Another attempt at the same thing.

One part of the question is whether different expressions of the same idea are worth the same. Should I pay more for a CD than a restricted bandwidth MP3 or a low bandwidth ringtone? The media industry appears to think they are all equally valuable and should be the same price. So what is it they actually own and what is it they are actually selling us?

The gist of the problem is in two parts.

1) Automated recognition of an idea (software, audio, video) even when it is in multiple encodings. eg. How do you tell that a 32Kbps stream, a 192Kb Mp3, an AAC file from iTunes, a FLAC file, a CD WAV, a mobile ringtone are all the same song. Or that a DVD, a DIVX, an AVI, or the same from a handheld camera in a movie theatre is the same video. And worse, that a 10 second sample of that song within a hip hop remix comes from the same idea. The industry has been focussing on watermarking and DRM used as a marker on a specific expression of an idea. But increasingly we transcode that expression (if only to remove the DRM) and in the process remove the marker. Intuitively (and legally), the rights remain the same. It's the same song. But automating that is hard.

2) Separating the trade in rights from the trade in ideas and the expression of those ideas. Analogous to futures and options trading independently from the underlying shares. What if I could buy the rights to listen (or perform or broadcast) to a piece of music separately from obtaining a physical CD or a downloaded Mp3? We could allow P2P file sharing to happen. In fact we would encourage it in order to get free distribution. But there's a big hole when we try and think about enforcement and control of the rights trading.

There's much to think about here. If we solve the recognition problem, we still have to solve the enforcement problem. But I think it puts a new slant on the copyfight.

On a purely personal level, I would like to buy the rights to obtain and listen to about 10-20 new albums a month but without saying where those came from or what format they're actually delivered in and where the rights holder is frequently individuals or independent record labels. And I'd like to be able to transfer some of those rights to my children and to offset the cost by reselling the ones I don't want on eBay or Amazon.

As soon as you start transcoding you open up all sorts of awkward legal questions. I've got a big CD collection which has now all been ripped to MP3. Inevitably my kids listen to it. And as they got laptops some of it migrated onto them. Then they went off to Uni.

Cory pointed me to this Kuro5hin article that proposes an open OSS DVD format for high definition music that is in a copy friendly format. But this is just dragging us back into an argument where some expressions of an idea are worth more than others. I want to move beyond that and ignore the format being used. Either I have the right to listen to the song or not. Either the owner of the rights to that song has the right to sell it to me or not. Once I have that right and a master copy, I should be able to transcode that master copy into whatveer format I see fit and play it on whatever device I see fit.

Still confused here. It makes sense but it still doesn't allow room for a meaningful business model around trading those rights rather than trading specific bit streams or physical expressions.

Building SOA your way | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2005-09-12 | By Jon Udell
Damn. More words that I've got to read... [from: del.icio.us]

GP2X.co.uk official site - Buy the GP2X Linux console
If only it had a hard drive. [from: del.icio.us]

Essential Bookmarks for web-developers: maxi edition | Essential bookmarks for web-developers
Too... Much... information... [from: del.icio.us]

Further to my last post.

In order to trade the rights to an idea independent of the expression of an idea, we need to be able recognise that expression.

In the audio world, we've been trying schemes involving, watermarks, embedded DRM, cryptographic hashes, markers in the start of red book CDs. All of these involve adding a marker to a specific expression. But this doesn't actually agree with the case law surrounding rights, patents and plagiarism. As humans we think we can identify a 32Kbps MP3 or a FLAC lossless copy as being the same song. We can probably identify a remix (the MTV Video version) as being the same song. With a bit of an effort we can identify all the samples in a bit of remixed hiphop. And so we have the example of the RIAA suing people based on filenames when the file is actually a Linux utility and not a top ten track. And their utility for checking P2P programs and audio/video on your machine makes no attempt to identify which files are licensed or even what they are and hence whether they need to be licensed.

So identifying a specific idea within an arbitrary expression of that idea reliably with automation is a hard problem. Perhaps we should be looking at technology like Shazam, that can make a good stab at getting a song title and artist from a snatch of music recorded by a mobile phone.

Burningbird » The Clean Industry : As for me personally, I wouldn't mind eventually incorporating something such as LID into my weblogging tool, to enable people to edit their comments without being dependent on IP address. I also wouldn't mind a good identity system that I could use for a set of similar services, such as specific social services or group membership, or for the online newspapers I subscribe to.

First some terminology for people not in this conversation. Identity Provider (IP): A system that provides identity services. Personal Identity Provider (PIP): An IP run by one person. Service Provider (SP):

I, and others, have a vision of an identity infrastructure where everyone ran their own PIP. And where a big proportion of SPs from Wordpress and MT upwards supported and used that infrastructure. Everyone should have an "About Page" with an API to provide single signon and identity provision.

I see three big problems to this happening.

1) Technology and adoption. For this to work the infrastructure standards need to be completely open, and they need to be implementable in lowest common denominator environments. That means PHP, Perl, dotnet and C++ with native language libraries or widely adopted extensions. Many of the target PIPs and SPs are running on hosted systems with minimal access. And the client browser could be one of several runnign on one of several OS. We can do this now with technologies like XMLRPC and SAX/DOM XML parsing. But we can't really do it with SOAP or with stacks built on SOAP.

2) Trust. If everyone is running a PIP how can we trust any one PIP site without some other trust metric? We can probably ensure that passwords are cryptographically secure and not exposed. But we still have the same problems of lack of trust that we have now with Splogs, trackback and comment spam. As peel away the onion layers eventually we need either a trust authority or a web of trust structure as in PGP.

3) Account Syncing and data duplication. Almost all SPs will want to maintain accounts with additional data. And they won't want to do round trip calls to the underlying PIP every time somebody views a profile on the SP or the account data is needed for session management. This means we will have data in two places and have to start thinking about sync as well as seeding new accounts with data from the PIP.

I'm just finishing reading Charles Stross' Accelerando. Fantastic book by the way, full of in-jokes for the accelerationista. And then I came across this. Copyright in a digital world by Nicholas Bentley.

I don't agree with all his conclusions but hidden in here is a *big* idea. The separation of rights from the ideas that those rights control. I think this is similar and related to the separation of options from shares and is related to the separation of money from the gold standard. This allows a market to develop in trading rights, independent of the trading of the ideas. So a particular idea, in the form of a 5 minute track of music wrapped up into an MP3 can be freely copied while the right to perform that track is traded separately. Stani Yassukovich while heading Merrill Lynch Europe and inventing the Eurobond famously said that you can commodify anything and turn it into paper. Once in the form of paper, you could trade the paper independent of the commodity. This led to the explosion of financial instruments currently being traded in the financial markets. What we are about to discover is that we can commodify ideas and turn them into paper representing those ideas and rights to those ideas. We can then trade this paper independent of the idea.

What I can't get my head round is whether there needs to be control and hence DRM for this to work, or whether it can work in the same way that money does. And money in the modern world works largely due to a social contract and belief system that says that it does.[1]

The economics 1.0 solution to this conundrum is that what we are buying is the physical expression of the idea in the form of a piano roll, a vinyl record or up to 1990 a CD. Continuing this line of thinking into the realm of Economics 2.0 we're attempting to maintain this by controlling the distribution of the idea by imposing some form of DRM.

The problem is that as Cory Doctorow has said repeatedly not only does DRM not work, it *cannot* work. The crucial argument is that you can treat the DRM system as a black box and apply cryptography to it. The box contains an encrypted copy of the idea. The rights owner gives you a secret key which unlocks the box and releases a plain text copy. The holder of the box now has a plain text version and can discard the box. It's irrelevant what algorithm the box uses. It's irrelevant how secret the key is. The holder now has a plain text copy and is free to distribute it.

So no matter how we kick against it, we have to discard the ability to have strong control over the movement of ideas when they are expressed in digital form, no matter whether they are software, words, books, music, video or CNC programs. The question is whether we can do this while still maintaining a market for the rights over those bits. Nicholas Bentley suggests that we can find ways of getting "contributions" from people who (temporarily) hold rights over the idea to the people who "own" the idea. I suspect that the tragedy of the commons means that providing there's a reasonable chance of getting away with it, the majority of people will freeload and avoid contributing.

At this point I'm out of my depth and wondering if all I've done is reframe the arguments slightly and we're back into trying tip-jars, centralised and legally backed performance rights processes or government controlled taxes for redistribution to monopoly rights holders. Whatever it is, the days of first sale of anything that can be digitised are now over. All we're doing now is thrashing around trying to keep it going for as long as possible while we wait for society as a whole to admit this and for some alternative to appear.

So now what I need is someone or groups of people who are prepared to hack economic theory around a rights trading market. And while we're at it, working out how to commodify and trade "trust", "reputation" and "whuffie".

[1]From Robert Anton Wilson. What's the difference between a dollar bill from the federal bank, a dollar bill counterfeited by the Mafia and a painting of a dollar bill by Andy Warhol and a photocopy of a dollar bill? The key is that the Federal Bank have a magic wand which they wave over *their* dollar bills which makes them real. And we all believe that the Federal Bank has one of these magic wands and they're the only people who have one.

Slashdot | Skype Security and Privacy Concerns Points to Scott Granneman at Security Focus

- Skype claims good encryption. But since the source is closed and has had no peer review we can't know if it's true.
- eBay is a US company and has a record of caving to US government requests.
- The FCC is pushing for wiretap capability in VoIP.

Doesn't give you a very warm fuzzy feeling, does it?

Just been surfing the BPI site. This is the UK version of the RIAA which has also been sueing people. These bits caused me to raise my eyebrows. Can you spot the Fnords?

Is downloading music illegal?
Downloading is when an internet user obtains a digital music file from the internet – in filesharing this source is another internet user known as an uploader. Unless this act of downloading is done from with (sic) the permission of the record label (for example, from a licensed service like iTunes), it is unauthorised copying and is illegal.

Uploading is when an internet user allows other internet users to access (and download) their digital music files. This phenomenon creates an enormous illegal library of music available for illegal download using filesharing services.

Copyright law provides that a person must have permission to make a copyrighted work (such as a sound recording) available for download on the internet. Doing so (i.e. uploading) without permission of the copyright owner (in the case of a sound recording, the record label) is against the law, regardless of whether the music was originally obtained legally or illegally by the uploader.

It is for the illegal act of uploading without permission that the international recording industry has commenced legal action against more than 14,200 people to date.

How can you tell which websites are legal?
Although there are some online music services that claim to be legal when they are not, a careful consumer should not find it difficult to identify legal music services.

Who are you suing?
After a prolonged period of warnings, the BPI has taken the decision to launch a programme of civil litigation against major uploaders – the “worst” filesharers in the UK.

The BPI is only able to identify copyright infringement at the level of the internet protocol (IP) address of the infringer; BPI then has to go to court to obtain an order requiring the relevant internet service provider to disclose to BPI the name and address of the owner of that internet account.

BPI then writes to the individuals concerned and offers them an opportunity to settle the legal claims against them before legal proceedings are issued.

How do you find major uploaders?
When filesharing, the uploader's computer transmits its internet location, so that the downloader's computer knows where to download from.

The BPI simply logs on to the internet like any other user and looks for downloads. When we download a sample track that track comes with details of the IP address of the filesharer who is offering it.. The BPI then obtains a High Court order that the internet service provider (ISP) which controls that particular IP address should disclose the identity of the owner of the computer in question. Having received those details, the BPI is able to initiate legal proceedings against the uploader.

Interesting that downloading from an illegal source is unauthorised copying and so illegal. That could get hard to tell as a consumer. And it appears to be hard for them to tell as well. I love the way "a careful consumer should be able to tell the difference." So when I can pay AllofMp3 via Paypal, and they say they have paid all relevant dues in their country, I can feel that I have taken due care in selecting them as my preferred download source then.

Apparently, in order to get the IP address and to verify illegal uploading they download a sample file. You might want to watch your logs then. Or disable sharing with unknowns. And they are less than clear about whether having files available is illegal as opposed to actually uploading. The fact that they do a sample download from you suggests that it's the second. And them doing that download looks curiously like entrapment.

Whatever, it's all just "demanding money with menaces".

http://www.skypejournal.com/blog/archives/2005/09/skypes_product.php

I've been saying that Google with Google Talk along with MSN, YM!, AOL and anyone else in the IM/VoIP field had better learn or relearn how to ship early and ship often. If Skype continue to add function and build out at this rate they will be very hard to contain.

Official Skype Video is scheduled for November. Social Networking and dynamic content (??) in Dec.

Beyond Cyberpunk! The Web Version
Have I read them all? Almost. [from: del.icio.us]

Open Rights Group: ORGnews Issue 1
ORG kicks off with a typically pithy letter from Danny O'Brien [from: del.icio.us]

Exactly how ambitious is Google?

- Building a carrier grade backbone network by buying up dark fibre.
- Building a Wifi Hotspot business complete with a VPN
- Getting into VoIP

This is all a long way from search. It's quite a long way from selling Ads. But it's an interesting use of a very big pile of cash.

So what do we call the nascent Google Telco? G&T? (Make mine a double with Bombay Sapphire).

AOL to Begin New VoIP Service Roll-Out on October 4

The IM wars continue. Now AOL has beefed up their IM client and bolted it to a more traditional VoIP offering. A key sentence out of the press release. AOL has worked closely with open source solution provider Pingtel, Global IP Sound, and On2 on custom-developed solutions that will deliver state-of-the-art audio and video quality, simplify connections behind firewalls, and provide SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) standard compliance and more to TotalTalk and AIM.

So where does this compare with Google Talk, Skype, MSN, YM! and Jabber? And what's the effect on Apple who interconnect with AIM in iChat.

Nothing like a bit of competition to stir things up.

Prior to Google releasing the Maps API, I was messing around with their system and discovered that you can embed an address in a URL call to gmaps and hidden in the return html is the lat/long. I couldn't resist writing a 30 line php program to turn this into an address to lat/long convertor and posted it as public domain code with warnings that it was a proof of concept and not to be used (!). Completely inevitable, but I've just had the cease and desist from Google for breaking their T&Cs.

I understand this stuff. And I understand the need for restricting these things. But it still rankles that you can't make use of everything you find on the web.

Scobleized!

So there you go. I pour out a screed that is not completely thought through. Strictly a personal view. And suddenly all these people are taking it seriously. Did I hit a nerve almost by accident? Try to read round the factual errors and that I temporarily forgot that Longhorn had a real name now. And try to get down to the core.

- Lots of technically dumb people have XP machines that they can't control, that make them feel inadequate and that are broken in various obscure ways. They just followed the defaults but it led them to this. This is actually the norm not the exception.

- We're now well into the cycle where anything that's wrong currently "will be fixed in Vista".

- Right now Apple is not an alternative for the mass market. It is actually great, but having both hardware and software lock in to a single supplier limits the market. And no matter what the Apple zealots say, software/drivers gets developed for XP first and Mac second.

- Right now Linux is not an alternative on the desktop. It's also great, but it's nowhere near as polished as Apple or XP.

- When Vista finally ships there will be a lot of people who will question whether to upgrade, buy a new machine with Vista installed or to switch. I hope Apple and the Linux community understand that.

Reader² - find new books to read, put your reading list online
[from: del.icio.us]

I never get comments on this blog. Made me think nobody read it ;)

I post one article from a bout of frustration over XP and that I'm considering switching to Apple and suddenly I get a burst of people agreeing and disagreeing.

I guess choice of OS is a religious issue.

Doug Miller takes issue with my comment Doing Something Different: A Weblog by Doug Miller : The only reason I stay with XP is because so much software appears on XP first, Apple later and if you're lucky and Linux hardly at all.

I suspect that statement is becoming less true so I'm not going to argue back hard. My one example here is Skype. Skype 1.3 for windows appeared some long time ago. Skype 1.3 for Mac has just appeared. i had a whole bunch of people I wanted to involve in a group chat but couldn't because they were using Macs.

I'm struggling for other well known examples but I know I have a ton of minor utilities on this machine, most of which I probably no longer use. Most of them are freeware or shareware. All of them are windows only. Are there alternatives that are available on the Mac? Maybe. Then there's device drivers for obscure hardware. And finally there's the sort of software that you probably discard immediately that comes on the CD in the box with a new hardware toy like a Digital camera.

My other issue with the Mac is the lack of clone hardware. Apple are much more competitive on price than they used to be. And their hardware is much more open than it used to be. And with Intel motherboards that will increase. But there's still significant lock in with buying into a platform with only a single hardware manufacturer. XP on one side and Linux on the other is completely hardware open.

First understand where I'm coming from. I've been using windows since V1.0 I run a heavily tweaked and minimalist XP with Classic windows and theme. I don't use IE6, Outlook, Outlook Express, Office except in emergencies or to check things. I have AVG, Spybot and Adaware installed but they never find anything. XP pretty much works for me with minimal annoyance. I hardly ever have to reboot. I've never caught a virus or any malware (touches wood) despite having this machine in the DMZ of my router for a long time and hence wide open on the net. And I have loads of software installed because I'm often trying new programs. I have an organised directory structure.

Now somebody I know got a new laptop for himself and his wife from PC World ready for a trip to the far east. It's a pretty ordinary Toshiba with XP Home loaded. They are not the most technical of users and simply couldn't cope with firing it up themselves so they got somebody else in to configure it for them. A few days later I'm in a meeting with them and noticed they didn't have Skype installed which they will need. So they downloaded the latest Skype Beta and tried to install it. The machine hung and refused to reboot without a full power cycle. At that point they said "don't tell my wife, I promised we wouldn't install anything so we could be sure it all worked for the trip."

So I took over and tried to get it working for them. And my mind recoiled in horror. XP used all the yucky defaults with the default "telly-tubbies" theme. The full Norton anti-virus and firewall protection suite was installed. IE had about 5 lines of toolbar. The system was setup with 4 different users. There were loads of useless icons all over the desktop. I go to download the current Skype instead of the beta, save it, and then can't find the setup file. When I go to drive C: the machine throws up one of those helpful dialog boxes that says "accessing drive c may be dangerous" huh? After much messing around with configuring the Norton firewall, a couple of reboots and un-installing and then re-installing Skype, I finally get the whole thing working and stable again.

So what we're left with is an operating system that attempts to hide everything from the user, collapses apparently randomly, tries to be helpful, but actually just makes most of its users feel inadequate. And actually all the MS application software is the same. Did you ever make a change in MS Word only for Word to helpfully reformat half the paragraphs and change all the quotes to "smart quotes"? Can you imagine any other business where a big percentage of the dominant manufacturer's customers feel inadequate because they can't use it? But then you and I are not Microsoft's customers. Their customers are actually Dell, Toshiba, Sony, and Merill Lynch.

So what has this got to do with Longhorn. Well I'm reading more and more about how Intel and Microsoft in conjunction with the hardware manufacturers will be bolting DRM in various forms right in the middle of the OS. I'm reading about how I won't be able to do what I want to do. The only reason I stay with XP is because so much software appears on XP first, Apple later and if you're lucky and Linux hardly at all. But if significant software I want to run is prevented from running, It's finally going to tip me over the edge to switch.

The other side to this is that MS is getting into the classic big software project mentality. Whatever the bug or feature is, it will be fixed in the version that comes out with Longhorn. Because all the software is so intimately tied to the OS, there's come a point where they can no longer ship each individual piece early and often. Everything has to wait for the big release. And that big release therefore ends up being vast and untestable. And late.

Now it looks like I'm going to be due a machine upgrade round about the time of the Longhorn release. And by chance that coincides with when Apple-Intel laptops should be available. So finally I'm being forced into making a choice that I otherwise could have put off for a bit longer. Will I stay with MS for another cycle or is this the time I jump ship? Will all the endless annoyances of windows being added to by another load of DRM and control finally tip me over the edge?

I think I'm not alone in this. A Unix based OS with a pretty face, stable drivers, and easy access to all that OSS feels awfully attractive. Just maybe a Linux distro will be as good as Mac OSX but I kind of doubt it.

So I think this should be a call to arms to Apple and the OSS cadre. You've got 2 years or so to become a completely credible alternative. If you can manage it then you can do us all a favour and blow MS out of the water. Because everyone who currently uses XP is going to be faced with the same choice I am. And that's the perfect moment to say "'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more" and just switch.

Which leaves me with a problem. I've got 2Gb of compressed and encrypted email going back 8 years in an obsolete email reader that I love. I know I don't really need to keep it all and I could just start afresh but it's a big part of my outboard memory. And I've never found an alternative that works as well.