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Technorati Tags: Apple, hosting, mac.com, podcasting, QuickTime

Andrew and Christopher
Originally uploaded by Kevin Marks.

With so many great entries it was hard to pick a winner, but the Marks Brothers' Fun with Dry Ice shined through. Their top notch explanations of how to have fun with dry ice was really great. The grand prize is a box set of Make Magazines signed by the Make Magazine staff, a Make: t-shirt for each brother, and Make: license plate covers, which they'll have to wait until they can drive to use!

According to the singer, many musicians recording in the 1950s rely on their copyright payments as a pension.

"It seems terribly wrong that 50 years on they lose everything from it."

To extend the copyright period in sound recordings would make an already complacent industry even more unbearably smug, and give a clear signal that they can get exactly what they want if they whine loud enough. The losers will be the artists who continue to have their back catalogue sat on by the fat corporate arse of the record companies, the small record companies who have made available numerous archive recordings that have passed into the public domain (which would almost certainly not be made available any other way), and, of course, the general record-buying public.

I’m a reasonable man. Here’s a counter proposal: Record companies can have copyright for as long as they want, as long as they make their entire archives commercially available in some shape or form at a reasonable price. Until then, no sale.

However, this concedes too much. The labels are trying to have it both ways here. In a digital world, the back catalogue can be released by simply digitising the songs and putting them up for sale online. The investment needed is tiny, and certainly doesn't justify conceding any more monopoly rights.

The labels' traditional pitch to musicians is that they have huge advantages in marketing and publishing through their marketing and connections, their economies of scale and skilled professionalism, which justifies them keeping over 90% of revenue.

If this is true, why are they so afraid of competition?

With 50-year-old recordings, the production has been done, and the distribution costs can be made tiny with online digital sales; even CD pressing is orders of magnitude cheaper than it was 15 years ago, let alone 50. If the recordings are set free, others can publish them, including the original musicians, and keep more of the revenue for themselves. After all Magnatune pay a 50% royalty on Creative Commons licensed music.

The question to ask the labels is, if copyright expires on a recording, will you cease to sell it, or will you just cease to pay royalties to the musicians?

Looking back 60 years, a big artist then was Vera Lynn - and her recordings seem to be abundantly available in the UK.

So, are the labels still paying her royalties? Or are they pocketing the money themselves?

Technorati Tags: 2006, copyright, Digital Commonwealth, digital rights, economics, music, Open Rights Group, ORG, rhetoric

Technorati Tags: culture

WiFired

getting thrown out of an internet café for spending 4 hours 'working on your startup' after buying one small mocha.

San-Franinsular

The uncomfortable anomie San Francisco hipsters get when they come down to the Valley for a geek event, caused by the sunshine and available parking.

Technorati Tags: valleyspeak

On April 30, ABC will unveil a revamped Web site that will include a “theater” where people with broadband connections can watch free episodes of “Desperate Housewives,” “Lost” and other hit shows on their computers. Episodes will be available the morning after they air and will be archived so people can eventually view a whole season.

Episodes of the ABC shows — which can be paused, rewound and fast-forwarded — will contain commercial breaks that viewers can’t skip, making Disney hopeful it has figured out a way to turn the delivery of programs over the Web into a profit-generating business. Ten advertisers, including Ford Motor Co., Procter & Gamble, Universal Pictures and Unilever, already have signed up.

Technorati Tags: ABC, bittorrent, Live TV is Dead, meme, movie, podcasting, QuickTime, streaming, television, video

I broadly agree with Paul Graham's essay on Software Patents, but I do think he underestimates the damage from patent trolls, and from what he calls the mafia-like behaviour of some patent holders.

Paul has been lucky in the field he has worked in, but in the Audio and Video area there are many patent thickets. Perhaps it is the history of Farnsworth's victory over RCA that makes video engineers patent hungry.

My first startup, The MultiMedia Corporation, was a spin-out from the BBC in 1990. One of our products was a program called MediaMaker that combined video from tape or videodisc, CD Audio, Pictures, digitised audio and Director animations into picture icons on a timeline for making presentations. It was demoed on stage at Macworld by the CEO of Apple, and we got Macromind to publish it.

Then the patent troll showed up. A company called Montage had made a video editing system that included several video monitors showing edit points from tape. The company had gone out of business but a lawyer had bought up the patents, including one on using a still image to represent a video sequence. The troll was working his way round the video companies, and he caused enough trouble to stop work on the product while we worked on a legal defence instead.

Later, while I was at Apple on QuickTime, there was a steady stream of patent trolls claiming that Apple should pay them royalties; enough to keep several lawyers busy, and a lot of engineers spending time working on prior art evidence demonstrations.

Several potential features were excluded from QuickTime due to patent thickets. The obvious one was the Unisys LZW patent that encumbered GIF, but there were other more subtle pressures that meant adopting open source codecs was discouraged. Working on the patent license agreements for MPEG meant that technology ready to ship was deferred pending legal agreement on more than one occasion.

So I'm much lass sanguine than Paul about this. I think software patents should not be granted, and the European Union's banning of them is the right decision. I hope the Gowers Review in the UK makes this UK law as well.