by Lee Gesmer | Aug 18, 2006 | Technology
First, Google wants to digitize every book ever written.
Now, YouTube wants to make available, for free, every music video ever created:
YouTube, which sprung out of nowhere a year ago to now claim over 100 millions views a day, is negotiating for rights to post current and archive music videos on its site, and said any commercial model it decides on will offer the videos free.
“What we really want to do is in six to 12 months, maybe 18 months, to have every music video ever created up on YouTube,” co-founder Steve Chen told Reuters. “We’re trying to bring in as much of this content as we can on to the site.” (continued)
Right. When will Westlaw or Lexis step up and make every law case ever decided available for free? Now that would be worth getting excited about.
by Lee Gesmer | Aug 15, 2006 | DMCA/CDA, Technology
As an ambivalent owner of an Apple iPod I’ve given a lot of thought to the fact that songs I download from Apple’s iTunes will not play on a portable device other than an Apple iPod. If I want to play my iTunes music collection on another manufacturer’s MP3 player, today or five years from now, I’ll be unable to play the tunes downloaded from iTunes. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act prevents competitors from reverse engineering the protection Apple embeds in these files, and therefore Apple has, in effect, a government enabled lock-in.
The only legal way around this restriction requires users to burn the iTunes songs to a CD and then import (rip) them back into iTunes as MP3 files. This eliminates Apple’s digital rights management (DRM) and “frees” these tunes, but what a hassle and disincentive to buy music from iTunes. Do I do this? Yes. Do I like it? Ah …. (If you’d like to gain a better understanding of how iTunes DRM works and how to avoid it, click here.)
Cory Doctorow has written a scathing editorial in Information Week discussing the policy and legal issues involved in Apple’s DRM program. A few choice quotes from the article:
Reverse engineering is a common practice in most industries. You can reverse-engineer a blender and make your own blades, you can reverse-engineer a car and make your own muffler, and you can reverse-engineer a document and make a compatible reader. . . . But [because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act] the iTunes/iPod product line is off-limits to this kind of reverse-engineering.
Apple’s competition-proof music makes switching away from its product expensive for Apple’s customers. The world of consumer electronics changes quickly and you’d have to be a fool to believe that no one will ever make a superior portable music player to the iPod.
Steve Jobs really doesn’t care how many CPUs you play an iTune on, or whether you burn a playlist seven or 10 times. He wants you to get locked into iPods, . . .
Read the full article here before you download another tune from iTunes. You may conclude that you still have no choice, but at least you’ll have a better understanding of your predicament.
by Lee Gesmer | Nov 14, 2005 | Technology
Technology. The business war between Microsoft and Google has the Internet and business communities riveted. This is the best business rivalry in years, better than Coke/Pepsi, better than Microsoft/Sun, better than Microsoft/Apple (okay, I’m stretching with the last one). At least for the moment Google is perceived to be, potentially, maybe (no one’s sure) a fundamental threat to Microsoft. Who knows, maybe later today Google will release (in beta, of course), an online suite of products superior to Microsoft Office that will be file compatible with Office, allow users to store documents with complete security and privacy on Google servers, and put Microsoft out of business (sans Xbox, of course) by the end of the week. Disruptive technology, thy name is Google. Well, its possible, isn’t it?
Robert X. Cringely writes most entertainingly on this subject this week, in his article Paper War.
by Lee Gesmer | Nov 6, 2005 | Technology
Technology. Science historian George Dyson visited Google recently, upon the 60th anniversary of John von Neumann’s proposal for a digital computer. His musings, in the form of a short essay published by Edge, are provocative and fascinating.
My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral – not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. . . .
by Lee Gesmer | Nov 2, 2005 | Technology
Technology. Did you ever think you’d see politicians debating software file formats?
Massachusetts has become embroiled in a politicized debate over a state agency’s decision to move away from Microsoft’s proprietary standards and require that all state employees, commencing in 2007, save documents in two state-approved file formats: Adobe Acrobat PDF files and the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications.
The logic behind this issue is simple: if Massachusetts moves to Oasis OpenDocument, anyone with Internet access will be able to read state documents. As things now stand, if a document was created with Word or Excel (representing the two most common applications, word processing and spreadsheets), a citizen would need to have a licensed copy of Microsoft software to read the document. Of course, Microsoft claims that its Office formats are sufficiently open to satisfy the Commonwealth’s requirements.
Needless to say, there have been all kinds of business and political cross-currents swirling around this issue since it first emerged, and it has thrust the Massachusetts Information Technology Division (or ITD), which usually labors in obscurity, into the spotlight.
A comprehensive backgrounder on the entire issue was written by my partner Andy Updegrove, and is available here.
All of this came to a head (or perhaps the first of several heads), on October 31st, when the Massachusetts Senate Committee on Post Audit and Oversight held a standing-room only hearing to question and investigate ITD’s decision.
Dan Bricklin attended the hearing, and provides both written observations and a recording here.
Laws and sausages, indeed.
by Lee Gesmer | Jul 12, 2005 | Technology
Technology. Tim Berners-Lee is widely recognized as the inventor of the World Wide Web. Today, he is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, Senior Researcher at MIT‘s CSAIL, and Professor of Computer Science at Southampton ECS.
Mr. Berners-Lee’s current project is the development of a Semantic Web, a dramatic enhancement of the current web which is described in detail here.
This Spring (2005) my partner Andrew Updegrove interviewed Mr. Berners-Lee regarding the Semantic Web.
