Andy on the Road

Hey, remember 15 hours ago, when I addressed the AP’s desire to work with bloggers and develop a rational licensing strategy? Remember how that, while I stressed the AP couldn’t set the terms of fair use, they were at least holding meetings to negotiate a fair balance? Remember how the AP stressed they weren’t going to act like the RIAA on this one?

Well, out the window all that nice talk goes.

Boing Boing is reporting this morning that the Associated Press has released their so-called quotation licenses. Here are the fees:

1. 251 words or more - $100
2. 101-250 words - $50
3. 51-100 words - $25
4. 26-50 words - $17.50
5. 5-25 words - $12.50

Yeah, that’s right. The AP wants to charge you $12.50 to take five words our of their article. Unless those 5 words are like the first 5 notes in Strauss’ Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I’d say it wouldn’t be worth your money.

What’s far worse is that these blind blanket licenses do nothing to consider the finer points of existing fair use law. No effort is made to gauge substantially, nor is any effort made to gauge the derivative work. The AP’s actions do nothing to consider why we hold that highly factual works are more likely to be taken from fairly. We stress the balance of a free press in this country, and part of that balance is not only avoiding government censorship of the press but also allowing any and all to criticize  or expound upon the existing press. In order to do that, quotation is not a fee you pay - it’s your statutory right that we must defend now.

Nielsen Hayden puts it quote well:

Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.

Welcome to a world in which you won’t own any of your technology or your music or your books, because ensuring that someone makes their profit margins will justify depriving you of the even the most basic, commonsensical rights in your personal, hand-level household goods.

The people pushing for this stuff are not well-meaning, and they are not interested in making life better for artists, writers, or any other kind of individual creators. They are would-be aristocrats who fully intend to return us to a society of orders and classes, and they’re using so-called “intellectual property” law as a tool with which to do it. Whether or not you have ever personally taped a TV show or written a blog post, if you think you’re going to wind up on top in the sort of world these people are working to build, you are out of your mind.

I would urge all of my fellow bloggers to not pay for what the law provides you with for free. And if you do, I have some beautiful snake oil I would be glad to sell you.

Ars Technica hit me with a quality one-two punch in reviews today, first with their take on the latest release of Songbird, and second with a Digg-smashing preview of Spore (specifically, the Creature Creator).

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(image from bubblecup.etsy.com)

Imagine a road in your town that serves as a convenient workaround from normal traffic. It’s the kind of road that only the locals usually know about; perhaps it links two major thruways, or is a way around a toll booth, or the fastest route between the high school and the local pizza joint. I suspect many of you already have a road or two in mind. This road is narrow and winding but well paved, providing ample support for the residents on the road and most of the neighbors. Maybe you live on a road like this, maybe even purchasing a home here for this very convenience. My parent’s house could certainly be such a road, linking main street in their Massachusetts town with a sizable New Hampshire highway, saving a few minutes and miles.

Let’s say your road has a problem. Your excellent shortcut has been found by the many of the public (as they often are). Many who do not respect the road as a resident might have been speeding on it in order to take advantage of this workaround. Naturally, this creates an unsafe and unpleasant environment for those living there and others who drive. What’s more, they show total disregard for the local neighborhood, cranking their music late at night or throwing trash out the window, or damaging the road. The speeders are a rampant problem, and need addressing right away.

One particularly angry resident, let’s call her Rita, is threatening to sue every speeder she sees. She herself has attempted to pull over people, and seeks assistance from a private company to solve the problem. In walks said company, let’s call it StreetDefender, offering to solve the speeding problem. In addition to giving Rita a radar detector to help her catch any and all speeder StreetDefender offers three other potential solutions:

1. They offer to jam the road with as many cars as possible, highly inconveniencing the culprit speeders and forcing them to slow down or seek an alternate route.
2. They offer to conduct an espionage mission where they block anyone who they deem a speeder from getting into their car in the first place, killing off the problem at its source, in theory.
3. They post up billboards along the road every ten feet at a premium (since so many people see them as they zip by), and then share the revenue of those billboards with the neighbors.

Allow me to make a generalization and assume that you, dear reader, are a sensible human being. You, having sense, determine all of these to be foolish solutions to the problem. You are also somewhat uneasy with the fact that StreetDefender is using radar guns on the street, figuring that role to be better served by the police, though perhaps the police, quite frankly, have better fish to fry. And while two of the three solutions above would most likely work, and the third would give you cash, they come at a great inconvenience to you. After all, you too would like to use the road for your totally legitimate, non-speeding purposes. Still, Rita accepts all three proposals and proceeds to sue speeder after speeder, with little success but much damage.

What would you do about it?

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While waxing poetic about the glory days of the internet with Friend Webster the other night, we mentioned that strange phenomena of websites that were designed to look like actual spaces. Webster seems to recall it was programmed with VHTML, though pokes around Google and Wikipedia can’t seem to confirm that.

When I said the sites looked like real spaces, I should correct that. They looked like rejected Doom levels, and clicked through like Myst. Here’s a strange example I was able to pull out of somewhere. This was listed amongst a litany of other missed things from the frontier days of the World Wide Web (this was preceded by webrings, to clue into where our mind was at with this discussion).

Well, it’s not a rejected Doom level, but t-shirt company Atomic Tarantula seems to get the virtual-imitating-reality idea. Found via BoingBoing today, they specialize in sci-fi themed tee shirts done with a great degree of class. The website, rather than putting the shirts in sterile static pages, prefers to sprawl out all the shirts as one might on their bedroom floor as if you were, say, a sci-fi nut.

I picked up the shirt of Frank or Dave in a corridor of Discovery One from 2001. Pretty swank, both in content and execution. Check it out.

This week is a fairly substantial one for royalties and radio broadcasting. The House Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on Wednesday discussing the “Performance Rights Act,” a law which would require terrestrial radio stations to pay royalties for sound recordings. As it stands, radio only pays royalties for the composition (so, songwriters and publishing companies), and sound recording is compensated by all of the free advertising songs get when broadcasted, which almost certainly translates to higher sales. Whether this is an important balance in the limited rights of copyright or the consequence of the fact that big radio was earlier to the table than the RIAA depends on how much of a cynic you are about the congressional process. I’ll have a detailed assessment early next week, after I read the bill and related opinions.

Regardless of the merits, I’ve always felt that the big pushers on these sorts of legislation have been much more the record companies than the artists. Based on the structure of royalty payments in sound recordings (an oft-screwed area of a contract) artists usually fare better in other revenue streams, such as, say, live performances. For years radio has been quite a gold egg goose for record companies, and the payola scandals certainly suggest that record companies get that. It’s hard to see why they want to kill it now.

On the internet side of things, media search engine / go-to MP3 streamer / lawsuit target Seeqpod seems to get how streaming music can benefit artists, record companies, and the music scene as a whole. As an interesting project they’ve recently created a streaming database of this summer’s festivals. The page provides a list of festivals, and fans click though and listen to acts playing at these events. As an example, here’s the SeeqPod page for last weekend’s Mountain Jam.

The benefits are numerous; the site helps fans make decisions on where to go, lets them learn about other artists performing at their festival of choice, or simply gets them hip to other artists in their favorite genre. It’s a cool experiment, a good resource for fans, and a benefit for artists (not to mention record labels and festival promoters).

The á la carte nature of Seeqpod would make it unlikely to be classified as a digital webcaster, although some would argue it still would be categorized as such. For the sake of argument, let’s say it was. The law as of the mid-1990s states that these sorts of services have had to pay sound recording royalties in addition to composition. This has had a severe silencing effect on these sorts of websites, making SeeqPod a brave exception. And not without consequence, as lawsuits have been filed by Warner against the company. I’m more than a little disappointed that organizations like Warner can’t see past the clear benefit to their own artists, themselves, and the general music scene.

Seeqpod will not be directly impacted either way on the legislation considered Wednesday, but let’s not forget that many broadcasters are trying to help the scene much like SeeqPod. Increased royalties would no doubt have a silencing effect on small broadcasters, silencing databases like this. Right or wrong, this should not be taken lightly, and if the record companies do in fact have the best interests of artists at heart, they should consider this as well.

Amazing explainers Common Craft have helped us understand every new web development, from RSS, to Social Bookmarks, to Wikis. Today they debut their latest piece on Hobnox specialty: social media.

The ice cream metaphor is great for sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and MetaCafe, but does it work for us here at Hobnox?

I’d say yes, perhaps even moreso. Hobnox is a community made by artists for artists. We have a suite of tools at your disposal on top of the standard upload-and-share interface. If you come along with the videos-as-ice-cream metaphor, Hobnox is the joint where the food critics and semi-pro dessert chefs come to hang out. Sure, that’s a cheeky description, but we are talking about ice cream after all.

If you’d like to join us, comment here, and I’ll hook you up with a beta invite. We have some big news coming up with a contest as well, so stay tuned… and if anyone would like to learn more about Hobnox, come meet me at JP Licks tonight. For some reason I have a hankerin’…

As a followup to yesterday’s ponderings over Tuesday new releases, very heady website Music Think Tank posted the following question a couple days ago: How much is a digital download worth when you resell it? We have yet to see the secondary market develop around digital music, as we see with used CDs and Records. What would that look like? What would that feel like?

This is a long and complex illustration, so reader beware.

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Good afternoon, and happy Towel Day. I’m thinking of re-reading the first story in the series today in tribute.

I’ve had a bit of time now to catch up on my RSS feeds, and noticed two pieces on Wired’s Listening Post that for some reason didn’t make their way onto the national TV news I was periodically checking while out and about. Muxtape, genius little mixtape website, had some trouble on Wednesday that was later resolved. Due to some sort of glitch almost every track on muxtape turned into “Good Disease” by Aim. While trip-hop may be the bee’s knees for a handful of folks out there, and no disrespect to the British DJ, it cost Muxtape a day’s worth of headache and the loss of the past week’s worth of uploads.

Perhaps I have grown too bitter observing twisted marketing campaigns in the online space, but the thought came to mind almost immediately that this would be quite the publicity stunt for an artist looking for some massive exposure. Naturally, this probably would never happen in the real world, but what a great plot twist for a movie. I can picture a sort of major-label “Office Space” trick: the young, desperate A&R rep with the myriad of personal problems is desperately trying to boost sales for his slacker friend’s indie rock band, so he hacks Muxtape and all the billboards in Times Square to play the “hit song.” Taylor? Oscar? Ryan? Any of my writer friends want to run with this one?

This incident hit me directly, as I had recently posted a tape of travel songs just before heading up to Maine. Well, I took upon myself to fix it, and here’s the Muxtape, back in action. I might mix it up a little later today. On the ride home I listened to Rhino’s amazing garage compilation Nuggets in its full, 120-song glory. I might make a little “best of” in anticipation of some songs I’ll be releasing here a little later.

I spent most of yesterday away from my computer, with good reason. Thursday and Friday’s conference saw me wired in a way I usually reserve for the web prowling I’ll do in some of the more heady market research projects at Hobnox. In addition to the lectures held in Harvard Law’s beautifully equipped facilities (all rooms had outlets at each seat, and many had microphones wired into a room PA, so discussions in a room fit for 100 people were conducted comfortably), we were conversing on IRC, posting questions for discussion on a dynamic question tool, twittering with an agreed set of tags which were aggregated through sites like twemes, and editing the details of the conference, Wiki-style, on a conference wiki. For a center dedicated to understanding the web in a powerful way, they certainly practice what they preach. As my roommate Oscar noted, “it sounded like you were put in the Matrix.”

I met some amazing people, had a chance to put faces to names I’ve been reading about (and reading the works of) for my entire college career. I met amazing people my age and younger working on fantastic projects at MIT, Harvard, and BU (see my YouTomb post from last night), and was left wanting much more. One small piece of that: I really wish I could have heard more from Wendy Seltzer of The Berkman Center, NU Law, Tor, and creator of Chilling Effects, a site working along many of the same lines as YouTomb for years now.

The substance of my reactions can be found on the various liveblogs and reactions I’ve written (and probably will continue to write) tagged with “Berkman@10.” My overall conclusion is as follows:

I don’t know enough yet.

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One thing I wanted to touch base on before moving onto my conclusions from the conference: YouTomb.

On Thursday night I had the opportunity to meet with a group of people over dinner to talk about an effort coming out of MIT’s Free Culture group - their campus’ chapter of a nationwide network of students spending time exploring and acting on the issues of culture, intellectual property, and society, based on the book of the same name by Lawrence Lessig. You can (and should) read it in its entirety here. Representatives from Harvard College’s Free Culture, the founders of ROFLCon, Alex Leavitt, and Jeff Young from Chronicle.com were also at the table, and thanks again to Jeff for picking up the tab.

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