Delicate Genius Blog

Yes, it is what it sounds like, non region locked Pandora. 

[found on Alan Jones' blog]

-dg

Eddie Vedder has always claimed that Vinyl is superior “and I don’t mean to be a Luddite and say I only listen to vinyl, which I mostly listen to vinyl or I just enjoy vinyl”

My generation grew up on CDs and prefer having media held in our hands.

Today’s generation is all about the digital download.

I came across this rolling stone article on Stephen Hamilton’s blog. The article, The Death of High Fidelity, talks about the degradation in the quality of download music as well as modern music production techniques through a practice dubbed “The Loudness War”. Where the industry has adopted the mindset that louder is better even at the cost of fidelity.

The article is a major eye opener and is well worth a read.

The concept of Loudness War is explained perfectly in the following video.

-dg

Something very cool happened today. I bought the new Ben Harper album, lifeline. Why is this cool?

Well, if you remember my dissapointment of not being able to buy another Ben Harper CD due to the copy protection on the CDs. Well today marks the day of my first Ben Harper purchase in years. Why? No copy protected-root-kitted CD!

Yeah!

-dg

When it was first talked about over a year and a half ago, I blogged about it and it caused major division between the readers of this blog.

Now, as Duncan Riley reports on both TechCrunch and his personal blog Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy has announced that there will be mandatory filtering on all content going through Australian ISPs.

And as Duncan correctly points out, the worst of it is that it’s an opt-out process. In other words, if you want to have the filters removed, you’ll need to explain why. Jeez, I wonder if ones porn fetish, gun enthusiasm and penchant for R rated games will get them on a list somewhere? A very very sad day indeed.

Once again, Australian government, thank you for deciding what’s right for me and my family!

For the time being, I’m going to adopt Monty’s enthusiasm (in the techcrunch comments) “I have complete faith in the Australian public service completely buggering up the implementation of this supposed system”

-dg

ABC Radio National’s The Law Report recently did a feature on Creative Commons.

It predominantly features extracts of Cory Doctorow and Sandy Grant (member of Copyright Agency Limited Board) debating at the 2007 Melbourne Writers festival, with interstitials from Mark Williams (Senior adviser with JDR Legal and copyright lawyer) and Jessica Coates (Creative Commons Clinic).

Listen here.

It’s well worth a listen as it presents the perspectives of both the believers and the skeptics in the (commercial) merit of Creative Commons.

As is often the case, I am in agreement with Cory.

My thoughts . . .

Sandy Grant: I think it may be worth your having a brief look at a book, The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen, and he points out the ease of posting content, the Creative Commons ease. I mean is changing your intellectual culture for the worse, it’s swamping vital and interesting information, replacing it with endless bloggers reinforcing their own prejudices rather than expanding their horizons.

As a blogger who reinforces his own prejudices, I know exactly what he’s talking about. I do take issue with the assumption that bloggers reinforce their own prejudices rather than “expand their horizons”.

Many bloggers blog to open up conversations to do exactly that, expand their own horizons. I don’t really want to go into depth and explain what drives me to blog, but a huge part of it is to share what I find interesting in the hope that others can “expand their horizons” by reading my content. So, major aspersion on your part Sandy.

The notion that the vast amount of “amateur” content is “swamping vital and interesting information” is a very interesting one to explore. On the surface I tend to agree. Although, the more I think about it, the cream always rises to the top and good content will find its way to me, regardless of whether it’s from an amateur or professional source.

Given a choice to live in a world where I only had access to what was deemed “professional” work or one where I had to wade through masses of amateur rubbish to find an amateur gem (as well as professional gems), I would take the latter any day, and it would seem that the vast majority of the populous would agree.

Sandy Grant: My final note on this subject is that, although it’s interesting to explore the notion of dilution of relevant and “vita” information, none of this really has relevance to Creative Commons licensing.

So I guess, as I said, just don’t believe all the patchouli-scented info hippies, check out the ACC advice and see if this sort of licence really does work for you. And just to quote quickly from the conclusion of that advice, ‘Creative Commons licences essentially strip copyright of all meaning, and they’re not generally likely to be of much benefit to professional creators.’

The ACC information sheet on Creative Commons licensing can be found here.

Sandy is absolutely right, you should be informed when making decisions around protecting (or freeing) your work. Clearly, in Cory’s case (as is the case with many others), giving away his novels has worked to his advantage. CC is all about choice and your freedom to do with your work whatever you wish. At its core, CC is all about giving you the ability to signal your intentions up front and your intentions might not always be to protect and sell as much product as you can. Remember the beautiful “Our Lives Change” story?

Sandy Grant: The Creative Commons obviously does have some real momentum, and something of a cult following

I love Cory’s great retort “160 million works of them licensed under Creative Commons and there are projects under way in 81 countries, if that’s a cult, I don’t know what a religion is”.

-dg

Remember the whole Virgin Mobile using Creative Commons licensed images from Flickr ordeal?

Well, it just got interesting.

According to the SMH this morning, one of the girls in one of the pics is suing:

A Texas family has sued Australia’s Virgin Mobile phone company, claiming it caused their teenage daughter grief and humiliation by plastering her photo on billboards and website advertisements without consent.

The family of Alison Chang says Virgin Mobile grabbed the picture from Flickr, Yahoo Inc’s popular photo-sharing website, and failed to credit the photographer by name.

Of note, the lawsuit names both Virgin Mobile USA LLC and Creative Commons Corp.

Lawrence Lessig, creative commons granddaddy, has some comments on the situation.

At a high level he notes that:

• He can’t really comment on the case specifically but;
• Creative Commons doesn’t specifically deal with privacy
• What is covered under a Creative Commons licence is very clear and far exceeds CC’s obligations regarding clarity

So, this is gonna be an interesting one. I don’t reckon CC has anything to worry about. There is sometimes (rarely) the misconception that CreativCommons is more than it is and is some alternative to copyright. When in fact all it does is compliment copyright by allowing rights holders to to specific usage rights up front, and nothing more.

It is interesting though that when taking a photo of someone and issuing a licence for commercial use, you do have to remember to consider your obligations as a photographer, especially around privacy and model release.

-dg

So, Virgin Mobile has a new ad campaign dubbed “Are You With Us Or What”.

For the campaign, they sourced Creative Commons licenced images on Flickr.

There is some interesting discussion happening around Virgin Mobile’s campaign. Namely:

• Not all images have commercial use permission
• There is question around whether a model release is required especially as the images are being used commercially and some subjects have been portrayed in a way which could be considered negative.
• Most of the licences require attribution and there is discussion as to whether Virgin Mobile has met the CC attribution requirements

I’m not really qualified to speculate, but it does seem to me that virgin did not seem to recognise fully the rights of the photographers nor the requirements of the Creative Commons licences attached to their photos.

To explore this further check out:

• Jess from Creative Commons Australia’s blog, she has some views on the topic
• Flickr discussion on the topic with plenty of thoughtful comments
• The Flickr pool

-dg

xpmediacentre.com.au reports:

Today the final verdict of the case between Nine Network and IceTV was handed down by Justice Annabelle Bennett at the Federal Court of Australia in Sydney, she said that IceTV in repurposing television program information, was not actually engaged in broadcasting but representing information that was not the copyright of the nine network.

Well done IceTV, now go and figure out how to get some Foxtel data on your network. Can you hear the old guard kicking and screaming their way into the future?

So, I’m staring to wonder why any of this really matters in the long term. Not wanting to take away from the immediate significance of the win but, will any of this matter when we get decent mainstream video content delivered via IP direct to a TV display?

-dg

From SMH:

TiVo in Australia will be accompanied by a video on-demand service, allowing users to order movies and possibly television shows through the TiVo box, says Seven Network’s director of digital media, Rohan Lund.

Although its primary function is to record free-to-air television, TiVo’s ability to connect to the internet opens up numerous other options, he said.

Seven is partnering with TiVo to bring the device to Australia by early next year.

It will go head-to-head with Foxtel iQ, which costs up to $15.95 on top of Foxtel’s cable service and, like TiVo, allows users to pause and rewind live television and access on-demand shows.

Bring on the competition!

-dg

I came across a paper written by Mark Pesce entitled “IPTV: Order, Chaos and Anarchy”.

Mark got my attention when I first discovered his talk, Piracy Is Good where he explores how “hyper-distribution” has changed the visual media landscape. Video and text is available online.

This paper takes it a step further and explores IPTV in the greater scheme of things. It’s a very good collation of thoughts on the topic and is very much worth a read. At the very least so that you can sound clever at parties.

Mark discusses:

• Australia’s very third rate broadband situation and how it’s holding us back
• Hyper-distribution – how p2p, namely BitTorrent and Napster, changed everything
• YouTube – how it revolutionised online video and how it proved that there is a market for user generated content and how the networks may have woken up to it just a bit too late
• How the xbox is the “Trojan horse” of IPTV – It’s a gaming console capable of (and doing so in the US) being an IPTV endpoint
• Other IPTV plays: AppleTV, Joost and Democracy Player
• And ultimately, no matter what the distribution mechanism, users as producers is gonna be a driving force

Many of these themes are not original not news to some. However, again, this paper is a good collection of thoughts on the topic.

To me, one of the big unanswered question is what “end-point” my parents will use. What will be the dominant platform to build to? Will it be a platform or a closed proprietary system? I hope that whatever becomes the end-point of choice, it will be open enough to facilitate a greater economy. A place where there is a choice of content providers and a plethora of 3rd party apps.

Btw, Mark, you neglected to mention XP/Vista Media Center and other HTPCs.

-dg