Virtual Thought

I was talking to some friends of mine about the various levels of covert surveillance they have their children under.

Apparently, waiting up in a bathrobe as your child sneaks through the backdoor at three in the morning isn’t enough… now we should listen in on our child’s IM conversations and install cameras to watch their behavior at the door.

I am not a parent. I have little real-world experience regarding concern for my child’s safety. I can imagine that I’d want to do almost everything in my power to ensure that my child escaped the rigors of childhood free form unspeakable horror.

This, however, goes too far. I think one of the goals of raising children is to raise responsible adults who can function well in society.

Posts have this nasty tendency of accumulating, un-written, in my Wordpress queue as drafts. I had these two links sitting around for a long time: One link saying that DRM is here to stay and won’t affect user-generated content and the burgeoning independent media industries and the other saying that DRM hasn’t protected a thing and should be removed entirely.

Somewhat explosively, Steve Jobs posted an essay last week saying that he would sell songs from the iTunes music store without DRM if only the big bad RIAA would let him.

So.

I posted those two links from long, long ago to make a point: I never thought those links would have a shelf life. Commercial DRM, as far as music is concerned (since video DRM doesn’t seem to be going anywhere except to be hacked most egregiously), seems to be counting down to some zero hour; here’s hoping that I live to see no DRM is used at all. I think this is much more constructive than asking that a DRM system somehow, non-sensically, be opened-up so that everyone can lock down their users in the same way! (Man, Norway, you should’ve asked for the whole enchilada and just outlawed it entirely since even a majority of music execs don’t like DRM)

Apple has claimed that they would sell music without DRM (which would be a change of policy for them) and that seems like the beginnings of a sea change. Coupled with EMI’s recent announcement to stop using DRM on its tracks I think this is a very exciting time.

There are a ton of good analyses of the tides in this debate, notably at DaringFireball… Gruber does a great job laying out the currents (to over-extend that analogy).

Here are more links on the subject from Electronista, the inestimable Mr. Doctorow, Cult of Mac, the Associated Press and some more Daring Fireball.

I wanted to switch from my old del.icio.us account to my new del.icio.us account and was very, very thankful for the (new-to-me) import feature. One problem though.

All my imported bookmarks are marked not shared. Dammit.

I haven’t been using del.icio.us that long, so it’s not like I have thousands upon thousands of links… but I have enough in there that I want public that editing each one individually to share it is a tremendous pain in my ass. Glancing through the comments on this post it seems that many people want the “share all” feature… but the del.icio.us developers have stated that they will not implement this feature.

I find that developers (myself included) get these little wild hairs up their butts about the funniest things: The creators of Yojimbo are vehemently against organizing information in the application using hierarchical folders. Not as big a pain point there as the tagging support more than makes up for it… but, dammit, sometimes I want to organize things as “Letters/Work” and “Letters/Personal”.

Anyway, I’ll probably release a little script soon that re-shares all one’s del.icio.us bookmarks.

So I’m talking to a friend of mine about building a NAS and, possibly, a media server. We were commiserating on the state of DRM and how it limits our choices: Since I’m an iTunes user I have to use Apple TV to enjoy my media on my AV system in my living room since no other product can work with Apple DRM… dammit. By the same token, I’m not about to use Vista and its crippling of the end-user experience in the name of protecting content.

He steered me towards an ArsTechnica story about how DRM isn’t about piracy and is, in fact, a way of creating false scarcities in an effort to ensure traditional revenue channels. Of course, the flies in the face of my growing admiration for agalmics in relation to digital media of all types. I mean, c’mon: I can perfectly reproduce any digital thing I want at little or no cost… so why are we applying traditional economic models here?

The two arguments I hear the most go thusly:

1. If you are not paying someone for every digital copy of media you are stealing.
2. The content creators would make no money without a structure for generating revenue.

These are both a bit stinky:

1. Am I stealing when multiple people come over and watch the DVD that I purchased, or listen to the music that I own? What if I lend it to them? What if, heaven forbid, I make a copy for myself because CDs have a tendency to not survive for very long? What if I bought a movie on DVD and want to enjoy it on my iPod, or stream it from my in-house NAS to my TV? None of that is stealing.
2. I differentiate here between content creators and content producers. Content creators are the actual artists who, y’know, write stuff; content producers are the ones who distribute and try to control all that content… in this case the RIAA. Who would we want to protect, the creators or the producers? The creators of course. Who does our current system protect? The producers!

But I digress… I’ve heard people question why Microsoft would bow to the RIAA on this since, really, it’s Microsoft that should be in control of this relationship (since it owns 95% of the machines in the market it can use its position to dictate to everyone else how they’re gonna play in that market). Instead, though, MS says, “Okay, we’ll make everything more fragile and jump through all these hoops and force all the hardware makers to jump through these fragile little hoops as well.” Why is that?

I think it’s the side benefit to MS that makes this interesting: Vista’s content-protection scheme squeezes out the open source hardware support necessary for people to run open-source OSes on their desktops.

Since open source hardware drivers, by definition, can’t keep proprietary content protection schemes a secret, as required by the licenses, and because the licenses themselves cost money… no more hardware support for open source OSes. Microsoft gets a bit of a win on this one.

But where are the consumers in all this? Nowhere.

A variety of truly dumb patents are romping around in IP(intellectual property) space… apparently these people are innovating within a process, but I don’t buy it:

• Linked lists (probably going to challenged because of the original linked list patent)
• Sandwiches
• Swinging side-to-side

So, yes, indeed, I am against current patent laws guarding “innovation”. Argh. So frustrating.

Recently read this ridiculous article asking if Garageband is harmful to creativity.

Musicians, those who are really passionate about what they are doing, need each other to feed off of. Jamming with friends who share your love of music is where the best ideas are inspired.

Bull. Speaking for myself, I don’t need other musicians to be inspired… and while jamming with friends is fun, and I’ve certainly been inspired by seeing other musical acts who rock, I don’t think that inspiration and creation are necessarily group activities. Just witness the variety of electronic acts out there who are bands in name only and are actually single individuals rockin’ out all on their own.

Engadget reports that the CEO of Warner Music is ‘fairly certain’ his children pirate music.

He assures us, though, that they’ve “faced the consequences.”

Would those consequences include paying his dad’s industry group hundreds of dollars like everyone else?