UK Retailers Join The Anti-DRM Crusade
Posted by James | Filed under Music
Digital Rights Management has long been one of the most hotly-discussed and widely-loathed technologies around, and whilst its grip on mainstream media providers seems set to continue, the wall of DRM is slowly beginning to crumble.
Recently we’ve seen plenty of activity against DRM, and even a change of tune with music executives making overtures about how ‘they were wrong to go to war with consumers’. Whilst it used to be just consumers who were the majority of DRM opponents, their cause has just been strengthened with new that British music retailers have added their voice to the campaign against DRM because they believe that horrendous amounts of copy protection is actually putting people off buying the very media they rely on.
Whilst it’s fair to say that in certain areas, particularly video, there’s plenty of progress yet to be made in changing industry opinion, the continuing demise of DRM is music to my ears!
Tags: british music, consumers, copy protection, digital rights management, drm, mainstream media, music retailers
Flickr Launches Places
Posted by James | Filed under Geek, Web
Flickr has finally gotten around to rolling out their new Places feature. Essentially it’s a profile page for locations, letting you dig deep into both local photographers, and pictures taken around landmarks that have been matched up either by name, or geotags.
Anytime people add their photos with the correct geography (something that’s done through Flickr’s organiser tool) the most recent shots will appear on the page. Each places page also links up with other Yahoo! services like Yahoo! Weather, to show you what the local time and temperature is, alongside a more detailed map.
Speaking of maps, Flickr has tweaked them too. Instead of browsing locations with a series of pink blobs like it used to, it’s now a smattering of the latest tags that show up where the shot was taken. There’s also a new shuffle button that refreshes the page with new content. Any time you click a tag, a small series of photos called the "ribbon" pops up below, letting you play the most recent or interesting shots just like a slideshow.
The move appears, in part, to direct people towards the new city pages, as viewed photos in the map are small thumbnails. Personally, I preferred the old style, as you could zoom down to city level and pick out shots by location. While you can still do that by using the integrated search tool, gone is the exploratory mode with zooming features that made it a more compelling way to browse.
While the updates may be small, the new places pages seem to me to be the early stages of more advanced user profiles on the service. Flickr’s current user profiles haven’t changed much since the service launched, and the new setup seems like a much clearer way to layout the same types of information you’ll find on user pages like photostreams, groups and tags. While the old profiles aren’t necessarily limited, to me it seems like the next logical step towards adding some additional networking and sharing features.
Tags: flickr, maps, photographers, photos, updates, Web
Trent Ponders Music’s Downward Spiral
Posted by James | Filed under Geek, Music, Play
To be perfectly honest, if you asked me where to find a thoughtful commentary on DMCA and musician’s digital intellectual property rights, the last place that would spring to mind would be Trent Reznor’s blog at nin.com.
However, that’s exactly what you’ll find, right now, if you head over there. Trent describes an ongoing project he’s had with re-mixing communities on the Internet, where he released the master recording files on the band’s website in an experiment to see what could come of it.
The results have been very pleasing to Trent, and he found what independent artists have known for years now: if you’re hard up for a sequel album, release your recording masters to talented amateur DJ’s, and bam, you’ve got a follow up album with a unique but familiar sound.
He liked it so much that he wanted create an officially sanctioned community around the remixing of NIN music, but ran into a fair amount of opposition from his record label. You may have heard of these guys: Universal.
They’re currently involved in lawsuits against Google and News Corp alleging that they’ve built businesses around exploiting the safe harbor provision of the DMCA, and that by setting up a user-generated content community for NIN, they’d be culpable for that same type of action.
That doesn’t man they don’t think it’s a great idea, though. They encouraged Reznor to move ahead with the project, but under the NIN brand, and ensured that should any DMCA allegations be brought against Universal, they would disavow all knowledge of the topic, and say that the band itself is culpable for the community violations.
Understandably, Reznor is a bit hesitant to launch it under his own name, and while he doesn’t specifically ask for legal advice, reading between the lines of his post, it seems that he might be open to a clever scheme that would prevent the pants from being sued off him.
Tags: copyright, dmca, legal, Music, nin, Privacy, trent reznor
Welcome to Jimmahdigital.com, personal blog of James Simm, Wigan/Manchester-based .Net developer.
