meta-roj

puccini

dancer

while we’re on the business of music, a couple weeks ago, reuters reported that online music sales topped 2.6 million songs in the last week of june.

Label executives and digital service operators say that, barring significant new developments in pricing, packaging or content portability, digital sales growth will be slow and steady for the foreseeable future.

content portability, eh? hmmm….

But Sean Ryan, VP of music services at RealNetworks, says momentum for a la carte services will be tempered by such factors as a lack of interoperability among competing digital music services and devices, a dearth of simple ways to move digital music into living rooms and cars and the slow process of expanding major-label content to include live music and unreleased material.

drm crops up between the lines, and as a barrier. imagine that.

drm week is apparently over, but i guess i’m not finished…

robert scoble watched cory’s presentation to microsoft on drm.

Cory wants Microsoft to be a bully with the RIAA

I want to see us avoid the courtroom if at all possible and avoid situations where we’re bullying anyone.

true, microsoft has a history of avoiding the courtroom, though some of those courtroom-avoidance tactics could be interpreted as bullying, depending on how you frame it.

Cory wants Microsoft to be a bully with the RIAA

My reaction? Cory is right. DRM is not something that users want. At least not if you frame it that way (someone in the audience framed it another way, though: do you want your private email protected? How about your medical documents?.

microsoft doesn’t have the option to “avoid the courtroom if at all possible and avoid situations where we’re bullying anyone.” i’d try to write a coherent argument about this, but fortunately, it’s already been done by rob heverly, and through the power of the internet, i can just point at it.

i’ve technically violated copyrights, because i’ve read both scoble’s post and heverly’s posts on the subject. and in so doing, i caused a computer to copy the information from its hard disk to its memory, copy it again, in chunks, to the network, caused my computer to copy those chunks into its memory, and finally, copied to the display and disk cache. so now that i’m done with that criminal act, i’ve left you a link to both, so you can commit the same crimes. that’s probably a violation of the pending induce-act.

so i’m off to a great start at avoiding the courtroom myself. depending on how you count those violations, i’m probably on the hook for more than my total potential lifetime earnings at this point, but it’s fairly likely that i’ll be able to settle for everything i own at the moment – at least that’s how the riaa handles copyright infringement lately. sure, i exaggerate a bit, and i probably won’t be prosecuted for reading things on the internet, unless it becomes important to someone to prosecute me for something, in which case i’ve just admitted by crimes in public. i’m more likely to be arrested for wearing the wrong t-shirt or protesting without a permit or taking pictures. but i digress…

i guess what i’m trying to say here is that microsoft can’t avoid the courtroom (and neither can i, most likely), and it’s big enough that any move it makes in the drm space is going to bully someone. so that leaves the question, for microsoft, in simple terms: who do you bully? who do you love?

doing something for the local music scene, if a bit far from me (london), bob stuart has assembled underexposed, with hundreds of photos of working bands.

this is the other end of the spectrum.

Unfinished Copy of U2’s New CD Disappears [ap via abc news]

An unfinished copy of U2’s upcoming CD disappeared from a photo shoot the Irish rock band was attending in the south of France, police said Thursday.

The CD, not scheduled for release until this Fall, vanished Tuesday while the band was in a studio outside the Riviera city of Nice having pictures taken for the album cover.

it’ll be interesting to see how this is handled.

according to billboard…. tour grosses for the first half of the year:

David Bowie $45.4 million
Bette Midler $40 million
Simon & Garfunkel $36 million
Shania Twain $34 million
Prince $26 million
Rod Stewart $25 million
Metallica $22 million
Beyonce/Alicia Keys/Missy Elliott $19 million
Britney Spears $19 million
George Strait $16 million

that makes the top-10 tours worth $242.4 million.

we picked up the ian spiers story on july 10th – not terribly quickly – ian’s blog went live on june 19th.

since then, we’ve seen a workshop organized, and the blogosphere [technorati] exploded – reporting 301 inbound links right now.

the stranger picked this up with an interview.

now, major media is in the game…

We’ve seen the enemy, and he is us [seattle post intelligencer, july 14, 2004]
Photo student draws attention of authorities [seattle times, july 14, 2004]

that’s the local media… the breakthrough is when the story gets out on the wires…

ACLU wants answers about questioning of photography student [ap via seattle post intelligencer, july 14, 2004]
Questioning of Photo Student Challenged [ap via abc news, july 16, 2004]

i’ve spent some time working on a little project that has been aching for another example of the blogosphere bringing news to the major media. i’m not sure this is it, but the whole trent lott story is tired.

do something?

it has to come from the scotsman, or this just isn’t worth mentioning….

Scientists Develop New Invisible Waterproof Coating

Scientists have developed an invisible coating that will waterproof almost anything including mobile phones, it was revealed today.

The revolutionary nanometre-thick coating was first researched to protect soldiers’ suits against chemical and biological warfare agents by Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) at Porton Down and the University of Durham.

shares of 3m, the producer of scotchguard seem to be unaffected to date.

we have the early polling results on electronic voting in florida, and the results are… well, disappointing.

Analysis reveals flaws in voting by touch-screen [sun-sentinel, july 11, 2004]

Records from the March 9 Democratic presidential primary show that votes were not recorded for one out of 100 voters using the new ATM-style machines. That’s at least eight times more than the number of flawed votes cast in the same election with pencil marks on paper ballots tallied by an optical scanner.

as much as i appreciate the accessibility and multi-lingual and other advantages of electronic voting machines, we’ve been saying for quite some time here that it’s just not worth it. find something else that lets the blind vote on their own, but don’t introduce a mechanism that creates eight times the errors in a system that absolutely must be trusted.

and i live in a state that already bought this crap.