pirating music and/or turning them off from using legal online stores like Apple's iTunes Store.

It never fails to amazes us how some people in the music industry don't understand the absolute basics of their business model.

We're all criminals. Especially those of us in college. That seems to be the message from the executives. How's that for "business development" strategy?

MacNN reports:

The special event to be held by EMI tomorrow (with Apple as guest) will be focused on dropping DRM restrictions from music, according to sources speaking with the Wall Street Journal. The financial paper claims that EMI will sell at least some of its music without any copy protection through the iTunes Store and potentially other outlets. Previous reports had at first suggested that the press gathering would see the launch of The Beatles' music online.

Such an announcement appears to confirm earlier reports that the music label was actively investigating the removal of DRM from some of its catalog. A particular reason for the decision has not been given but is likely to stem from a belief that rights management has so far curbed the growth of online music sales, restricting interoperability between devices and music stores.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs' personal involvement in the presentation would also reflect the assertions made in his "Thoughts on Music" open letter, where he argued that the only practical alternative to FairPlay and other protection methods was to derestrict online music sales entirely.

This is good news indeed. I may even start buying some music online. Goodness knows it's getting almost impossible to find anything of value on CD anymore.

So Jeremiah Owyang has started a media consumption diet meme, and Marianne Richmond has tagged us BlogHers, so here goes....

• Web: I used to use NetNewsWire Lite for RSS, but I tried Shrook and found it to me easier to use, with some of the features NetNewsWire makes you pay for. Shrook is easy enough, so I'll stick with it for now. Do I need to mention Firefox? For search, I use Google pretty exclusively (I find myself wondering how Yahoo! gets by, what with all the barriers they put up for people to get listed in their index) and if I'm blog-hunting, I go to Technorati. I blog using Drupal for platform and either Performancing or ecto for blogging client (though neither is optimal -- Performancing repeatedly loses my drafts and ecto keeps embedding cruft into my html, even when I define the tags myself). For online video, I find YouTube too useful to ignore. It can be a bit hard to take, though, just browsing at random.
• Music: I've started trying out Pandora, but in some stations they keep trying to push the strangest things -- sorry but how do you get Foreigner or Journey from Led Zeppelin? -- and they limit how many songs I can reject in a given time. (Am I just too persnickety?) I have several of my old CDs burned to mp3 files, which I play on my desktop iTunes, but as I've moved from my nearly-dead PowerBook to two iMacs to my current MacBook Pro, it's been a challenge carrying those 20GB of files along for the migration ride. (It doesn't help that some of the discs were defective bulk coasters.) I haven't signed up for the iTunes Store, though, because the DRM restrictions and poor audio quality make downloads there less than appealing, no matter how appealing and easy-to-use the GUI is. Stop treating me like a criminal guilty until proven innocent, Apple and RIAA, and you'll have my business. Meanwhile, as CD music continues to fade away at the big box stores, I'm finding my music horizons diminishing, and that's a terrible place to be. My whole live is defined by soundtrack.
• TV: I don't have much time to watch television, especially the commercial variety -- I think I'm more and more intolerant of commercials. I will watch the NewsHour if I'm home early enough, the Daily Show if I'm up late enough (and thank goodness for the 9pm rerun of last night's show), Frontline if I stumble across it and (of course) Battlestar Galactica. I don't do cable news -- it strikes me as an entire industry getting excited about the lint in their own navels. However, since getting HDTV on Comcast, I've found that I'm more likely to just watch anything as long as it's high-def. Well, not anything at all, but it's amazing how much more interesting Nova or Discovery (or reruns of Battlestar Galactica and Firefly) are when you can see so much detail on the screen. (Ironic that local news is in high-def, but most network shows are not; the Rose Parade was in high def, but the Macy's parade was not; sports are in high def but arts typically are not; and all HBO seems to play on their single high-def channel is Rome [though it could be worse].)
• Communication: My cell is a Palm Treo 700p, but I hardly ever use it. It comes in handy when I need to keep up on email or check something on the web, but I'm realizing the touchscreen I so wanted (and thus the reason I rejected alternatives like Blackberry or Q) is pretty over-rated. Ah well, live and learn. The phone part is actually great for clarity and reception, but I don't use it as a PDA at all, as the 320x320 screen is just too damned small. Other phonage is Vonage. I haven't had a land-line phone in quite a few years now. --Not that any of this matters, because I really really hate talking on the phone unless it's necessary. For IM, I use Jabber (via Adium), which we have set up on one of our domains, and the sadly unavoidable Skype, which as a relay is an absolute bandwidth hog even when it's just sitting there.
  I don't use Skype much for voice, since so many people seem to have so many problems configuring it to work well. We thought it'd be great for talking to clients overseas to save a few pennies a minute, but all too often it was too much like the Cone of Silence. I use Apple Mail for email, mainly because Thunderbird on Mac is too slooowwwwww (I wish it weren't).
• Movies: Once upon a time, I saw several movies a week, sometimes several in one day, but now that they blast commercials in your face before showing generally sucky movies -- not to mention the overpriced junk food, sticky floors and noisy patrons -- it's just not worth it. It's not fun any more. So I watch movies on DVD, where I'm not limited by the, excuse me, crap selection of the week, and which on an HDTV plasma is an entirely new experience. I tend to buy, not rent, because rented discs always seem to have scratches that make the flick skip or freeze.
• Magazines: I subscribe to Post, HOW, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Macworld and occasionally Wired. I rarely buy a magazine off the rack. It amazes me how many magazines are in print. Do people actually read all these things? Somebody must. I have to say, however, that the supermarket tabloids do keep me informed. I mean, I could've gone for weeks or even months without knowing that Brittney Spears shaved her head or that Brad sent a note to Jen! Eeep!
• Books: I live for novels, but it's hard for me to find writers I like, so I'm stuck with the five or six authors who could write just about anything and I'd read it. Maybe if my life weren't so fast-paced, I'd be able to relax enough to get into a new writer's style, but usually I can't get past the first paragraph, so I do without. Meanwhile I'm reading more non-fiction than any time since I was in college. How She Does It, Blink and Designing Interactions are three of the most recent delights.
• Newspapers: I love reading off paper, but unlike magazines I don't hold the same love of newspapers. I like the print design of the New York Times, but I hate getting newsprint all over my fingers, and at a buck a pop for something I may not even have time to read that day, it becomes a dead-tree guilt and a recycling burden more than a source of news. 15 years ago that wasn't the case -- I loved getting the paper! How life changes in these times! I still read the "newspapers" online, including the NY Times, the Mercury News and the odd site that happens to have the AP wire story I want to read.

So there's my consumption in a nutshell. Now in the tradition of tagging, and because they are such an eclectic group of geeks and artists, I'd like to tag everyone on Planet Drupal.

Technorati Tags: media consumption diet

YouTube is 30,000 files smaller:

The Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers, found 29,549 video clips such as television shows, music videos and movies posted on YouTube's site without permission, an official from the group, Fumiyuki Asakura, said Friday.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based company quickly complied with the request to remove the copyright materials, made on behalf of 23 Japanese TV stations and entertainment companies, Asakura said.

Most videos posted on YouTube are homemade, but the site also features scores of copyright material posted by individual users. YouTube's policy is to remove such clips after it receives complaints, though some have suggested the startup eventually could be sued, especially with deep-pocketed Google Inc. about to buy it for $1.65 billion in stock.

This is almost inevitable. The media industry is built upon control over distribution, and 'net outlets like YouTube blast their oligopoly back into the 20th century. They are trying to hang on by using DRM and sniffer technology:

The company agreed to deploy an audio-signature technology that can spot a low-quality copy of a licensed clip. YouTube would have to substitute an approved version or remove the material automatically.

But the writing is on the wall: There is no room for the controlling middle man in the new economy. Content creators, producers, writers, photographers, videographers, filmmakers will be taking their work more directly to their audiences. In the end, while things will inevitably shift around, my guess is that the new economy will be better for the creators.

It's the "owners" who don't create, just speculate, that will lose out. They require big jackpot payoffs, and the market is shifting to the long tail.

I remember hearing Lou Rawls' own brand of singing on the radio back when I was in high school. His was the cool voice because it was the voice of jazz, not pop. I loved his scat singing.

I never heard much of his forays into other genres.

Rawls' grandmother introduced him to gospel in his hometown of Chicago. The singer moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1950s to join a touring gospel group, the Pilgrim Travelers.

After a two-year stint in the Army, Rawls rejoined the Pilgrim Travelers in Los Angeles, where he sang with Sam Cooke. Rawls performed with Dick Clark at the Hollywood Bowl in 1959, and he later he opened for The Beatles at Crosley Field in Cincinnati.

Rawls was playing small blues and R&B clubs in Los Angeles when his four-octave range caught the ear of a Capitol Records producer, who signed him to the label in 1962.

His debut effort, "Stormy Monday," recorded with the Les McCann Trio, was the first of 28 albums Rawls made with Capitol.

In 1966, his "Love Is a Hurtin' Thing" topped the charts and earned Rawls his first two Grammy nominations. He won three Grammys in his career and released his most recent album, "Seasons 4 U," in 1998 on his own label, Rawls & Brokaw Records.

Lou Rawls died battling lung and brain cancer. 72 years young. Rest in peace, Lou. We'll miss you.

On the current nefarious Sony anti-piracy outrage, a column in The Inquirer (UK) by Marc Ninthly highlights what I think is the biggest issue here:

My big problem is that we are not being told about these things. Decisions about the software we run on our systems – the ones we saved hard for, or stole from some drunk yuppie last night – are being made, and implemented without our consent. Now, some legal smart arse will undoubtedly point out that it was all outlined quite clearly in Section 3, paragraph 17, addendum III b of the user contract but let’s be realistic, who the hell reads that all of that mumbo jumbo in the first place? Most real people don’t and when it comes to products from big brands, I often don’t. It’s not just that it’s mind-numbingly boring, but that it’s written in a way to make it impenetrable to normal folk.

One could say that it’s been embedded with an Anti-Interest rootkit that prevents you from reading more than a few paragraphs before you start questioning your own existence. The only way to stop it is to press the ‘Accept’ button. Consumers allocate a certain amount of trust to household name companies when they buy one of their products. We figure, maybe naively, that forking out that extra bit of cash for a real CD instead of some cheapo knock-off at a car boot sale, entitles us to a certain level of quality and protection. Not so. We have now gone from being valued customers to potential criminals. That’s it in a nutshell.

And, he points out, the ultimate consequence of Sony's treatment of its customers is that the customers will be more likely to go the illegal route and download pirated music -- Sony's customers will indeed become the "criminals" that Sony despises.

I'm reminded of a tenet of Eastern thought:

You tend to receive from life that upon which you focus. If you focus on bad things, then you tend to cultivate bad things in your life.

In other words, you reap what you sow. And the "why" is that your creativity is a powerful thing, and works in ways that you don't even realize. Put all your energy into positive endeavors and positive energy comes back to you.

Successful entrepreneurs know this -- they will be the first to tell you how once you commit to a venture, it's almost like doors are opened up before you and the universe conspires for your success. On the other hand, gloomy Murphys will tend to see the downside of any decision; they prove adept at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

In this sort of Zen-like way, we're seeing multinational megacorporations focusing on the negative, and therefore cultivating negative outcomes. Sony's corporate policies are being dominated by gloomy Murphys who see criminal intent in every customer. Meanwhile, whatever creative visionaries there might be in Sony's executive suites -- those who might see the new media developments as opportunities rather than threats -- seem to be having little or no impact on corporate decision-making.

The clichéd metaphor of corporate "dinosaur" seems especially apt in this context, for we see a large beast that is so angry that its feeding grounds are changing that its stomping out the food it has -- and seems to be too limited in intelligence to see the self-destructiveness of its actions.

That's not to say I'm predicting the fall of Sony over this. As entrenched as these corporations are in our global economy, it's pretty clear that they aren't going away any time soon.

But this does offer yet another clear indication that the market is changing in ways of which the megacorporations are not mentally, creatively or even lawyerly equipped to take advantage. Our economy is changing, and the old-time top-down hierarchical business models, where the consumer has little or no say in the vendor's business practices, are proving to be outmoded and, ultimately, counter-productive.

Sony is facing an expensive lesson in the new economics of the world. How many more lessons will it take, and how many other dinosaurs will have to suffer the same, before they join us rather than fight us?

Nothing like lawsuits to get a response, if only for the moment.

Stung by continuing criticism, the world's second-largest music label, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, promised Friday to temporarily suspend making music CDs with antipiracy technology that can leave computers vulnerable to hackers.

Sony defended its right to prevent customers from illegally copying music but said it will halt manufacturing CDs with the "XCP" technology as a precautionary measure. "We also intend to re-examine all aspects of our content protection initiative to be sure that it continues to meet our goals of security and ease of consumer use," the company said in a statement.

Note that customer satisfaction is not mentioned. We don't even get a crocodile tear.

I must say, I find their contempt for the customer -- or, at best, disregard for customer satisfaction -- astonishes me.

It apparently also offended the sensibilities of the new assistant secretary for policy in the Department of Homeland Security, Stewart Baker:

"I wanted to raise one point of caution as we go forward, because we are also responsible for maintaining the security of the information infrastructure of the United States and making sure peoples' [and] businesses' computers are secure. ... There's been a lot of publicity recently about tactics used in pursuing protection for music and DVD CDs in which questions have been raised about whether the protection measures install hidden files on peoples' computers that even the system administrators can’t find."

In a remark clearly aimed directly at Sony and other labels, Stewart continued: "It's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property -- it's not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it's important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days.

"If we have an avian flu outbreak here and it is even half as bad as the 1918 flu epidemic, we will be enormously dependent on being able to get remote access for a large number of people, and keeping the infrastructure functioning is a matter of life and death and we take it very seriously."

Now that's an angle I hadn't thought of.