The MP3 isn’t dead

It’s just not profitable anymore.

Intellectual Property

Welcome to a world where not only is IP used to stop you using software you DO want, but is also part of a major bargaining tool to oblige you to run software that you don't necessarily want.

The deal will supposedly grant Asus the right to Microsoft's vast collection of patents affecting Android phones.

As part of the deal Asus will bundle Microsoft software, including Office, on future Android phones.

Cameron and Antibiotic Resistance

Cameron does something important and starts to look into the threat of antibiotic resistance.

But he puts an economist in charge of the project with an explicit assumption its an economic problem that industry has failed to invent more antibiotics.

So lets see if the committee starts recommending the banning of antibiotics in intensive farming practices or if they just come with recommendations to extend "intellectual property" rights or other incentives for big pharma companies.

WikiLeaks Release of Secret Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement

Here

Microsoft Patented Wiretapping?

Huh?

Microsoft has a patent for injecting snooping software into Voice Over IP (eg. Skype)?

It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw it Up

It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw it Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology - Shapeways Blog on 3D Printing News & Innovation

Aaron Swartz, Freedom Fighter & Innovator

RIP Aaron Swartz

3D Systems Announces Filing of Patent Infringement Suit Against Formlabs and Kickstarter

Bollocks!

Booo!

Good Guy Caveman

An Idea For The Film Industry

Dave Winer has an idea for the film industry :

Here's the idea. Set up a trust for the movie industry. A bank account that we can deposit money into but only movie-makers can withdraw from. When you download a movie via BitTorrent that you watch all the way to the end, deposit $5 into the account for the movie. When the owners decide to accept BitTorrent as a legitimate distribution system, which someday they are sure to, they can have the money. The amount of money in the account is always public info. So it becomes an important statistic, part of the "box office" for a movie. Then you'd probably find a funny thing happening -- independent movie producers who can't get distribution any other way will start promoting this site as a legitimate way to pay for movies. It wouldn't take long before the MPAA realized that there are a huge number of people who want the convenience of watching movies at home on their own timetable, instead of having to deal with the inhumane system the movie industry created for them.  

What Is SOPA?

Wikipedia, Craiglist, Boing Boing and several other sites are going black today to protest SOPA. I wholeheartedly agree with them. But here's something I haven't heard mentioned yet.

SOPA is not about stopping piracy. Everyone (even the RIAA and friends) know that it won't stop piracy. Instead SOPA is an attack on the visibility of piracy.

I once called home-taping "civil disobedience against industrial mass-commercialization of music". And I believe it was. Copying is overwhelmingly supported (in practice) by the citizens of every country where the technology to do it is available. It is mass civil disobedience against a law which most people think is an ass.

SOPA is an attack on the public affirmation of that position. An attack on the "normality" of piracy. It stops me visibly and proudly displaying my disobedience and forces me into doing it (shamefully) in private.

And this is its main aim : to try to roll-back the perceived legitimacy of copying that has arisen because on-line "everyone is doing it". It's not about stopping pirates, it's about cutting off their "supply lines" of public support by criminalising everyone who "gives succour" to them.

As Apple prepares (allegedly) to reinvent the book publishing industry, pay attention to Lawrence Lessig on the micro-chunking of copyright.

Bleah!

Intellectual Ventures : despicable.

Via today's twitter, two interesting journalism stories :

Guardian's Open Content Platform.

Which looks bold and interesting. It's not what Winer has been calling for (ie. that newspapers start opening their authority to the crowd) but it looks to be taking the syndicated content model about as far as it can. Good experiment.

And the next-gen Hackney Post.

WTF!!!???

IBM patents the "trim" function?

Behance has an interesting competition for artists to contribute ideas for the future of mobile music.

So far, though, I find the entries incredibly depressing. It's not exactly that they're bad or that some of the ideas don't seem "cool".

It's that the idea of music that they convey is 100% the one of "music as personal cocoon from the world". The personal devices are all about escaping from the social space into a world of ... well, if it was a world of "art" maybe that would be OK.

But there's no apparent love of music in the proposals. Industrial suppliers of musical escapism talk about "the music you love" ... thereby sidestepping the issue of what aesthetic vision *they* are trying to sell. Rock, soul, hip-hop, dubstep. They don't care. Music is the means, not the end. Their product is isolation.

In contrast, despite my pro-pirate tendencies, I just cracked open my PayPal piggybank and bought a real CD : Moon Wiring Club's Shoes Off And Chairs Away directly from the Blank Workshop site. Because of a Paypal mishap I had to mail him / them / the strange inhabitants of Clinkskell and ask for the CD to be sent to my UK address and not Brazil.

It arrived promptly yesterday, and I am ecstatically happy. Not so much with the music itself - the last Moon Wiring album grew on me rather than grabbed me immediately; for this new one, the atmosphere and weird juxtapositions are there, but the melodies haven't hooked into my brain yet I'm sure they will.) - but with the act of buying and getting a real CD from an artist who is so self evidently in love with the world he has created.. This is what makes it great music for me.

Update : semi-related. Over on the comments in SmartDisorganized, Albert gave me a nice compliment :

As I said before, what I liked the most about SDIdesk is that you actually use it yourself as opposed to being just the creator of an application. I personally am looking forward to starting with features that you would like to use yourself. Why? So then they will be implemented in a way that you would find convenient to use.

Of course, "build for yourself", like "scratch your itch" is a great heuristic for a programmer. Some of the best software is built like this.

Also some of the worst, of course. :-)

Clever idea from Current 93's David Tibet : subscription edition of forthcoming album - pricey but subscribers get lots of goodies. More importantly they need to send in their photos and will have them printed in the CD booklet. Good way for fans to get themselves acknowledged and make a statement.

Don't know if this is true, but it's a great anti-copyright story if it is.