Duncan Mac-Vicar P.

A citizen of USA is being sued by the RIAA for ripping CDs in order to play them in the computer.

This opens a really stupid discussion. This is my point of view as a consumer.

The music industry still wants to run their old business model. They want to charge you for expensive CDs. I haven’t bought many CDs since long time. The reasons are simple: I don’t have a CD player, and I don’t listen CDs on the TV/DVD player because I want to make playlists out of many artists and styles and not just loop over 2 good songs and 10 bad ones. Then I want to go walking and bring that playlist with me. To the car, etc.

The usual understanding of CD license model is “private use”. That means I can play it 10.000 times or as much as I want. However, because the reason above, people don’t want CDs. And because the RIAA don’t sell CDs, and they are years late (and also incompetent) to get into the digital market business, the solution is to (as usual) exploit the legal system, and try to change it so the user will pay for every song for every medium. So if you want to listen a song in your car radio, you have to pay for it again.

What this comment mentions is interesting:

Uh oh, George Bush better watch out! The Beatles have never released iTunes tracks… yet, according to his interview here. He’s got them on his iPod. I wonder if the RIAA will go after him next?

There is nothing you can do. The RIAA already as been sued for acting like a mafia/criminal organization but the end of the digital rights war is far away, and everything that happens today will mostly only affect our children’s. We are already screwed up and will have to live with crap for some years.

Not buying RIAA (and friends) albums is an option. I have to admit that most of the music I like is still under RIAA control. You can find those using the RIAA radar.

I own a good bunch of CDs. But as they are not a good investment because I would need to pay for the music again now that I don’t listen to CD media I am not buying more CDs. I have to think (or rethink) my music strategy for the next years. Perhaps start looking in the top 100 RIAA-free albums? or just switch to realtime internet radio?

Las malas ideas se copian. A través de Fayerwayer, vía quemarlasnaves.net me entero de que la Sociedad Chilena de Derecho de Autor quiere que en Chile exista Canon por copia privada, o sea un impuesto a todos los medios de grabación, aunque los uses con fines legales y privados, para llenarles sus bolsillos. Una copia del rídiculo impuesto que se aplica en España, y que hace que medos de grabación y reproducción sean mucho más caros.

Aún no aparece mucho sobre el tema, por lo que me limito a comentar un párrafo:

Después supe que estaban en contra de las licencias Creative Commons. Todavía no me decido si simplemente no las entienden, o no son capaces de ver un mundo sin intermediarios (como ellos).

Las licencias no se han inventado para estar de acuerdo o no con ellas. La licencia solo puede ser elegida por el dueño del copyright de un trabajo. El dueño puede hacer lo que quiera con su obra y licenciarla bajo los términos que le parezcan. Las licencias son sólo plantillas para ayudar a licenciar obras bajo los términos más populares entre la gente que no quiere licenciar bajo “Todos los derechos reservados” sino “Algunos derechos reservados”.

Me gustaría saber, ¿Qué parlamentarios están apoyando esto?

So this weekend my chilean friend Egon visited me with his brother Wolfgang.

I am able know to give you a really nice overview of Nürnberg in a half day and a long night ;-).

After the mandatory visits to the castle, Hauptmarkt and walking around the innerstadt, we stopped for a real german dinner at Geiß Spital.

Then we continued in direction to Wörde Wiese where we had a top in DeroteBar and Weinerei, where we met a bunch of friends.

While in the Weinerei, a guitar player came in and started to play blues.

He asked us for some money and I ended buying his album for 5 euros. Not that I like blues that much but…. lets support art. He persuaded me to play after him. Well, he just announced I was going to play. So I ended playing live in the Weinerei.

After that we did a quick stop at Downtown. They left today, but my feeling is they liked Nürnberg a lot. Complete photoset.

Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs has a message for consumers and anti-trust regulators claiming the company has locked people into its iTunes music store: Don’t blame us, blame the music companies.

Article in securityfocus.com.

• The 50 Worst Artists in Music History is the biggest piece of crap ever written. How can you put Live, The Doors and Gipsy Kings there?. Well, in the same magazine, there is an article called 500 CDs You Must Own: Classic Rock, and they include “The Doors: The Very Best of the Doors]. Consistency?.
• You can see my brother playing in his University here.
• My chilean friends Cristian and Rodrigo met again to play some Megadeth songs.

Some tech predictions about dynamic languages, ajax, java, etc.

Andreas just sent me this video, where a guy with no musical trainning plays drums using the stop motion technique.

Andreas me acaba de enviar este video, donde un tipo sin conocimientos de música, toca batería utilizando la técnica de stop-motion.

So let’s try a online music store…

Today, I visited the Yahoo Music Store. Found some artists I like (I already have the album but I was just trying it..) I clicked buy, and… oh, I can’t see what the popup says because it is displayed behind the advertisement. Ok, I can’t buy music here. Close the window.

I have been searching for long time a nice way to buy legal music, because I just don’t buy CDs anymore. The online stores I have found:

• Are from russia, and other countries claim music bought there is ilegal.
• You get files with DRM, so when you want to move your files, backup them, carry them on a device, etc, you can’t.
• You get files in proprietary formats.
• The store decides which player you use.
• Stores without DRM (usually mp3 format) lack content, because music labels won’t work with them.

Any Linux user has tried emusic.com ? Any experiences? Which other systems do exists? independant music?

I support of copyright. I do think people should pay for the media they want to see. But I do think the topic is manipulated:

• FUD against peer to peer technologies, by the recording industry, whose managers has been sleeping in terms of innovation and did not see the digital age coming.
• RIAA using every trick that the law allows to spread fear, at the expenses of, sometimes, innocent people.
• FUD against encryption
• DRM, technology that tries to control what you can play or not. As every technology has problems, sometimes you will find yourself not being able to play stuff you own.
• Artists still the forgotten part of the story.

Conclusion, today, the whole system sucks.

To educate yourself about the topic, some interesting readings:

• Electronic Frontier Foundation DRM Guide

Napster 2.0 and many services like it provide celestial music jukeboxes, but you’d better bring a sack of quarters. Using DRM, they charge extra for many traditionally free uses of your music.

For a monthly subscription fee, the Napster Unlimited music rental service offers you the ability to stream and download as much as you like from its entire catalog. If you miss a monthly payment, the DRM renders the downloaded music unplayable.

Even while your subscription lasts, however, the DRM ensures that you don’t get to use the music “any way you want.” Want to move your music to a portable player? That’ll be an extra five bucks per month for Napster To Go — and you’ll still only be able to play it using software or devices licensed to play WMA-protected subscription content, which excludes the iPod and most other portable players. How about burning a song to CD? Napster’s DRM requires you to cough up 99 cents more. What if you want to copy music to more than three computers? Pay another monthly subscription fee, or 99 cents per song. And what if you want to mix a song snippet with a home movie? Forget it—the DRM forbids that entirely.

• DRM free music stores

Other stuff…

• Snakebite - A BitTorrent Server

It’s easy to download files with BitTorrent, but sharing your files over BitTorrent is somewhat complicated. You have to generate torrents for each file you want to share, run a tracker, and run a seeder. Most people don’t even know what any of that means. It’s much more complicated to share files using BitTorrent than with a webserver. To put your files on the web, you just drop them in the correct folder and then webserver does the rest.

• Steal this Film

“Steal This Film is the first part of a free documentary series about file-sharing. This part focuses on The Pirate Bay, and copyfighters Piratbyran. From their website: “There have been a few documentaries by ‘old media’ crews who don’t understand the net and see peer-to-peer organisation as a threat to their livelihoods. They have no reason to represent the filesharing movement positively. And no capacity to represent it lucidly.”"The film is free for you to share, watch on your DVD-player or on your iPod, or show in cinemas.” Torrents are available on their website, or watch part one, two, three and four on YouTube.”

Torrent here

Rodrigo sent me this video link of Orion in Rock am Ring. I was in Rock im Park, but the show was exactly the same. After all I did not realize the video was from the previous day before I re-read the title.

There are also some videos from Rock im Park, but grabbed using a cellphone as a camera, here and here.

I was yesterday in Rock Im Park. I only went to see Metallica. The show was great, the (long) playlist was something like:

• Creeping death
• Fuel
• The God that failed

• Wherever I may roam

• Battery

• Master of Puppets
• The Thing That Should Not Be
• Welcome Home (Sanitarium)
• Disposable Heroes
• Leper Messiah
• Orion (Instrumental)
• Damage, Inc.

(yeah, they played the whole Master of Puppets album because it was its 20th birthday)

• Nothing else matters
• Sad but true
• One
• Enter Sandman
• So What
• Seek and destroy

I did not bring my camera, but today some photos started to appear in flickr. The official gallery is here.

Other bands that were there include Depeche Mode, Placebo, Tool, Franz Ferdinand, Korn, Morrissey, Bela B., Reamonn, Nelly, Furtado, Sportfreunde Stiller, Deftones, Pharrell, Turbonegro, Tomte, Kaiser Chiefs, Dir en grey, Paul Weller, Goldfrapp, Dresden Dolls, She Wants Revenge, u.v.a.

The above photos are © 2000-2006 Nordbayern Infonet.

On friday, after visiting the Nuernberg Wiehnachtsmarkt and having dinner with Will and Lisann, I went out with Daniel and Thomas, who introduced me to some new people from Spain and Eslovaquia. We were in like four different places over the night, but we ended in the parkcafe, which I wanted to visit since long time, as it is very close to my place.

I got a Christmas tree, thanks to Will (who is getting a bigger one). My place looks really better with it. I will spend Christmas with my brother, who is coming from Paris after a hard semester studying. But he seems to have *lot* of fun there. I think I am going to visit Paris earlier than originally planned.

I booked a flight for Michael and me to Berlin for new year, that will be really cool.

Today, KDE 3.5 was released, and one of the killer features is webcam support for Kopete. The team has done and incredible work, specially the new younger developers. There is a visual guide introducing the new features here.

My University teacher Jaime, who was my MSc. thesis advisor, sent my this link to the presentation given by Dick Hardt, Founder & CEO, Sxip Identity. The style of the presentation is really cool. It is worth to see it. Congrats to him!

Today I bought batteries for my guitar digital processor. It has been a long time since I played “plugged”. After my brother opened the effects processor to fix it after it burned throwing white smoke. (putting in practice his new knowledge in electronics by that time), now it has its own life. It turns on/off randomly, shows strange characters in the LCD screen, and you can not turn it off without pulling off the batteries.