Luis Villa: Open Tech and Policy
Software, law, and the spaces in between.
good news: a post from my journal’s blog team made it all the way to slashdot.
bad news: slashdot (more specifically, the blog we’re nominally affiliated with) called our writing ‘surprisingly readable.’ It’s sad that lawyers are supposed to be excellent communicators, and yet our training typically stilts our writing so much that it is surprising when our work can be read by the public.
I’ve been scouring the internet for this information, but no luck so far, so I’ll ask here in hopes something will come of it.
Amazon is charging less (in some cases significantly less) for their mp3 music service than the same album in physical media. The question is: where is that reduced cost coming from? Out of the pockets of the distributors (as a result of lower media costs), or of the artists (as a result of…?) There is at least anecdotal evidence that artists make significantly less when you buy their album from iTunes than when you buy the same CD, which is insane. Does Amazon’s mp3 service have the same problem?
I’m otherwise leaning in the direction of becoming a regular user of Amazon’s mp3 service- no DRM, increased convenience, and lower costs is exactly what should be happening to the music industry right now, and Amazon is doing all of those. But if that actually improves the position of the labels at the expense of artists… ewww. I want to pay artists for their art, not distributors for their 20th century marketing and overhead, and if Amazon makes that harder rather than easier… Not Cool.
(I realize there are issues with mp3s as a closed standard, but that’s a post for another way.)
I’ve been using a fair number of CC-licensed images in blog posts lately; I’ve had a lot of fun doing it- looking through and finding the pictures is often a blast. I’ve noticed others are doing more of this lately as well.
CC, by Franz Patzig, used under the CC-BY license.
Note that in all of the pictures I use, I include the title, the creator, and the license, plus links for each of those. It is my pleasure to give credit to the generous artists who let me use their work.
But let this post serve as a quick reminder: the Creative Commons licenses also require that when using the licensed work, you must also include the URI of the license, the name or pseudonym of the author, and the title and URI of the work. These requirements are fairly loose (they need only be appropriate to the medium) but they are there, and they should be respected.
Tangentially: some CC fan should update this flickr greasemonkey script (or a similar one) to include proper licensing information. That would make this whole blogging thing so much easier :)
I’m spending today at a conference on user-generated content at New York Law School. Some notes from throughout the day. As usual, these come with the disclaimer that these are not direct quotes (unless I indicate them to be with quotes); as such you should not cite them as the words of the speaker, but rather as my paraphrase.
Rest will be below the fold.
