Astonishingly, in response to the continued noise ordinance brew-ha-ha borne out of SXSW, APD has revoked the permit for this week's First Thursday event. Apparently, they were able to invoke some little known provision in the Austin Code of Ordnances governing mass gatherings which happen to fall on the first of a month (aka, this Thursday).

Anyway, I'm of the opinion that this is a bit extreme. Besides the fact that the whole "riot" on 6th street probably never should have even occurred, I'm not quite sure what one has to do with the other. In anycase, it is poor decision making like this which will eventually drive people (and business) away from Austin. Hopefully they'll come to their senses sooner rather than later!

By Gary at 06:55 PM in Rights | Comments (6)  

This one is filed under "rights" and not "music" for good reason. The String Cheese Incident, a jam-band set to play at the Austin City Limits Festival, has initiated a lawsuit against TicketMaster. Apparently, TM wants to end the practice of venues selling blocks of tickets directly to artists so it can wrestle control of every last drop of the market. SCI has made a good business of selling their tix directly to their fans (as well as helping other like-minded bands do the same) and TM wants this no more. Of course, SCI aren't the first to sue TM, but lets just hope they meet with more success. What an abusive monopoly.

By Gary at 06:39 PM in Rights | Comments (1)  

I just saw the link to this NYTimes story from Slashdot. It's an interesting look towards the implications of commercially available pictures of the U.S. and the implications to the proliferation of its uses.

By Gary at 10:37 PM in Rights | Comments (0)  

This article at NYTimes discusses some of the anti-piracy measures currently being explored by the recording industry. While nothing has formally been enacted due to concerns of legality, some of the proposed measures they are looking into include "freeze"-- a program designed to freeze your computer for some specified amount of time, and "silence"-- a program which roots out and deletes all illegal music on your system.

While reading the article, I couldn't help but draw some parallels to our war in Iraq and the war over piracy. With Iraq, you had a vicious regime lording over its people through fear and intimidation. Obviously, with the recording industry you have the same situation between the recording companies and the artists. Likewise, the recording artists are probably as skittish to losing all their rights and control over the music through music swapping as the Iraqi citizenry are to welcoming the American army to come in and "rebuild" their country.

This leaves the rather dubious parallel between the the similarities of the U.S. army and the peer to peer music swapping applications. However, this parallel is regime change. The technological prowess of U.S. forces is the equivalent to the unstoppable nature of peer to peer file sharing. If history does repeat itself, then the music industry should be very worried. P2P is destroying the recording industries ability to profit from the artists they control and at the same time the internet is the oil which might give the artists the resources they need to determine their own fate.

I guess ironically in both cases the American people are just the consumers-- consumers of oil and consumers of music. Rights? Tyranny? What's that all about? Fatten us up, lower our gas prices and drop the price of CDs and we'll be happy.

By Gary at 03:58 PM in Rights | Comments (0)  

A day for the history books. Most of Baghdad falls, and Iraqi's cheer their freedom as Saddam's regime crumbles. But from the land where a falling statue is liberty to the one with the Statue of Liberty, today perversely shows that the fight for freedom is never over.

Just today, it was reported members of the GOP are maneuvering to make the Patriot Act permanent (link), a judged tossed out a case challenging the DMCA wherein it was ruled that reverse engineering web filtering software to determine what sites it blocked is not within fair use rights (link), and that phone companies moved to block regulations enabling our right to retain the same phone number regardless of which phone company we switch to (link).

The devil, it seems, is in the details. Perhaps today the Iraqi's start down the long path to reach these "last mile" issues. Of course these things can only be called last mile within the context here, but having been struck seeing the commercial for the pet medicine delivery service in between the scenes of overjoyed Iraqis on CNN, one can only marvel at the incongruities of life on earth.

By Gary at 11:49 PM in Rights | Comments (0)  

Looks like amongst other states, Texas is considering extending the DMCA. They'd like to outlaw systems that conceal your identity on the internet. These would include such things as firewalls and VPNs which is absolutely laughable. Though, I must say, I can't find myself getting all wound up about things like this. When such ludicrous legislation comes around it will either get defeated before passage or the blowback after passage will be so acute that actually passing the legislation would lead to the beginning steps of dismantling the idealogy behind the DMCA. This is a dangerously optimistic stance and I'm glad to have it.

Though, I also find it interesting that so many state legislatures are all simultaneously scheduled to discuss taking this extension up. Its obviously a concerted effort by someone (read CORPORATE). I wonder who it actually is. Although, given their route through state legislation, it also makes you wonder whether the federal McCain/Feingold campaign finance bill is working. Until now, I'd never heard of a bill that was so dumb that Congress wouldn't even pick it up ... maybe the donor money to pissed-off constituent ratio wasn't within the right range for the Congressmen.

By Gary at 02:30 PM in Rights | Comments (0)  

Well, it looks like someone's already got a whole website devoted to sending your settlement money to the EFF. I guess its just that good of an idea. Check out the website here.

By Gary at 03:30 PM in Rights | Comments (0)  

In agreement with this discussion at Ars Technica and with the same idea a co-worker had, I'm donating my settlement money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The music industry was earlier found guilty of price-fixing the cost of CDs and had a window (which is now closed) where you could sign up to receive your share of the settlement. It comes out to $12.60 a person and I'll be endorsing my check over to the EFF, which is a non-profit that is dedicated to defending our digital freedoms. Let me know if you plan to do the same.

By Gary at 08:29 PM in Rights | Comments (0)  

I saw this article on NYTimes this morning about Time Warner/AOL's new tivo like device. I've got to say, I completely agree with BoingBoing. Dubbed "MystroTV", this thing is just horrible. It attempts to be a Digital Video Recorder (DVR) but is laden with DRM to manage your rights (DRM having about as much to do with helping you manage your rights as a ticketmaster convenience charge is about being convenient to you). Unlike tivo, one could not skip through certain commercials with a fast forward button, share recorded programs with friends, and not have full access to record all programs.

This concept product is just yet another example of the failure of old-economy content distribution companies in understanding that the avalanche of technological adoption both current and coming has completely destroyed tradional methods for deriving income. Though I do have strong faith that we'll soon see the tide turning away from such feature crippled products for the sake of "licensing," it does seem for now that these media giants have still not learned their lesson from the music swapping that has already turned the corner and moved straight on to video and whatever else you can imagine sharing. The bubble may have burst, but the chewing gum hasn't lost its flavor. They're screwed, and making crappy products surely won't help them.

And speaking of their current crappy products, lets talk about time warner's current Tivo system which I have. Living in Austin means living in a city of early adopters and as such, it is one of TW's test markets. The NYTimes articles makes brief mention of it, but Time Warner is hedging their bets as they currently have a DVR cable box available in Austin that works just like tivo. And, unlike their new dream product, this one isn't crippled ... on purpose. Sure, the thing works well enough, but its got some issues:

* It reboots often, perhaps 4-5 times a week. This takes about 3 minutes.
* You cannot reliably expect it to record your program if you've set it to record all instances of a show.
* Because of this, you are pretty much forced to manually select every single thing you want to record.
* If you are recording two programs at the same time, you can't watch anything else live.
* The program guide randomly forgets to highlight things you've set to record in the future.
* It has no ad-skip feature, but you can get pretty good with the "triple fast-forward" followed by an "instant replay."

Oh, to be an early adopter. Sure, I've never used the real tivo before, but even with this meager offering, I'm still somehow satisfied, especially given the potential I see in it. Of course, the same can't be said of Mystro. Do they really believe that people would actually give up one for the other? They'd have to be stupid, and, unfortunately, they haven't shown much brilliance as of yet. Perhaps they'll just simplify it all by taking away the choice. That's some rights management.

By Gary at 09:54 PM in Rights | Comments (5)