Our meeting also voted overwhelmingly to support a three-strike sanction on those who persistently download illegal files, sanctions to consist of a warning letter, a stronger warning letter and a final sanction of the restriction of the infringer’s bandwidth to a level which would render file-sharing of media files impractical while leaving basic email and web access functional.

How backward-ass!!

As an artist, I am going to have to revoke my membership if they don’t do some serious back-peddling in the next few days.

I thought the FAC was a forward-thinking organization.  Maybe not.

Availability Notes:
Hulu can provide five episodes of this series at a time. We’ll add a new episode each week as we take down an older one, following the same schedule as the official site.  

Customer trust is hard won, easily lost. On January 9, we removed nearly 3 seasons of full episodes of ”It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” We did this at the request of the content owner. Despite Hulu’s opinion and position on such content removals (which we share liberally with all of our content partners), these things do happen and will continue to happen on the Hulu service with regards to some television series. As power users of Hulu have seen, we’ve added a large amount of content to the library each month, and every once in a while we are required to remove some content as well. 

This note, however, is not about the fact that episodes of ”It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” were taken down. Rather, this note is to communicate to our users that we screwed up royally with regards to _how_ we handled this specific content removal and to apologize for our lack of strong execution. We gave effectively no notice to our users that these ”Sunny” episodes would be coming off the service. We handled this in precisely the opposite way that we should have. We believe that our users deserve the decency of a reasonable warning before content is taken down from the Hulu service. Please accept our apologies.

Given the very reasonable user feedback that we have received on this topic (we read every twitter, email and post), we have just re-posted all of the episodes that we had previously removed. I’d like to point out to our users that the content owner in this case – FX Networks – was very quick to say yes to our request to give users reasonable advance notice here, despite the fact that it was the Hulu team that dropped the ball. We have re-posted all of the episodes in the interest of giving people advance notice before the episodes will be taken down two weeks from today. The episodes will be taken down on January 25, 2009. Unfortunately we do not have the permission to keep the specific episodes up on Hulu beyond that. We hope that the additional two weeks of availability will help to address some of the frustration that was felt over the past few days.

The team at Hulu is doing our best to make lemonade out of lemons on this one, but it’s not easy given how poorly we executed here. Please know that we will do our best to learn from this mistake such that the Hulu user experience benefits in other ways down the road.

Sincerely,

Jason Kilar, CEO, Hulu

First of all, Thanks for the IP Colloquium Podcast.  This is great stuff so far.

I wanted to point out a few things about your WebSite that are annoying for ‘Power-Users’ like me and/or that are standing in your own way.

1. Flash is not the way to go.  Flash Websites are less accessible than sites that display HTML. There are many reasons why.  Here are a few:
   • Navigation-Buttons or Links within Flash sites don’t allow right-click functions such as “Open Link In A New Window/Tab,” which people who use the Web well use often.
   • Flash Content is Less Machine-Readable (for instance, by robots like Search Crawlers), Less Universally Semantic, Less Friendly to Alternate Viewing (Like Text-Only Browsing or Viewing of the Page-Source).  The reason is that the content is hidden within the Flash animation objects.  Essentially, Flash sites are about as Machine-Readable as pictures of text are, probably less.  You want to be found in Search Results, right?
   • Flash sites require an extra browser plugin which is sometimes a barrier for people on alternate systems or that aren’t very technically savvy.  Barriers aren’t a good thing.
   • The Text within your site cannot be copied from the browser window, making it harder for people to quote you etc.  I had to actually look at Doug Lichtman’s name etc to post this entry.  Sure hinders my abilty to blog about you guys.
   • Since your site is Flash, updating it is surely more complicated than it would be if you were using some sort of Content Management System (CMS), like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc. This is also true for making minor ‘look-n-feel’ changes. When your design elements are separate from your content, you have a lot more flexibility if you decide you don’t like some font or color etc.  Again, HTML and CSS based sites are superior for this reason.
2. You do not have an RSS/Atom Link in your Site’s HTML Head.  This is easy to do and is what is expected of modern sites that are content sources. All you need to do is put the following line in the top of your HTML: <link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” href=”http://ipcolloquium.com/rssfeed.xml” /> …This is what makes the little RSS icon/indicator show up in the URL field in FireFox/Safari/Etc, which is expected from sites that are Syndicating content via the web (like you are). 
3. Your Feed is not set up properly for “Enclosures” which is what makes Podcasting tick.  Perhaps the iTunes Subscribe link you give out is being processed by FeedBurner or something, but I can’t tell because the site is Flash so I can’t “Copy Link…”  …Really, if you moved to WordPress, you could use any number of podcasting plugins that will take care of all the dirty work of making your feed Standards-Compliant, iTunes-Ready and user-friendly.  If you don’t want to go down that road, you should at least consider running your feed through FeedBurner and then linking to that feed rather than the “/rssfeed.xml” one.  This way, the Audio files show up in your feed properly as ‘enclosures,’ and your feed will work in all feed-readers and ‘pod-catchers.’  
4. It’s also mildly annoying to have links on your site automatically open new windows.  It’s just one of those things that gets on people’s nerves.  If we want a new window or tab, we’ll open one.

I really think you guys should consider a quick re-build using a more standards-compliant Content Management System (CMS), like my favorite, WordPress (which is free and great for podcasting).  This really only takes about an hour or two to do and requires no special skills.  It’s especially easy for a site like yours that has such a minor burden of content migration.  Joomla and Drupal are also free, but for the IPC-Cast, I recommend WordPress.  There is also a handful of other powerful open-source CMS solutions out there that I haven’t mentioned.  Bottom line, you don’t need to spend money on software.

Anyway, I’m just trying to help.  Keep up the great work!  The Podcast is great.

Lawrence Lessig should be looked at by the new administration for positions like ‘Technology Czar,’ ‘Federal CTO,’ ‘Chairman/Commissioner of the FCC,’ or any other position in which Ethics and the Public Interest in matters of Technology and/or Communications are concerned.

Professor Lessig has already proven himself as an advocate for the people as an Educator, an Attorney, an Author and an Activist.

I’m sure there are many, many others like me who believe that the Obama administration, and more importantly, the American People would benefit from having Lawrence Lessig’s sound judgement and clear voice involved in the Federal decision-making processes.

He’s one of my personal heroes, and he cares about America, its consumer’s, their rights, the possibilities of modern technology, and the importance of our culture as it evolves and we grow with it.

Thanks for having this open suggestion box.

My question is, is the O.R.G. a friend or a foe?  

I’m a child of digital media, and I’m also an artist.  I’m also a creator of other forms of content like this blog. 

The Open Rights Group’s site is so confusing and not-clear in its mission at first glance.  For all I can tell it’s a front for a major publisher effort.  

Really, the site is terribly unclear.  Maybe I was supposed to spend a bunch of time digging for the agenda there.  

Please, you guys, make it clear!

I can help if you want, but damn.  I can’t even tell what you stand for.

It needs to be completely clear to anyone visiting the site, as soon as they get there, me thinks.

“…We speak with one voice to help artists strike a new bargain with record companies, digital distributors and others…”

As long as this organisation doesn’t become a new RIAA, by suing the pants off music lovers, or advocating network filtering by ISP’s, I’m all for this.  Labels get too much for too little while screwing over the fans and artists at almost every turn.  

If you’re listening, FAC, please don’t become another RIAA.  OK?  

Some quotes from the Press Release (pdf HERE):

 
ARTISTS LAUNCH CAMPAIGN FOR NEW DIGITAL RIGHTS

The Verve, Radiohead, Jools Holland, Kaiser Chiefs, Kate Nash, Robbie Williams and Billy Bragg are among dozens of musicians and performers calling for changes to the law and record industry

[...]

The new organisation will campaign for specific changes to the laws governing the music industry and how business is conducted, so that:

 
[...]
The new organisation will campaign for specific changes to the laws governing the music industry and how business is conducted, so that:

• artists always retain ultimate ownership of their music
• all agreements between artists and others are conducted in a fair and transparent manner
• rights’ holders have a duty of care to the originator of those rights, and must always explain how any agreement may affect how their work is exploited.

[...]
The Coalition will begin by focusing on six areas where it is seeking change: 

1. An agreement by the music industry that artists should receive fair compensation whenever their business partners receive an economic return from the exploitation of the artists’ work.
2. All transfers of copyright should be by license rather than by assignment, and limited to 35 years.
3. The making available right should be monetized on behalf of featured artistes and all other performers.
4. Copyright owners to be obliged to follow a ‘use it or lose it’ approach to the copyrights they control.
5. The rights for performers should be the same as those for authors (songwriters, lyricists and composers).
6. A change to UK copyright law which will end the commercial exploitation of unlicensed music purporting to be used in conjunction with ‘critical reviews’.

It just occurred to me that what artists like me, who are non-label, totally independent, need is a tracker/directory site for us to upload out torrents to.  A tracker that’s 100% legal music.  

I’m thinking since when you launch a .torrent file, depending on the client, you can select what files you want to download, artists can include in one torrent, a few different versions of their releases.  For instance, I could include a flac version, and two different mp3 bitrates, all album artwork bundled with each compression scheme  separately, and each version in it’s own folder.  

The user selects the one torrent, launches it, selects the folder for the version they want, and they get what they want.  

*Artist is distributing without needing a central server…

*Fans of indie/niche music are getting what they want the way they want it. And there’s a central place  for hard-to-find and/or totally legally-distributed-via-P2P music. 

There may also be advantages to creating a recommendation engine that excludes major-label music:  Maybe major label music obscures the analysis of music taste in some cases?  Just a thought.

I wrote a letter to the peeps at The Pirate Bay.  Maybe they’ll read it and write me back.

He touches on a number of things ranging from history of the Internet and Moore’s Law to the future ubiquity of Cloud Computing and Kurzweil‘s “Sigularity.“ 

He covers concepts like the Semantic Web, and the give-and-take between privacy and participation with relatively light language that any lay person should be able to understand.  This is an interesting and entertaining little presentation.  Thought I’d share.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDYCf4ONh5M]

“Just as citizens of a nation must be educated about their rights to ensure that they are protected and upheld, so too must those who compose words and music know the rights that support their own acts of creation. Without these rights, which directly emanate from the U.S. Constitution, many who dream of focusing their talents and energies on music creation would be economically unable to do so – an outcome that would diminish artistic expression today and for future generations.   

At this time, when so many forces are seeking to diminish copyright protections and devalue artistic expression, this Bill of Rights for Songwriters and Composers looks to clarify the entitlements that every music creator enjoys. 

1. We have the right to be compensated for the use of our creative works, and share in the revenues that they generate.
2. We have the right to license our works and control the ways in which they are used.
3. We have the right to withhold permission for uses of our works on artistic, economic or philosophical grounds.
4. We have the right to protect our creative works to the fullest extent of the law from all forms of piracy, theft and unauthorized use, which deprive us of our right to earn a living based on our creativity.
5. We have the right to choose when and where our creative works may be used for free.
6. We have the right to develop, document and distribute our works through new media channels – while retaining the right to a share in all associated profits.
7. We have the right to choose the organizations we want to represent us and to join our voices together to protect our rights and negotiate for the value of our music.
8. We have the right to earn compensation from all types of “performances,” including direct, live renditions as well as indirect recordings, broadcasts, digital streams and more.
9. We have the right to decline participation in business models that require us to relinquish all or part of our creative rights – or which do not respect our right to be compensated for our work.
10. We have the right to advocate for strong laws protecting our creative works, and demand that our government vigorously uphold and protect our rights.”

DOWNLOAD IT HERE. (ZIP FILE)

UPDATE: It’s also available as a Torrent via The Pirate Bay. Please consider seeding this. It’s a tiny, tiny file.

Here’s the Read Me info I just put together to go with it:

“LOGIN_EMAIL”
and
“PASSWORD”
and change those.
LEAVE THE QUOTES IN PLACE
Save the file.
Upload these two files to your server.
point your web browser to http://where-you-put-the-file-on-your-server/ms_test.php
and what will result is a CSV file of all your MySpace friends and their demographic information. Also included is the URLs to “send message” etc, and some other useful things.
View the source of the page and copy it into a PlainText text file
Name the text file with the extension .csv
Now you should be able to work with your myspace friends in Excel

There is nothing malicious about this simple application. No viruses, spyware etc. It only does what it’s supposed to do: scrape your friends so you can more easily work with your social network data.

If you are of the camp that feels that people scraping their own myspace contacts is unethical, I suggest that you consider that all the pages are already available and the data they contain is rendered in HTML which can be freely accessed already. This is just a tool to make it easier to get the useful data separated from the clutter.

Finally, this is possibly against MySpace’s Terms Of Service, so use at your own risk.