Join the blackout.

I don’t watch nearly enough films, but my attention has been drawn to two animations recently. Both are free. Firstly, the Blender project has brought out a new film (I wanted to embed it here but it breaks the page). It has a CC licence, and looks like an impressive bit of 3D animation (all […]

A friend of mine recently said they thought ID cards could be useful. They said they thought one day they might forget to take their passport to the airport or on the Eurostar. It struck me that I’d not blogged about my thoughts on this (and hey, what’s a blog for if it’s not for […]

When I’m murdered in my bed by a gang of bored teenagers, I’ll try to remember to blame the RIAA as I expire. Some issues are too big to arrive at any useful perspective until you have thought and experienced a great many ideas relating to them. For a long while now, I have tried […]

I am usually completely unsuccessful in hiding my glee at the demise of music publishers, and this post is no exception. I have been hoping for the last few years that what started as a trickle would become a flood. And now with Radiohead and even (gasp!) Madonna, it surely has. I think the penny […]

Max Hole is President, Asia Pacific Region and Executive Vice-President, Marketing and A&R for Universal Music Group International. He has some soothing words for anyone who thinks the internets might be a bit worrying for music publishers. When he’s using words like “… record companies … sign and encourage great music by great artists. This […]

So the BBC is now the latest broadcaster to sign a deal with the force that is YouTube. Right now, the Beeb (and CBS, NBC and Fox) are all saying that YouTube is a “promotional vehicle” for them. Nothing to do with their core programming or anything like that. OK, and what about all those […]

I’m thinking of adding a new category of “copyfight” to this blog. There’s so much to write about!

Hot on the heels of the AllofMP3.com news comes more news that the BPI wants to sue them! This after Tiscali is made to take down its juke box service.

The absurdity of UK government agencies having to sell data back the very tax payers that paid for it has been going on ever since I was a lad. I’ve always regarded it as another one of the breathtakingly stupid things the Thatcher government did that, once done, could not be un-done. Like football hooliganism, chaotic public transport and the poll (now council) tax.

But the Grauniad’s now come up with an interesting angle – and a campaign no less – that holds out the possibility of change.

(By the way, I love that Guardian Technology masthead with the picture of Admiral Tojo wearing 3D glasses on it. It’s a classic.)

I went to see Cory Doctorow and others on a panel organised by Free Culture UK last night. The subject was “Open Content” – a moniker given to the concept of digitisable works of either art or craft distributed under an alternative copyright licence (such as Creative Commons). Inevitably, a lot of ground was covered by the speakers, and one of the hottest topics of the evening was the recently-launched BBC’s Open Archive project. I wasn’t actually aware that they’d launched, but it sounds evil.

I’m always late in on things, and this is no exception. But I’ve just put up a Shoutcast stream of the American Edit mashup tracks. First time I’ve done this, so hope it works. For a day or so anyway…

Of course it’s too early to say, but I’d like to think that this is the beginning of the end for the music publishing industry. The terrible signal: too weak to even recognise…

Unless you’re Madonna, Coldplay or U2, chances are that you’re 
not going to make money selling records. 

So let’s try something different here.

Laurence Lessig’s written a great short piece (I didn’t know Americans could do that!) for Foreign Policy on the death of the public domain. He’s great at hitting the nail on the head.

The US Supreme Court’s ruling against Grokster came in today:

"We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting 
its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other 
affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting
acts of infringement by third parties"