Mayhem & Chaos Blog

Legal/Government

Lessig on farm subsidies

Larry Lessig suggests that smaller countries who are put at odds due to US farm subsidies should blackmail the US into dropping the farm subsidies:

A block of powerful developing nations should first take a page from the US Copyright Act of 1790 and enact national laws that explicitly protect their own rights only. It would not protect foreigners. Second, these nations should add a provision that would relax this exemption to the extent that developed nations really opened their borders. If we reduce, for example, the subsidy to agribusiness by 10 percent, then they would permit 10 percent of our copyrights to be enforced (say, copyrights from the period 1923 to 1931). Reduce the subsidy by another 10 percent, then another 10 percent could be enforced. And so on.

I doubt that would work. The countries that are most affected by US farm subsidies are also likely to receive foreign aid from the US. One step towards blackmailing the US and the US would cut off the foreign aid. Remember how the threatened to cut off military aid to countries that support the international war crimes court in Den Haag?

These countries would not risk loosing the US support and possibly being on the bad side of the US. Generally, taking on the US in any sort of effective manner requires something as drastic as terrorism. Sad, but that's how I see it.

Microsoft Bashing

Downhill for M$

The Inquirer writes: "The IT industry is shifting away from Microsoft":

Licensing 6.0, the new 'rent as you go, but do so at our sufferance' was the catalyst here. When it proposed this scheme, people laughed outright. When Microsoft said do it or pay the retail price, people blinked, and a few cried monopoly. This is when people started to take Linux seriously.

I remember the hubub when M$ announced this licensing strategy -- I was damn near dancing on my desk. This is the best way for them to shoot themselves in the foot -- no doubt about it. Seem as though it worked. While this article has nothing really new to say, it sums it all up nicely.

Blogging

MusicBrainz permanent links

MusicBrainz now has permanent links to its pages so you can link to your favorite artist (Portishead), album (Dummy) or even a track (Strangers).

Cool -- now bloggers can talk about music more effectively.

Music industry watch

Issue roundup

A few interesting things went down while I was preoccupied with the holidays, earthquakes and building computers:

• DVD Jon is acquitted again
• The MPAA takes a kinder approach to dealing with copyright infringers

  "The movie studios," he said, "are trying to prevent themselves from becoming the next music industry."

• Dropload is a place to stash files for someone else to come pick them up.

I think I need to get a linkblog going...

Music industry watch

Now what RIAA?? (part II)

In part I I asked what the next step for the RIAA was if it couldn't force ISP's to identify its customers. C-NET has a nice FAQ: How the decision will affect file swappers:

I've heard of the possibility of "John Doe" lawsuits. What are those?
Until now, the RIAA has used an expedited subpoena process provided for under copyright law, which it says allows it to force ISPs to hand over customer names without a judge's approval or even a lawsuit. If Friday's decision stands, the record industry will likely be compelled to take the more time-consuming and costly step of filing "John Doe" lawsuits against people whose identities are not yet known. The person would eventually be unmasked during court proceedings.

This option has a possible downside for the RIAA, however. Currently, the trade association knows the identity of the people it names as defendants. By switching to a process in which anonymous people are sued, the RIAA runs the risk of making an embarrassing misstep--by suing a son or daughter of a record label executive or of a U.S. senator, for example.

So, it's not quite a dead-end for the RIAA yet. They've just made it much harder and expensive on themselves, since now them need to worry about quality vs quantity. Suing a 12 year old girl and dropping the suit is one thing -- opening a formal court case to have the court force the ISP to identify the defendant is a whole new game. I would suspect that the people who get nailed in this process are going to get reamed hard. I doubt there will be cheap $2000 settlements once this process gets started.

With the rise of Darknets, which are invitation-only underground networks that disguise their activities with crypto, the RIAA will have a much harder time filing any lawsuits at all. IANAL, but I'd think that with John Doe lawsuits you need to convice the judge that your copyrights were infringed upon. Well, if everything is encrypted, how is the RIAA supposed to establish probable cause and convince the judge to move forward?

Blogging

The holidays are over!

I managed to survive the holidays without too much trouble. Just 8 hours of traffic getting to SD from SLO and a few extra pounds on the ribs. I hope your holidays went smoothly too!

Ok, enough of the rampant spending, eating and whatever else retailers wish us to do during the holiday season. Back to work talking shit about the music industry. :-)

San Luis Obispo

Earthquake!

We had an interesting wake-up call this morning when the earth started shaking. I've felt a few quakes before, but this one at 6.5 was the strongest I had witnessed. Feeling the whole house literally quiver and shake all over the place was really eeerie.

I'm ok. Jean is ok, my friends are ok.

In Paso Robles the story is a bit different -- a masonry building with the famous clock tower collapsed, killing two people. Ugh.

Music industry watch

RIAA cannot force ISPs to identify their customers

Ha! The latest RIAA setback was just dealt from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia: The RIAA cannot force ISPs to turn over the identity of filesharers. Get this:

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates had approved use of the subpoenas, forcing Verizon Communications Inc. to turn over names and addresses for at least four Internet subscribers. Since then, Verizon has identified dozens of its other subscribers to music industry lawyers.

The appeals court said one of the arguments by the Recording Industry Association of America "borders upon the silly," rejecting the trade group's claims that Verizon was responsible for downloaded music because such data files traverse its network.

I mused about this in my entry Dead end for the RIAA?, wondering what would happen if this got overturned. The whole sue the world program hinges on the ability to expose users via the ISP. Its technically not possible otherwise -- now what RIAA?

In the same vein, the Dutch supreme court rules Kazaa to be legal. BUMA Stemra (the dutch RIAA) is now going to persue end users. Another country, another dead end coming up.

I thought all this was interesting a year ago. Ha! It keeps getting better and better!

Microsoft Bashing

Real sues M$

Real Networks sues M$ over antitrust issues. Real claims M$ llegally used its Windows monopoly to limit consumer choice in digital media. Sounds about right to me:

Beyond the charges that Microsoft tried to trip its competitors, Tevanian also testified that Microsoft executives tried to encourage their Apple counterparts not to market a version of QuickTime that would run on the Windows operating system. He quoted Microsoft executive Christopher Phillips as telling Apple colleagues, "We are talking about knifing the baby," a reference to Microsoft's wish that Apple kill QuickTime for Windows.

I'm curious to see how this will turn out. If the DOJ can't be counted on to do its job (Thanks shrub!) the private companies need to duke it out themselves.

Music industry watch

WalMart starts download price war

WalMart, with their new music download service is starting the promised price war on music downloads. Salon says:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. began a test Thursday of its new 88-cent-per-song online music service, trying to capture more of the music market at a price that undercuts the 99-cent standard of its competition.

Not surprising that WalMart is starting the price war.

File sharing

Shirky on RIAA and encryption

Clay Shirky talks about how the RIAA's current legal strategy is driving broad public adoption of encryption in his latest essay. The essay is good (especially since I will be arguing much the same point), but Clay's use of the term cat and mouse game is interesting:

The obvious parallel here is with Prohibition. By making it unconstitutional for an adult to have a drink in their own home, Prohibition created a cat and mouse game between law enforcement and millions of citizens engaged in an activity that was illegal but popular. As with file sharing, the essence of the game was hidden transactions -- you needed to be able to get into a speakeasy or buy bootleg without being seen.

Humor

CDs make crappy presents

On a lighter note, you have to check out What a crappy present!. I love these headers:

The company that makes this sued my friend.

Its not like any of the money goes to the bands.

You could've bought me a DVD for 3 bucks more... why are you always so cheap?

It's a bad idea to give music CDs to P2P savvy kids. I especially like the shot of the kid with the pack of CD blanks... :-)

Legal/Government

Alternative Compensation Systems

Aaron Swartz's post about the Alternative Compensation System fleshes out some of his prior ideas and musings about a fair system for rewarding artists. I'm glad to see that some serious thought is being put into this issue.

People with broadband Internet connections pay an extra $3-$5 on their bill (the amount is calculated by determining how much money is lost by Internet downloads and dividing it by the number of Internet connections), which is given to the operators of the system ("MiniPay"). (Optionally, a similar charge can be added to other Internet connections, blank media, burners, computers, etc.) In return, they receive a "blinded signature token" that allows them to tell MiniPay what they're listening to without cheating (the token can only be used once) and without knowing who submitted it (the ISP was "blinded" when it gave it out, so they don't which they gave to who). The token is sent to them automatically and electronically and is held onto by their MP3 player (e.g. iTunes).

. . .

Yes, this is one difficult problem, but there are some ways to mitigate it.

. . .

Third, a variety of technical means could possibly be used to make faking playcount data difficult for the average user.

. . .

Yeah, this is a hard problem.

. . .

Perhaps the best thing is to include some quickly-updated anti-virus software with all playcount collecting software so that any such virus can be quickly contained.

I have a few reservations about this proposal.

First, this solution is designed to cope with the advent of the Internet. However, top down models don't work so well on the Net. In general, models that work in a brick-and-mortar system don't work too well on the net (eg the .com boom and many of its transplanted business models). The chaotic nature of bottom up systems (the net, P2P, weblogs) lend themselves as good solutions to hard problems. Harder problems can be solved by using lots of tools that specialize in solving one hard problem. ACS is descibed as having several hard problems to solve and having one solution all these hard problems is failure prone.

Second, the fix for the music industry is not another company or a government institution. The RIAA/MPAA has muscled its way into the most lucrative siutation possible and they will do the same in ACS. If this is even permitted to pass by the RIAA, (I doubt it) they would demand to have a hand in it. If we're trying to avoid the RIAA and its tactics, we need to create a new model where the RIAA is superfluous, and thus easy to set into the dirt. Central organizations have failed us on the net -- take Network Solutions as an exampole.

Third, if attacks need to be mitgated, the underlying model is flawed (e.g. Internet Explorer). Models that balance cooperation with competition are likely to work better than models that have lots of weaknesses to attack. As an example of an attack prone model, take PayPal. PayPal is an easy target for crooks since it deals with a virtual representation of cold hard cash. In order to start making money, PayPal needs to have gazillions of transactions a day -- otherwise the fraud related aspects (prevention, investigation, resolution) of the business take too much money to earn any at the end of the day. To avoid this. it's better start with a model that works. It seems like mediAgora is a step in the right direction.

Finally, let me espouse a favorite quote from one of my CS teachers: "Complexity is a scarce resource". Meaning, you can make your system only so complex before you start having problems. As an example take Windoze and IE -- they are too complex and thus riddled with bugs.

This applies to the ACS -- it seems too complex already and it hasn't really solved the hard problems yet. Not a good sign. So, Aaron, I urge you to simplify, simplify, simplify -- Keep It Simple Stupid!

Cool ideas

The emergent remix culture

The Creative Commons just unveiled their sampling license that allows artists to use samples from works released under the sampling license. The CC hopes to spur the development of a remix culture that encourages re-use of other artist's work. Boing boing points out that the remix culture is subject to the network law -- the more content in the remix library, the more valuable it becomes.

The open source software revolution is founded on those principles and the media world is ready for the same shake-up. We have learned the basic rules of this game and organizations like the CC are taking it from the software realm and brigning it into a much larger general audience arena. It's about it time this happens, and I can't wait to see it happen.

To the same effect, the University of Maine has created the pool, as mentioned in this Wired News article:

To prove that open sourcing any and all information can help students swim instead of sink, the University of Maine's Still Water new media lab has produced the Pool, a collaborative online environment for creating and sharing images, music, videos, programming code and texts.

. . .

"We are training revolutionaries -- not by indoctrinating them with dogma but by exposing them to a process in which sharing culture rather than hoarding it is the norm," said Joline Blais, a professor of new media at the University of Maine and Still Water co-director.

Cool stuff, for sure. I just wonder when the RIAA/MPAA will come knocking on their doors.

Music industry watch

Loudeye and M$ cooperate on music downloads

Looks like Loudeye and M$ have teamed up to bring even more music downloads to the net. It's all based on Windows Media 9 DRM crap -- no surprises there.

What is surprising is that they want to offer a customizable store where any company can start offering its own cobranded music download site:

But the Digital Music Store lets any company interested in starting an iTunes-style service do so for a fraction of the cost, said Loudeye President Jeff Cavins.

. . .

"There is only one iTunes,'' Cavins said last week. "But there will be tens of thousands of outlets for digital music.''

At least those 10,000 stores will be compatible with one another, which is one saving grace. But it looks like Roj is on the money and these services will proliferate to the point where they will all have to compete on price, which of course drives the margins to near zero.

Jobs and M$ were right -- Jobs knows that the margins will drop to zero and M$ will make money off other sucker companies who start their own download service. It all becomes clear now.

File sharing

LegalTorrents

Larry Lessig mentioned LegalTorrents, a site dedicated to torrenting out MP3s that have been released under Creative Commons licenses.

This is a great idea, and also a great legal use for BitTorrent. I'm also hoping that MusicBrainz and Alluvium can work together in the same manner in the future.

Music industry watch

Music industry creates P2P network

Looks like the music industry, led by Universal Music has created a P2P network! Huh??

A new file-sharing standard designed to distribute copyrighted music and movies legitimately has been developed by a technology consortium. The system could deliver any content format to any computer, and users might even earn rewards points for sharing the files.

. . .

Using the new standard, computer users could share small files containing information about music, video or other data, but not the content itself.

I don't even know where to start with this harebrained idea. First off, this looks like thinly veiled content distribution system designed to shift the cost of music distribution to the consumers. Not only are the music companies only going to offer crippled music, they are also hoping to not pay for the distribution! I think the music companies think that people like playing with P2P systems for the sake of P2P. Wrong! People use them for the free music, duh!

This project seems to try and shift as much of the work of selling music off to the music fans themselves. Use their bandwidth and get them to also do the promotion by letting them swap information about the music.

Has their stupidity no bounds? Do they think this a snowball's chance in hell of flying??

Linux

SCO is dumber than a rock

As you may have noticed, I stopped caring about the whole SCO debacle. They are so ridiculously dumb that I can't continue talking about it -- well with one exception. SCO put out a press release that they are suffering a SYN flood DDoS attack. Except that their FTP servers on the same subnet as their attacked web servers are still functioning. Which means that they can't be attacked, unless they are doing it themselves -- which has been raised as a possibiltiy.

Groklaw has the whole story: Security Experts Doubt SCO was attacked.

Unbelievable!

That will be the last bit of SCO musing from me, until there is some actual news. Like them getting firebombed or something equally fun.

Music industry watch

The future of music albums

Roj posted an insightful quip about the Death of the Album. He analyzes the latest public figures about single track vs whole albums sales and comes to the conclusion that crappy albums with a couple of good tracks are in fact on the way out.

I've been pondering this for quite some time and I have to agree. In the spectrum of solid albums (Dark Side of the Moon) to single-hit-in-a-pile-of-crap (Til Tuesday comes to mind) the single hit albums are definitely going to fall by the wayside. This will create more competition on the singles scale, which makes life rougher for the lower end bands as Roj likes to call them. I doubt that established bands with solid fan bases are going stop releasing (concept) albums anytime soon.

Over at MusicBrainz we have a concept called non-album tracks. Its a mis-nomer and mis-understood. The idea is to provide a place where users can stash single tracks that were never released part of an album. Think internet only releases, jam sessions and other loose tracks. Unfortunately most people stick single remixes that were published on CD singles into the non-album tracks stash, which in incorrect. The number of true non-albums tracks we've seen has been pretty slim so far. So, the album is far from dead, but its ripe for a shake-up.

Legal/Government

More US bullyism

The US Government exerted pressure on the .nz government to shut down a cruise missle hobbyist. There is something wrong with the US if it can just demand that other governments censor its citizens -- and get away with it.

.nz is slightly out of your jurisdiction, is it not, Mr. President?

Music industry watch

Slim margins in music downloads

Not too long ago I was wondering about online music stores making money, comparing M$'s and Apple's statements about their online music offerings. M$ was the only one coming out saying that there was lots of money on the table and Apple maintained it was a driving force for selling iPods. Now C-Net has more details about slim margins on music downloads:

"There's very little money in this to begin with," said David Ring, vice president of Universal Music Group's eLabs division. "A lot of people are already recognizing that we're going to have to sell a lot more singles at 99 cents in order for us to make money, and for artists to be able to make a living."

. . .

Currently, close to two-thirds of the 99 cent digital song price goes to labels and other copyright holders, leaving slim or even negative margins for the song stores themselves. Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently said his company remains interested in the business because it helps sell the company's profitable iPod music devices.

So, it looks like M$ is smoking rock or they are up to something sneaky once again.

Microsoft Bashing

Windows ATMs hit by viruses

Not too long ago I wrote about ATM makers using Windoze on ATMs and I thought it was stupid that companies would even consider this. Well, it turns out that even before I wrote that some Siebold ATMs had been infected with various Windows worms.

Siebold's ATMs suck and so do their voting machines. Do they have any products that are good? Siebold's ineptitude is amazing!

Music industry watch

Theft vs. rational avoidance of moral hazard

Red Herring has a cool article about the Net has obliterated the traditional value proposition for music:

The music industry's problem is fundamental: the implicit contract between music companies and listeners is no longer viable.

. . .

Furthermore, the labels' biggest buyers - the big music and electronics retailers - have forced them to standardize prices. In most markets, prices convey meaningful information about value and risk. This point is intuitive: think of the price of blue-chip stock, for example. But because every CD costs roughly the same, prices do not serve their usual function of providing an informational feedback loop between labels and listeners.

The music industry has done its best to protect its interests from outside attacks. In the process of doing this, they have also cut themselves off from important information about the satisfaction of its music customers This in turn has alienated the customers who have turned to file sharing applications to attempt to level the playing field. Very interesting observation.

The rest of the article talks about risks and moral hazards and how they apply to the recording industry -- a very interesting perspective from which to view the current music industry quagmire. Well worth reading!

Music industry watch

Downhill Battle

The fine folks from the RIAA Radar and Downhill Battle have conjured up these cool stickers:

These stickers are designed to alert CD buyers that the proceeds from purchasing these CDs will go towards their popular sue the world program. Get your own stickers and then head down to the local music store and slap these stickers onto RIAA's CDs and walk away. Hmmm. Do they take PayPal for ordering stickers?

File sharing

Oh, the irony of it all!

Sharman Networks, the Vanuatuan owners of Kazaa have successfully shut down the Kazaa Lite website. Kazaa Lite is the hacked version of the Kazaa file sharing appliction sans all the evil spyware. Unless you pony up money for Kazaa you are supposed to endure spyware while you file swap.

I love the fact that the company who has arguable caused more viacarious copyright infringement that any other company, can't tolerate it when others infringe its copyright.

Gotta love those double standards. And Napster didn't act any differently.

Music industry watch

AS(S)CAP is part of the problem

SFGate writes about a popular bar in SF that had live bands playing, until the ASCAP started sueing the bar for copright violation. The two sides of the story differ quite a bit and the bar has decided to stop live music performances in the bar.

This is amazingly petty. I'm trying to think of how this could've been avoided and it becomes clear how nasty of a problem this is. First off, I think the bands in question should've been sued for their actions -- why was the venue sued? I suppose the bar could've acquired an ASSCAP license to cover its butt, but it doesn't sound like the bar should have to do this -- it sounds like the band's responsibility. I suppose the bar could've gotten the license and then passed the cost on to the bands playing there. I think this is what the ASSCAP is wishing to accomplish here.

It even sounds like the band and ASSCAP disagree on what songs were performed and if any performance royalties were in fact due. And lets do some rudimentary math real quick to see what kind of money we're talking about here. If memory serves right, the Harry Fox agency is due $0.047 for each song performed (if this is incorrect, please post a comment). I don't know if the ASCAP collects for Harry Fox or if the ASCAP demands fees as well. For now lets assume that its about a nicket per song. If bands played from 6pm to midmight and if each of them played songs on average 3 minutes long and half of those songs were ASCAP covered songs, we're talking about four dollars of royalties due each day. That assumes that 180 songs were played in that timeframe, which a jukebox can do, but not a series of bands. I'd put the figure at far less. Perhaps 1 - 2 dollars a day., thus $500 - $1000 a year. Consider all the bars that perform live music and how much revenue that could be for the ASSCAP and it sounds like Skip's Tavern is being used as an example.

Pathetic. The music industry is trying harder each day to alienate the people who pay the bill to support it. Yet another argument for music industry revolution -- as if we needed many more.

Travel

Why so much tar and concrete??

Why does the US insist on building streets and sidewalks with concrete and/or tar??

Seems quite silly to me. While I was in Amsterdam I walked down the street past a group of construction workers orienting themselves to get some task done. When I walked back less than 10 minutes later they crew had begun tearing up the street/sidewalk by pulling out the bricks that make up the road.

Finally I walked past again about 3 hours later. No trucks. No workers. No holes in the street. Just street. I had to look really carefully to see where the street had been torn open. It looked perfect like it did when the day began.

So simple. So clean. So effective. So cheap. Why do the americans have to do everything with tar? Put tar on it. Then chip seal it. Need to dig it up? Sure, just rip it to shreds with big expensive powertools do what you need to do, and do a poor job of patching the tar. 10 years later the tar is a patchwork of bad patches and has to be replaced completely.

Bricks/cobblestones last a long time, and with a simple puller tool you can undo any patch. Using a few hammers all the bricks can be pounded back into the ground.

Do americans have to be wasteful with their resources?

[ Can you tell I have net connection to play with again? ]