We were talking in #joiito about wanting to play music for each other, but not being able to just post urls to our mp3's for fear of vexatious prosecution.
So here's my initial straw man suggestion for how to do this.
1. create a new playist format that refers to songs by a canonical naming scheme - MusicBrainz has a good starting point. These get put in URI's that look something like:
songid:66fea472-0093-4764-a574-7ef87ade4433?artistid=d1601842-8052-4ac1-81ef-67e8259250dd&artist=Shannon%20Campbell%20and%20Scott%20Andrew%20LePera&title=Nothing%20New
How does one resolve this URI?
Implement an app that tries several alternatives:
1. Is it in the local music collection?
2. Is it available on a label or artist website/bittorrent?
3. Is a promotional extract up on Amazon or iTunes store?
4. allow further plugins
In each case the name/title are used for an initial match, and the sing identification process defined by MusicBrainz used to be sure we have a real match.
Sunday, 28 December 2003
Tuesday, 23 December 2003
DRM 'Industry' hates freedom
Bill Rosenblatt :
Remarkably honest reporting by DRM Watch here. The DRM 'Industry' has a vested interest in destroying the free transmission of information over the public internet in favour of closed, restricted networks.
The DRM industry should hope that the ISPs lose. If they do, then that means that ISPs do not have a free pass around liability for their treatment of content, and therefore that they should be proactively offering DRM services, both to protect themselves legally and as a source of incremental revenue from copyright owners. If the ISPs continue to win these cases, then a major segment of the digital media value chain that could support DRM technologies and services may disappear.
Remarkably honest reporting by DRM Watch here. The DRM 'Industry' has a vested interest in destroying the free transmission of information over the public internet in favour of closed, restricted networks.
Saturday, 13 December 2003
Deeper pixels needed
Glenn Reynolds, assorted Slashdotters and Peter Lewis at Fortune are speculating on whether Ansel Adams would have used digital cameras.
As I worked on the first official release of Ansel Adams images in digital form - the Ansel Adams screensaver - I feel somewhat qualified to pontificate on this.
What everyone is missing is that it is not a question of resolution, but of dynamic range.
With film the issue is blurred by questions of grain, but with digital the problem is which image format to use.
TIFF supports more than 8-bits per channel, but JPEG does not, nor do most computer displays. Most digital cameras only generate 8-bits per channel of dynamic range, and are still competing on resolution.
On the other hand, even the $30 scanners do 12-bits per channel these days, and 14-bits per channel (42-bit) are only about $50.
I expect that digital cameras will pick up on this soon, but we'll need a file-format change (and possibly a better transient storage device than flash memory) and new low-cost software to make it mainstream. Ironically, all the sophisticated exposure calculation that makes many digital cameras too slow to use for action snapshots could be reduced if they upped the dynamic range a few stops.
If you want to see what kinds of dynamic range digital photography is really capable of, have a look at the Hubble images, where every photon is carefully counted.
As I worked on the first official release of Ansel Adams images in digital form - the Ansel Adams screensaver - I feel somewhat qualified to pontificate on this.
What everyone is missing is that it is not a question of resolution, but of dynamic range.
With film the issue is blurred by questions of grain, but with digital the problem is which image format to use.
TIFF supports more than 8-bits per channel, but JPEG does not, nor do most computer displays. Most digital cameras only generate 8-bits per channel of dynamic range, and are still competing on resolution.
On the other hand, even the $30 scanners do 12-bits per channel these days, and 14-bits per channel (42-bit) are only about $50.
I expect that digital cameras will pick up on this soon, but we'll need a file-format change (and possibly a better transient storage device than flash memory) and new low-cost software to make it mainstream. Ironically, all the sophisticated exposure calculation that makes many digital cameras too slow to use for action snapshots could be reduced if they upped the dynamic range a few stops.
If you want to see what kinds of dynamic range digital photography is really capable of, have a look at the Hubble images, where every photon is carefully counted.
Tuesday, 9 December 2003
Tasty links
Down on the right is my del.icio.us linkblog. Its a bookmark replacement, and a place to find great links, as you can see other people's links and categories too.
Monday, 8 December 2003
HTTP diffs
Steve Jensen Jenson:
Steve, there is an existing HTML RFC for sending diffs that is perfectly suited to this - RFC3229. I mentioned this when it came out in Jan 2002.
I came up with an idea on the train recently that might be useful here: If you're given the right bytes and told where they should go, you can construct the right document. HTTP does have semantics for giving you bytes and where they should go.
Steve, there is an existing HTML RFC for sending diffs that is perfectly suited to this - RFC3229. I mentioned this when it came out in Jan 2002.
Friday, 5 December 2003
The technical argument against DRM
Although the economic argument is more powerful - that DRM destroys value for customers and hence will be shunned by them - the technical argument is strong too.
This rests on one of the fundamental pillars of Computer Science - the Church Turing Thesis that states that any computer can emulate any other. When this is combined with the continual improvement in computing power available, it means we will always be able to run old software, or indeed protected software, by emulating the environment it runs within.
Simson Garfinkel describes how emulation saved the BBC Domesday Project, the authors of which I worked with at the BBC and the MMC.
"But that wasn't DRM" I hear the cry, "just obsolete hardware and data formats".
How about a systematic program that defeats the hardware protection for pay per use interactive experiences that works in a general enough way to encompass 25 years worth of hardware design?
It's called MAME and it has just been ported to the Nokia N-Gage cellphone/game gadget. It has emulators for various CPUs (and graphics and sound chips) to run the code directly from the original game ROMs - they look and feel just like the real thing
If Nokia are smart they will license this and the games and use it to promote the gadget - this company has licensed Atari ROMs for sale. After all, those 80s games are smaller than most MMS photos that get sent, and they're lots more fun than ringtones.
I hope Ed Felten and maybe can explain this to the assembled lawyers at the Berkman conference today. Most of them seem to like on compulsory licensing schemes.
I wish I had been able to take the chance offered to join them and present mediAgora to them. I look forward to reading the blogging of the event.
Here's a cartoon I made with the wonderfully silly Bayeux Tapestry Construction Kit
This rests on one of the fundamental pillars of Computer Science - the Church Turing Thesis that states that any computer can emulate any other. When this is combined with the continual improvement in computing power available, it means we will always be able to run old software, or indeed protected software, by emulating the environment it runs within.
Simson Garfinkel describes how emulation saved the BBC Domesday Project, the authors of which I worked with at the BBC and the MMC.
"But that wasn't DRM" I hear the cry, "just obsolete hardware and data formats".
How about a systematic program that defeats the hardware protection for pay per use interactive experiences that works in a general enough way to encompass 25 years worth of hardware design?
It's called MAME and it has just been ported to the Nokia N-Gage cellphone/game gadget. It has emulators for various CPUs (and graphics and sound chips) to run the code directly from the original game ROMs - they look and feel just like the real thing
If Nokia are smart they will license this and the games and use it to promote the gadget - this company has licensed Atari ROMs for sale. After all, those 80s games are smaller than most MMS photos that get sent, and they're lots more fun than ringtones.
I hope Ed Felten and maybe can explain this to the assembled lawyers at the Berkman conference today. Most of them seem to like on compulsory licensing schemes.
I wish I had been able to take the chance offered to join them and present mediAgora to them. I look forward to reading the blogging of the event.
Here's a cartoon I made with the wonderfully silly Bayeux Tapestry Construction Kit
Wednesday, 3 December 2003
99% perspiration
Tim Oren takes me to task for saying Dave invented outlining. Now I could go on about the long history of simultaneous or convergent invention in history, but I won't, I'll just say this.
Tim - you're in VC. You should know the difference between a demo and a product.
Tim - you're in VC. You should know the difference between a demo and a product.
Commodities are a good thing
Doc:
Commodities are great - to paraphrase something Clayton Christensen said - once your business has become commoditized it is simple enough that you can hire some MBAs to run it for you.
The stupidest conceit of the software business is that commodities are bad.
If it weren't for commodities, we wouldn't have civilization. Or food.
There's plenty of money to be made in - and on (or choose any other preposition) - commodities. You just have to think smart about the stupid stuff. Is it that hard?
If it weren't for commodities, we wouldn't have civilization. Or food.
There's plenty of money to be made in - and on (or choose any other preposition) - commodities. You just have to think smart about the stupid stuff. Is it that hard?
Commodities are great - to paraphrase something Clayton Christensen said - once your business has become commoditized it is simple enough that you can hire some MBAs to run it for you.
Jessica Litman's music idea
Comment on Sharing and Stealing - Jessica Litman
It is a great essay until this paragraph::
This aspiration: "It should also be compatible with the current generation of digital playback devices, including CD players." is impossible. CD players play unencrypted, uncompressed digital audio. A drm'd format would require new players.
It is a great essay until this paragraph::
The key to the opt-out mechanism I propose is the selection of a single digital file format or family of formats capable of conveying copyright management information as defined in section 1202 of the copyright act. The format will probably incorporate digital rights management capability because the people who will be using it will desire that feature, but there's no need for any copy-protection to be hack-proof, or even exceptionally durable. It should also be compatible with the current generation of digital playback devices, including CD players. I'll call the format *.drm for short.
This aspiration: "It should also be compatible with the current generation of digital playback devices, including CD players." is impossible. CD players play unencrypted, uncompressed digital audio. A drm'd format would require new players.
Monday, 1 December 2003
Hierarchies, webs and emergence
Last week Dave Sifry and I met up with Dave Winer and Steve Gillmor at Technorati to share ideas. We talked about the public resource that Dave W created in weblogs.com, about Technorati, and about Dave's new idea to help people categorize blog postings and the things they link to.
Dave W said: I feel we're at a turning point in the weblog world, either we're going to be like every other hierarchy that's ever been, with secret deals, lots of impediments to progress, eventual stagnation; or we're going to overcome that.
Dave thinks in hierarchies; whether this is because he invented outlining, or why he invented outlining I'm not sure. Along the way he added links into the picture, so his hierarchies can link to other nodes, or other hierarchies to get as complex as you like.
The conventional wisdom is that links beat out hierarchies - Google's link-centric approach beat out Yahoo's hierarchy-centric approach (the HO in Yahoo stood for Hierarchically Oriented).
However, another way of looking at it is top-down versus bottom-up - central design versus emergence.
Dave W wants to build a bottom-up emergent taxonomy, using open debate and open standards.
Steve Gillmor is saying something similar about how we can grow new things.
I have a couple of ideas that I need to write up as spec proposals to try to start such discussions - one about 'vote links', one a new bit of metadata for feeds saying whether they are complete or not.
Dave W said: I feel we're at a turning point in the weblog world, either we're going to be like every other hierarchy that's ever been, with secret deals, lots of impediments to progress, eventual stagnation; or we're going to overcome that.
Dave thinks in hierarchies; whether this is because he invented outlining, or why he invented outlining I'm not sure. Along the way he added links into the picture, so his hierarchies can link to other nodes, or other hierarchies to get as complex as you like.
The conventional wisdom is that links beat out hierarchies - Google's link-centric approach beat out Yahoo's hierarchy-centric approach (the HO in Yahoo stood for Hierarchically Oriented).
However, another way of looking at it is top-down versus bottom-up - central design versus emergence.
Dave W wants to build a bottom-up emergent taxonomy, using open debate and open standards.
Steve Gillmor is saying something similar about how we can grow new things.
I have a couple of ideas that I need to write up as spec proposals to try to start such discussions - one about 'vote links', one a new bit of metadata for feeds saying whether they are complete or not.
What am I missing?
One fascinating thing about Technorati is how many blogs are showing up in languages other than English. One of the highest on the the Top 100 is an Iranian blog, which is a great thing.
However, I look at blogs like this and feel like Ginger in Gary Larson's classic What Dogs Hear.
'squiggle squiggle squiggle Blog squiggle squiggle squiggle Permalink'
However, I look at blogs like this and feel like Ginger in Gary Larson's classic What Dogs Hear.
'squiggle squiggle squiggle Blog squiggle squiggle squiggle Permalink'
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