It’s hard not to hear somebody laughing at the 180° in Google’s mobile platform strategy.

There will be no more willy-nilly tweaks to the software. No more partnerships formed outside of Google’s purview.

via Business Week.

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How very strangely cool this is. As China’s rapid ascent continues, the Nixon visit feels like 120 years ago.

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On the heels of the Exile on Main St.’s reissue, Mick Jagger basically tells BBC news that he doesn’t expect to make a fortune off royalties anymore. And he has one of the best perspectives on the post-material media market I’ve heard. This from an old timer.

But I have a take on that — people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone!

Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.

So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.

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Microsoft confirms grossly shortsighted plans to release crippled Windows 7 SKU for netbooks and developing markets.

I don’t mean to hate on MSFT again. In fact, I’m mostly just tired of spending energy, positive or negative, on that behemoth. I’m not alone. I’ve seen even among dedicated Mac-folks an optimism, a rooting-for-ness surrounding Windows 7.  My sense is that those of us in the <10% marketshare crowd take pleasure in the apples-to-oranges aesthetic high-ground, the we-like-macs-because-we-get-it smugness. Vista made that smugness more difficult in a way: If the Microsoft “other” is just objectively crappy (Vista) rather then subjectively inelegant (XP), from where can we claim our cultural grace?.

I, and many others, have been looking forward to Windows 7 succeeding, looking forward to it correcting the overinflated, over-SKUed, errors of Vista. I’ve been running the Windows 7 beta on a `living-room laptop for months, and found it stable, and most of all effectively functional on a slow 3-year-old Centrino laptop. I’ve tried Vista on that same laptop. It wouldn’t even allow me to install it without a couple hacks. And it was unusably slow.

The early hope for Windows 7, aside from necessary stability and compatibility improvements, was that it would a.) ditch the wacky SKUs of Vista – ahem -

• • Windows Vista Starter
  • Windows Vista Ultimate
  • Windows Vista Home Basic
  • Windows Vista Home Premium
  • Windows Vista Business
  • Windows Vista Enterprise
  • Windows Vista Home Basic N
  • and so on

and b.) run well on a wider array of machines, such as the rapidly growing array of netbooks that hit the market in the past year.

The big MSFT news this week: The company made a two-fold announcement confirming what many feared. For one, they verified a Windows 7 Starter SKU – indicating the that consumer will face the same confusing differentiation between Home Basic and Home Premium. That was frustrating, one more sign that the company has not learned as much as many of us hoped from Vista’s failure.  But such thick headed-ness is not surprising from such a massive company. The second part of the announcement, however, confirmed a rumor that I thought insane: That Windows 7 Starter would be have a number of expected features hamstrung, most egregious of them a limitation to running three programs at once. Three programs. In a full-sized OS. In 2009. Crazy.

The mere inconvenience is significant enough as a value proposition for those 1st world folks who might pick up a netbook as a living room laptop to be a bad business move. Especially so after XP had so much success choking out the nascent linux-netbook threat. But what’s really crazy is that Windows 7 Standard is also the OS that Microsoft will be pushing onto the developing world. The corporation of the same man who’s so committed to developing-world issues with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is going to be pushing an artificially crippled, third-rate OS in on that same developing world. The full-featured Windows 7 Home SKU cost no more to develop and distribute than this crappified 7 Starter. All MSFT has done is taken a sledgehammer and scalpel to the OS the West gets, cast key innards into the trash, and is set to sell the remains to the world poorest regions as a “next-generation” OS.

Why would they do this? The obvious answer is so that those folks in poor nations will want to spend US $200 on Windows 7 Home Basic. Obviously unbecomingly greedy of them, but that’s OK, they’re a public company. The real mistake is making this move while desktop linux continues to approach parity in usability and available software . The Ubuntu 9.04 release candidate was released this week, and it looks and runs as well as the Windows 7 Ultimate Beta I’ve been running, and is absolutely free.

Competing with free is hard enough as is, and MSFT is disappointing us all by trying counterproductive shortcuts. They may still win, but they ought not even want to be in the fight in the first place.

Then again, MSFT’s surely spent more on market research then I’ll make in ten lifetimes, and maybe Windows 7 Standard will be a success. But the very idea of offering such a crippled product itself is contemptuous. As Gruber put it,

“They might as well name it “Windows 7: We Hold You in Contempt and Dare You, Fucking Dare You, to Try Something Else Edition”. #

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Open Curtain: LeRoy sits down in his bedroom to watch several torporous hours of old M*A*S*H episodes on YouTube before slipping into an empty vastness of sleep. We watch as he heaves a familiar end-of-the-day sigh, kicks  off his shoes and settles down in front of his laptop and …”DAMN IT! The FRIGGIN’ INTERNET is clogged AGAIN! It’s never does this at work! Those kids next door must be STEALIN' my wireless!”

In most cases this story ends one of three ways: a.) Dude works through the two steps required to set up basic WEP. b.) dude goes wired, or c.) dude deals with having an open router.

In this case, however, dude is a state senator. In such cases, a fourth solution pops up: d.) Legislate, rather than technologically investigate, a way to keep anyone but you off your network. LeRoy recently introduced a bill which proscribes the accessing of an open WAP “ without permission” and thus renders joining an open WAP a gamble, a bet that the network is willfully open.

As Ars Techical calls out, “ The proposal of the bill suggests that Myers would rather see this legislated than learn how to set up wireless security.” 

Once again the public good is left at the chilly intersection of ownership-mania and aninsulated legislative body of techno-cultural laggards.

Examples: 

Ted Stevens Anti-net neutrality rantings

The general nonsense of the 90s leading up the DMCA

*DING DING DING*

Time for the Ted Stevens honorary Lawmaker of the Week Lightning Round!!!

The prize this week: A brightly colored Thing of unspecified form, function, and build quality. 

QUESTION: What is the personal legislative priority that LeRoy is speaking about in the following quote:

"People are making a joke out of it, but I think it's a pretty serious problem. You have body parts hanging from the hitches of cars. We've crossed a line.

ANSWERS (Choose the single best answer):

A: Ending the narrow, but growing, trend towards "deer driving," wherein the remains of any animal struck by ones car are left dangling as a sort of road trophy.

B: Coming down hard on a serious of pranks involving false limbs that had resulted in a general uproar in several communities in his district, including a false arrest.

C: Banning drivers from showing their manhood externally in the form of rubber nutsacks, which got him a bunch of calls from old ladies who'd apparently never seen them before.

D: Building a "zombie highway" so the damned things will stop mucking up our fenders with their undead remains.

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All these social networking and rich-media services are starting to splinter off into specialized domains, much like television programming did decades ago. It’ll be fun to watch the adoption trends over the next 12 months.

Be a leader! Watch this godly take on Sir MixAlot.

One sentence preview of fair use piece: Architectural freedom will expand with the
continued abandonment of DRM in the audio space, but Big Content’s
aggressive litigation and lobbying will strengthen the flawed DMCA regime stateside in addition to exporting similar legislation elsewhere.

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via Boing Boing 

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The DMCA seems to be at the center of all focused discussion, and will be a major player in the final paper written on this research. For the purposes of the thinking here, it is the legislation that cemented the legal legitimacy of DRM. Rights management in this way, through embedding actual limitation in the content, is problematic for reasons beyond simply making it a pain to listen to music bought of off iTunes on a Rio. Within the practice is disregard for fair use. In fact, it often makes fair uses legally impossible. By embeding in content the technical inability to make unauthorized uses, fair uses are also excluded. //examples//  Fair use is central to cultural development and the public good, and so the new copyright regime represented by DRM is dangerous, and EMI's move will hopefully prove successful and spur other labels to do the same. 

Interestingly, EMI's move away from DRM is the result of the market, rather than courts or congress, raising an idea I had not previously considered: the activities of consumers and the market has a vast impact on the rights claimed by copyright holders. If their are sufficient options available to consumers, and consumers find the terms of use for a particular outlet unsatisfactory, than the loss of business to that outlet may cause it to change its policy. What seems unique about digital copyright, and the unusual role the market might play in its development, is the ready availability of identical pirated content without the embedded use limitations of DRM (which,again, is not limited to music). EMI may have smartly come to the conclusion that consumers, when faced with the choice between interoperable content from p2p networks or DRM'd content from online music stores, the prevalence of privacy may not be so much a question of price than dissatisfaction with the limitations on music store content.

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Jamendo describes itself as follows:

jamendo is a new model for artists to promote, publish, and be paid for their music.

On jamendo, the artists distribute their music under Creative Commons licenses. In a nutshell, they allow you to download, remix and share their music freely. It's a "Some rights reserved" agreement, perfectly suited for the new century.

These new rules allow jamendo to use the powerful new means of digital distribution like Peer-to-Peer networks such as BitTorrent or eMule to legally distribute albums at near-zero cost.

jamendo users can discover and share albums, but also review them or start a discussion on the forums. Albums are democratically rated based on the visitors’ reviews. If they fancy an artist they can support him by making a donation.

jamendo is the only platform that joins together :

• A legal framework protecting the artists (thanks to the Creative Commons licenses).
• Free, simple and quick access to the music, for everyone.
• The use of the lastest Peer-to-Peer technologies
• The possibility of making direct donations to the artists.

I don't want my entries here to center around musical culture, and the copyright issues therein, but 1.) music has been the earliest battleground over digital copyright (napster, kazza) and 2.) music is one of the oldest and most accessible elements of culture. Jamendo is specifically interesting in its use of Bit Torrent, a new distribution technology that has several particularly significant attributes.

In keeping with the still emerging democratic nature of the net, torrents take a unique and distributive, if not democratic, approach to content distribution. Unlike early P2P (peer-to-peer) protocols, torrent downloads refer to and draw the bandwidth of no central host. Instead, the distribution responsibilities and bandwidth are shared by all the users actively of the shared torrent. Users who are 'leech', or download from the pool, while other users who are finished downloading 'seed', or distribute the file through there own bandwidth allocations/limitations. Bandwidth, in it's digital use, is the increasingly commodified range through which information can travel over networks. And it costs money. If jamendo had to provide the bandwidth for those million album downloads at 60mbs a pop, it simply could not afford to under it's current business model, focused as it is on cultural free exchange (and limited advertisement revenue). Torrents cut out the intermediaries of distribution, whether analog record labels or digital backbone hosting, and allow for a more free exchange of culture.

Because of this, they also pose a new challenge to the traditional authorities of cultural production. The technology has, naturally, become a popular medium of choose in undermining control of copyrighted material. And it community hubs a new target of legal action. It can't be shut down in the same way napster and kazza, however, due to it's decentralized nature. The lawsuits continue, however.

How torrents fit into the tradition of copyright policy formulation, and how it may be exceptional. 

 In so many ways, copyrights holder struggle to retain control here mirrors previous battles. New technologies of distributing content never quiet fit into existing copyright laws, as Litman discusses. For one, the policy writers are generally not in a position to foresee future technologies. But if broad limits on control were established, the law would have far less trouble adapting. However, the process by which bills are written and policy created establishes a web of convoluted and narrow exceptions forged by and for existing copyright interests with little room for future developments. For this reason, battles over copyright interpretations and implementations have raged nearly continuously throughout the 20th century. At the turn of the century, piano rolls challenged composers control over performance, leading to a 1905-06 legislative conflict; later motion pictures and "talk boxes" (1912), and radio (1920's).  This trend continues through to the debate over VCRS in the early 80's, home recording equipment in the early 90's, and internet distribution recently. In each of the cases, interested bodies (consumers not included) have been brought together to haggle over legislation, writing it by committee, each using its influence to carve a narrow exception in law for its own business model of copyright use and excluding all parties not at the table, the general public included.

What is unique about bit torrent, and the 'net trend it represents, is that there is no central entity profiting in the same way from it's use. For this reason, their is no interested party in the traditional, D.C.-lobby sense to sit at a table with the MPAA and RIAA and spar over positions and come to an argreement. Piano roll vendors, motion picture firms, radio broadcaster associations, et al were all making significant and specific profits from their sales of copyrighted material and related paraphernalia, and so could fund lobbiest and influence policy makers. Torrents and their like create more free information, rather than new ways to profit from it, and so have so such centralized and empowered interests. This makes it difficult for a internet distribution advocate to emerge in the policy realm outside of the historically underpowered consumer coalition.

Likewise, however, it also makes it difficult for conservative copyright forces to shut down the practice.The folks that profit over bandwidth use have clearly sided with the conservative interests, as they seek to share in profits from sale of copyrighted material via creating a tiered network. This leaves unorganized but ubiquitous internet uses who don't have a Sony to fight for their right to record TV for home use, as had happened in the early 80's. Google and other content aggregators are showing interest, but don't have the same sort of interests; copyright issues are not central to their business model (their actions surrounding their YouTube property will be the true indicator). By my account, the two fold uniqueness of the net-as-distributive system for its 1.) lack of a central vested interest(s) to influence policy and 2.) lack of a central interest(s) to prosecute (ISPs have carved an exception) makes for a unique historical point in the history of copyright.

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One of the global leaders in open information policy, it turns out, is Brazil. Prior to research, if I'd been asked to throw out some nations I thought might be leaders,Brazil's would have been on of the early ones due to my awareness of their controversial take on drug patents, another major component of intellectual property law. Brazil's drug policy in 2004 and thereafter pretty much told major patent holders on HIV/AIDS medicines to bugger off as Brazil produced it's own copies of the drugs to best address the growing AIDS health problem within it's borders. They've evidently taken a similar take on copyright.

The Brazilian cultural ministry took umbrage at the idea that it's creative activity could be controlled by the interests of corporate media conglomerates a hemisphere away (mainly those in the US). In 2003 a newly appointed Brazilian Minister of Culture reacted by forming an institutional aliance with the Creative Commons movement, one that has gained continual popularity as an alternative to the "all rights reserved" nature of tradional copyright. The national sentiment behind the move is expressed well by a spokesman for Brazil musicians speaking at a public forum on Brazilian IP law,

the discussion is not only within economic basis. It is time to bring the discussion within a human basis. … When dealing with intellectual property we are renegotiating my life not as an artist, but rather as a citizen. … It is crucial that the human aspect be the core of the discussion: I am a commons good, I create the national identity. I and all the other artists are intrinsic goods of the country just like petrol is.

The emerging information policy of Brazil reflects this natonal sentiment well. The Minsitry of Culture has sponsered the Pontos de Cultura, or "Cultural Points", program, in which small government grants are issued to hundreds of community centers to install small – and increasingly affordable – recording and video studios in community centers, and to teach residents how to use them. As a result, many Brazilians and engaged in and created a cultural outpouring of music and video, often times "racially conscious and politically tinged" takes on hip-hop and electronica. Further, these individual and group creations are broadcast over community radio and independently distributed in CD's at "markets and fairs" rather than record labels. In this small way, Brazil's relatively small program had brought everyday citizens into the process of creating culture, and had been able to so while circumventing the traditional institutions of cultural authority: the major record labels, recording studios, and radio stations. Of course, these institutions are quite unhappy with the new tendencies of Brazil's information policy, and their representative interests have put the nation on notice. 

There does exist, in actual policy, alternative visions of copyright to those being forwarded by the MPAA, RIAA, and the like, and this breadth of possibility seems important to keep in mind.

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