Armchair Generalist notes (with the appropriate adjectives) the decision by the three major American broadcast networks to pull their full time correspondents from Iraq.
Category: Distribution Page 6 of 15
I found myself on the phone with a friend the other day, trying to explain to him why he couldn’t simply copy the music from his iPhone to his new computer. Yes, his iPhone could connect to his new computer, and he’d already paid for the music on his phone, but no, he couldn’t just copy it. He’d have to start up his old computer, copy a bunch of directories from it to the new computer, and hope that he’d followed my instructions exactly.  He wondered why he couldn’t just sync his iPhone with the new PC. That’s a good question that more and more people are facing as they discover that they’re living in a world with crippled technology that intentionally makes your life harder – DRM (Digital Rights Management).
I’ve gone on enough about it over the years, so I’ll leave it to Gizmodo this time:
Digital rights management is a corporate pain in the ass that stops you from doing whatever you want with music and movies in the name of fighting piracy. But there’s more to it.
Straight up, you run into DRM pretty much every day. Bought music from three of the four major labels or any TV show from iTunes? Played a game on Steam? Watched a Blu-ray movie? Hello, DRM. If you wanna get technical about it, digital rights management and copy protection are two different, if similar things. Digital rights management is copy protection’s sniveling, more invasive cousin—it isn’t designed simply to make it harder to steal content like straightforward copy protection—you thieving bastard you—but to control exactly how and when you use media.
Gizmodo goes on like that, slashing and burning its way through things that will almost certainly affect your life, like HDCP, CSS, and FairPlay. What’s all that, you ask?  Gizmodo explains.
Warner wants more money from YouTube, and because it isn’t getting it, you’ll shortly have a tougher time finding music/videos from artists like Cher, Alanis Morrisette, The Raconteurs, etc.:
Warner Music Group ordered YouTube on Saturday to remove all music videos by its artists from the popular online video-sharing site after contract negotiations broke down.
The order could affect hundreds of thousands of videos clips, as it covers Warner Music’s recorded artists as well as the rights for songs published by its Warner/Chappell unit, which includes many artists not signed to Warner Music record labels.
Between that and Sony’s dedication to hating its own customers (i.e., making it impossible to easily embed videos from Sony artists), the music series here will have to shift from being mostly retrospective to a good bit more prospective. When it comes to new music, I’ve happily avoided the major labels for years.  Most of my favorite new artists – like Dan Reeder, Stereo Total, and Tanghetto – are on indy labels that don’t fight against the idea that the more people that hear their artists’ music, the better off they are. That doesn’t, unfortunately, solve for the problem of having most of the music I love – and want to share – stuck with the old major labels, but it’s a start.
The RIAA says that it’s no longer going to sue individual file sharers and it isn’t seeking ISP filtering. Given the RIAA’s long and storied history of lies, I’ll believe that when I see it. Even if true, however, I’m certain that there is an untold story. The hand that is letting go here will surely soon be wrapped around another part of the consumer in short order.
Our global communications network can be a fragile thing:
France Telecom observed today that 3 major underwater cables were cut: “Sea Me We 4†at 7:28am, “Sea Me We3†at 7:33am and FLAG at 8:06am. The causes of the cut, which is located in the Mediterranean between Sicily and Tunisia, on sections linking Sicily to Egypt, remain unclear.
Most of the B to B traffic between Europe and Asia is rerouted through the USA. Traffic from Europe to Algeria and Tunisia is not affected, but traffic from Europe to the Near East and Asia is interrupted to a greater or lesser extent (see country list below). Part of the internet traffic towards Réunion is affected as well as 50% towards Jordan. A first appraisal at 7:44 am UTC gave an estimate of the following impact on the voice traffic (in percentage of out of service capacity):
-Â Â Â Saudi Arabia: 55% out of service
-Â Â Â Djibouti: 71% out of service
-Â Â Â Egypt: 52% out of service
-Â Â Â United Arab Emirates: 68% out of service
-Â Â Â India: 82% out of service
-Â Â Â Lebanon: 16% out of service
-Â Â Â Malaysia: 42% out of service
-Â Â Â Maldives: 100% out of service
-Â Â Â Pakistan: 51% out of service
-Â Â Â Qatar: 73% out of service
-Â Â Â Syria: 36% out of service
-Â Â Â Taiwan: 39% out of service
-Â Â Â Yemen: 38% out of service
-Â Â Â Zambia: 62% out of service
That’s just three accidental cable cuts. Imagine if someone actually put their mind to it.
There’s been no small amount of handwringing over the WSJ’s (uncharacteristically poor) reporting about Google’s attempts to strike caching deals with major ISPs. Dave Isenberg explains how the WSJ blew it. Larry Lessig has a few things to say about it, too.
No, really:
Media conglomerate Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy protection Monday, as the owner of the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Cubs and other properties tries to deal with $13 billion in debt.
Add to that list of holdings WGN and the Baltimore Sun.  Not at all surprising, but it’s still really something to see.
Creative Commons is an organization dedicated to ensuring the free exchange and flow of culture by providing ease to understand and use licenses by which creators (such as you and me) can release their works. 
Creators can choose to make their work freely available for any kind of use by anyone, or they can limit that use so that it must give them credit (attribution), and/or may only be used for non-commercial purposes.
On general principle, I put most of my posted work on the web – including this site – under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial license. I’m quite happy to say that people all over the world have found my work useful for their own projects. My photos help illustrate wikipedia entries, university programs, and news stories. All because the CC licenses made it clear and easy for others to understand that I wished them to be used for those purposes.
Occasionally, however, I’ve had some problems with others understanding the concept of “non-commercial”. It’s not a big deal to me in terms of dashing my own hopes for commercial sales, and the exact definition of non-commercial is certainly unclear. It does bother me greatly, however to see a business abusing the ambiguity of the CC non-commercial license clause. That’s why I’m happy to see that the folks at Creative Commons are working on clarifying that issue. Part of that work is surveying creators and users on exactly what *they* think non-commercial use is. If you’re still reading, you should jump over and take the survey. It’s for the common good.
Because only the victors get to (re)write history, no?
This really isn’t complicated. President Bush was not being “blunt” or showing “candor” when he told ABC News in an interview published yesterday that his biggest regret was the failure of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War.
Rather, he was whitewashing away his own role in the fisaco by promoting the demonstrable falsehood that there was no available evidence or information that argued against war and that he was merely fooled into invading Iraq solely by the bad intel.
The big news orgs seem eager to help Bush do this. Not a single one of their reports on the interview that we can find bothered to tell readers that there was plenty of good intel — ignored by the Bush administration — saying that Saddam wasn’t the threat Bush was claiming he was. Nor did any of them bother mentioning that the weapons inspectors in Iraq were saying the same thing — something that also went ignored.
These facts are absolutely central to understanding Bush’s efforts to falsify history in yesterday’s interview. Yet they went unmentioned in reports by Reuters, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, CNN, and The New York Times.
Or maybe losers get to write history, too.
This is very encouraging:
In what can only be seen as a major coup for those of us who have been hoping that the Obama Administration would embrace a saner and more sensible thinking on questions of copyright than is the norm in Washington, Change.gov has swapped a strict copyright policy for among the liberalist of Creative Commons licenses.
And for those of you who have being playing the copyright game along at home, and are thinking “Wait, isn’t everything prepared by the Federal gov’t in the public domain already?”:
As a rather strange government-private hybrid entity, the Obama-Biden Transition Project doesn’t appear to be covered by government copyright rules which presume that what the government creates should be freely useable by the public.
I’m still not used to these flashes of sanity emanating from DC.