President Bush is quoted as saying, in part, that one of the artists on his iPod is The Beatles.

As you may know, none of The Beatles songs are available on the iTunes Store or on any other online music store. The only way to get them onto an iPod is to copy them from a Beatles CD.

Jennifer Pariser, Sony BMG’s the head of litigation, recently testified, when asked if it was “okay if a consumer makes just one copy of a track they’ve legally purchased. She said no — that’s “a nice way of saying, ‘steals just one copy.’”

So, it seems the position of Sony BMG is that George W. Bush is a thief. I wonder when they’ll file the lawsuit.

In the US. The price for series 1 of Lost is $34.99. That’s about £18 including tax at the current exchange rate. So what is Apple charging for the same thing in the UK? £34.99. That’s about $70. Nice profit margin for someone, but I’m sure not going to pay it.

Even leaving out the UK/US price comparison, you can buy the series one DVD box set from Amazon UK for £32.97. That’s the total price with free shipping and look at what you get for money:

* A higher resolution picture (720×576 for PAL vs. 640×480 for iTunes video)
* Dolby Digital 5.1
* Lost Flashbacks All New Unaired Flashbacks
* Welcome To Oahu The Making Of The Pilot Behind The Scenes Featurette
* The Genesis Of Lost
* The Art Of Matthew Fox
* Audio Commentaries
* Before They Were Lost Audition Tapes And Personal Stories From The Cast
* Deleted Scenes

So, not only is it slightly over two pounds cheaper, but you get 5.1 audio, a higher resolution and a bunch of extra scenes and content.

But surely you get something unique in the iTunes version right? Yup, here’s what:

* Available to watch within a few hours
* Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to prevent you from playing back your purchase on anything other than Apple’s devices

So why in the world would I buy the iTunes version when I can have the DVD version for the same price? And if I want to watch it on my iPod or AppleTV, there’s always [Handbrake](http://handbrake.m0k.org/).

This means that people who bought HD ready TVs in anticipation of watching high-def movies, but whose TVs don’t have the latest HDCP copy protection will still be able to watch them at full HD resolution.

Now, this is being reported on Slashdot as “Blue-Ray won’t use…”, but if you actually read the original article, it’s only Sony-the-movie-studio doing this. The players and discs will still have the capability to do this, so if other studies want to cripple your television to stop the big bad pirate boogie man, then they can.

But still, at least Sony, perhaps having been bitten once by the anti-consumer problems of DRM, has realized that giving people less is a bad way to sell them new stuff.

Technorati Tags: DRM, copyfight, sony

He said something in the Q and A period that was something of a revelation to me. “My biggest problem as a novelist is not piracy,” he said, “it’s obscurity.” This statement made me realize two things: First, he’s right, and second, that this is the retort when our side is accused of not caring about artists.

Record companies are basically bankers. They loan artists money for the cost of making an album, marketing and promotion of the album, distribution, etc. The album sales go toward paying of the loans. So, the record company wants to make its money back from the successful artists’ albums and cover the bad loans it made to the unsuccessful artists.

This is why you have top ten lists, massive payola on the radio, enormous marketing blitzes aimed at getting teens to buy the latest boy band album, etc. You see, the record company actually needs a few big name artists who are going to sell a massive amount of albums to cover the loss on the other artists. Like any banker, they are going to try and maximize their returns while minimizing their losses. That is, they will pick a few “safe” artists that they know will appeal to a wide audience and promote the hell out of them. Everyone else gets left behind.

So, if you sound like the big selling artist of today, you’ll probably find the record company will promote you. This is why, when one band with a new sound makes it big, you suddenly get five or six other bands who sound the same. The record companies don’t want to take risks, so they basically want to sell you the same thing again, with a “new and improved” sticker on the outside.

Lets try a little thought experiment. Imagine a world where the record companies have achieved their goal of creating a technical and legal confluence, such that DRM systems really do work to stop people from sharing music. Leaving aside the impossibility of such a state (for reasons I won’t go into, but if you do any research on security, you’ll understand).

So what happens in this world where perfect DRM exists? There is no casual sharing of music. The only artists that anyone hears are the ones the record companies decide to take a risk on. Now, answer honestly, is this a good thing for artists?

Sure, it’s good for few that the record company decides to promote. But what about the vast number of artists who don’t appeal to a multi-million dollar audience? Or who don’t sound like the hit artist of last month?

Lets say your an artist whose style of music might only appeal to enough people to make, say $60,000 a year. That wouldn’t get you in the door of a record company. But that’s a pretty nice amount of money for your average artist. If, through the sharing culture, enough people found your music such that you’d make sixty grand a year, I think most artists would be pretty happy with that.

The current situation is a fiefdom, where a few at the top make millions and the rest starve. Yes, some artists might not get money every time someone downloads their track, but most artists have a bigger problem. Nobody knows who they are and cares enough to download their track.

Technorati Tags: copyright, DRM

From the news reports I’ve read, he’s right. For example, here’s a report about Bush’s visit to the disaster area. Apparently, it was entirely staged with the food distribution point torn down as soon as he left.

If you just want to hear the radio interview, it’s here.

Technorati Tags: Bush, Katrina, New Orleans

They’ve got guests, a dance troupe, and even a band leader.

They occasionally loose a guest do to another player coming along and shooting them, but they still manage to construct a reasonable show with nothing more than in-game “sets”, multiple points of view provided by “camera men” and the voice capabilities of the xbox.

One of the guests commented that it’s like “Snow Crash” (Neal Stephenson) where the action takes place in the real world and in a virtual reality simulation named the Metaverse.

Life imitates art, I guess.

Technorati Tags: stephenson, thisspartanlife, xbox

The paid shills politicians in Washington are being bribed lobbied to pass the Broadband Investment and Consumer Choice Act.

Of course, you should know that in the language of legislation, this bill is about everything but investment and consumer choice.

The whole point of the Internet, as opposed to older networks like the original AOL and CompuServe, is that every computer is equal. That is, the Internet is a dumb network designed to carry simple data packets from one machine to the next. It doesn’t care what those packets represent, as long as they conform to some basic standards.

This was the vision of the internet as the great democratization of communication. You don’t have to be the phone company or a large multinational corporation to have this amazing communication technology at your disposal.

You also didn’t need a lot of cash to have the same voice on the Internet as Shell Oil or the government.

As you can imagine, the status quo hate that. Oh sure, we’ve gone through the years of newspaper editors crying about the lack of editorial control, but that’s nothing compared to the Broadband Investment and Consumer Choice Act.

According to Susan Crawford, “The whole point of BICCA is that it dismantles any interconnection obligations for broadband providers. These obligations go upwards — so there’s no requirement to allow all applications or content to be permitted or carried on the network. And they also go downwards — so there’s no requirement to allow all user devices to be attached to the network.”

This is nothing less than the dismantling of the Internet. This is going back to the stone age of centrally controlled content from big stuffy media companies. Boring as fuck and just as profitable.

There’s a reason CompuServe, Prodigy, and the old AOL are no longer with us. Don’t bring back by legislative fiat that which to market has soundly rejected. You’ll just end up with Fidonet all over again…

I’m struck be the quality of early reporting on this story. The number of articles I’ve seen that are misleading or just flat out wrong is incredible.

I’m not just talking about obscure points of law either. Some of the stories get the basic facts of the case wrong, like what the various parties are actually suing for.

In all this, I’ve noticed a couple of things about online news websites that you should look for when deciding how much to believe. When reading an article, ask yourself these questions:

• Do they have a name associated with the article?
• Can you actually send an e-mail to the journalist who wrote it?
• Can you, at least, send an e-mail to the editor of the article?
• Is there a date that the article was published?
• Do they quote more than one source or sources with opposing viewpoints?

If you can answer yes to all five of those questions, consider bookmarking that site. It’s probably run by professional journalists who aren’t afraid to stake their reputation on what they write.

If you can’t; if the site only lets you fill in some comment form submitted to who-knows-who, or even worse, the only e-mail address you can find is for “webmaster@…”, don’t bother reading the article. It’s probably not worth the bits is magnetized on.