Category: intellectual property
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The Feed vs. the Archive
The longstanding photo sharing site Flickr recently was acquired from Yahoo by the much-smaller professional photo site SmugMug. As a 14+ year user of Flickr, I saw this as a good thing, since the service seemed to endure benign neglect under Yahoo’s unsteady stewardship. But, under the pressure of keeping the service economically sustainable SumgMug…
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Free Chicagoland Music
WFMU’s Free Music Archive–as discussed Friday on the blog and radioshow–is featuring a whole mess of music from artists around my new hometown of Chicago. Happy downloading and listening!
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Free Music Archive
On today’s radioshow I interview WFMU station manager Ken Freedman about the station’s very cool Free Music Archive project. The idea of the Archive is to take the fundamental idea of sharing Creative Commons-licensed music online, as seen with sites like Archive.org, and add a curatorial element. According to Ken, the goal is to replicate…
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Congress Says, Let’s Screw Up Broadcast Radio, too
Never doubt the power of the lobby. Despite all the public uproar over the rising royalties levied on online radio broadcasters, paid to the recording industry, Congress is now considering putting similar royalties onto traditional broadcast radio. The fact that no royalties are paid by radio stations to the owners of the “performance” on a…
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Anarchy, Integrity and the Digital Marketplace, via a Double-Ended Podcast Interview
Michael W. Dean is the former lead singer of the 90s band Bomb, an author of instructional books, podcaster and is probably most well known for his documentary DIY or Die about independent artists. I watched DIY or Die a year or two ago and had made a note to get Michael on the radioshow,…
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Make Noncommercial Online a Little More Like Noncommerical Broadcast
According to Broadcasting and Cable the Association of Public TV Stations has created a Digital Rights Coalition in order to ensure that some of the same Fair Use rights they enjoy for noncommercial TV broadcasts. Some of these rights are: 1) use copyrights audio in their shows without asking permission or paying, so long as…
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Ripping Video Streams with Real Player 11 beta
The beta of Real Player 11 came out the other day, for Windows only, and I have installed it and fooled around a bit. I do have to report that it does what it advertises: it very easily rips online video and saves it to your hard drive. From YouTube to streams coming off our…
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Real’s New Survival Technique is Stream Ripping and Fair Use
I have no idea how I missed the big announcement at the end of May that Real’s next media player will feature the ability to record media streams in a whole host of formats — most notably, YouTube’s Flash video content. (As a tangent, the way I found out is kind of interesting — it’s…
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SM East: Microsoft’s Bid To Beat Flash at the Plug-In Game
This morning’s keynote was Microsoft’s Sean Alexander giving a peek under the hood of its new Silverlight platform which offers a bi-platform (MacOS & Windows) browser plug-in rich media player that looks an awful lot like Flash. He also showed off MS’s new production suite offering design and authoring tools that look a lot like…
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Headlines from the Feb. 2 radioshow: Journalists Beaten in Oaxaca, a Pro-Fair-Use Bill, The House’s Telecomm Agenda
Community Radio Journalists Beaten in Oaxaca Two community radio journalists were beaten by state-supported militants in the Mexican state of Oaxaca on the night of January 24. One was arrested. According to a report from the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters, known as AMARC, the incident occurred during a confrontation between militants of the…