Lucas Gonze’s blog

I tried out Chompin yesterday. Really fun and inspiring. It’s a cousin of Shuffler.fm and Extension.fm.

Nearby older relations are Hype Machine, Elbo.ws, Yahoo Media Player, and the Webjay “Play this page” feature.

Some ways to talk about the zeitgeist:

1. Keep music from the web in the web. Don’t go to a music blog, download a track, and then listen in iTunes. Keep bookmarks of tracks from the web together with the source where you found them. And don’t download at all, leave the files at their source HTTP URLs.
2. Keep content and context together. When you play back a track from a music blog, go back to the blog.
3. Make playlists of out music blog entries. As you play each song, open the source site. When the song is over move on to the next site.
4. Web pages as digital music packaging. Opening a particular page gets you album art, rich metadata, liner notes, interactivity.

It takes 33 bits to identify you:

Take, for example, a database that stores a user’s ZIP code, gender, age and model of car. On their own, these things sound anonymous. But if the ZIP code has 20,000 people, gender narrows that down to 10,000. Age could cut it down to a few hundred, and once you add model of car, you could be looking at a handful of people. Add other characteristics, like specific browser type and computer operating system, and you may be describing just one individual.

How many pieces of information are needed to identify an individual? In the field of re-identification science, it’s 33 “bits,” specifically “33 bits of entropy.” (Information-science researchers refer to random pieces of information as “entropy.”)

Could you consider those bits an identifier? Could you call yourself “the 22 year old male in the 02130 zip code who drives a Ford Bronco”?

For some purposes, yes.

You could pick up messages left for that identifier as long as it didn’t matter whether somebody else read them. This identifier would be accurate enough to enable you to find messages that were intended to reach you.

Needless to say this ID scheme is decentralized. There isn’t a provider of these identities – individuals make their own by moving to a particular zip code or selecting a particular car.

But could anybody remember these identifiers? I think so. The hard part is zip codes, but I think that’s doable.

Apropos of changing the subject, I got an email asking would it be possible to advertise in one of your blog posts? and offering a hundred bucks if I put a particular link in a post, obviously for SEO reasons.

I feel like it would be gross to not take the money. It’s the same question as whether you pick up a penny on the floor. Maybe I don’t even want pennies, maybe the trouble to bend down is worth more than the penny. I try to always take the penny, under the theory that it’s disrespectful to people who really need a penny if I leave it there.

Years ago I took money for mentioning a company in blog posts on gonze.com. Some friends tolerated this, some must have moved on. It is weird to do to people in a personal blog, like signing on to a pyramid scheme that requires you to turn your friends into zombie suckers just like yourself, except at your profit and their expense.

I remember offering to buy a drink for the cyber celebrities Lawrence Lessig and Tim O’Reilly, who I had run into at the bar at a conference. They took it as offering to buy dinner. I guess people often do that for them because they’re celebrities. They took me up on the perceived offer and by the time I figured out what they thought I was too embarrassed to correct them, maybe because of their celebrityhood. They must have seen that offer the way I see this one.

A tip for life: when somebody writes you a check, cash it. So I put the link in, along with a little blurb about the money stuff. (That blurb is how this post started). Also I named the logo image on my site thesefolksgavemeahundredbuckstoputthishere.png. And the guy didn’t dig it.

So I moved the blurb out to this post. But the dude still didn’t dig the image name, and he didn’t like that I prefaced the link with here’s a link that will earn me a few bucks in exchange for some SEO juice. So I said forget it and gave the money back to make him go away. Easy come, easy go.

I’m sitting in a cafe and I hear that Phil Collins hit “I can hear it coming on the edge of night” or whatever the title is. That song bugs me. And it strikes me that it’s possible to selectively remove it from my existence.

Picture if you will a noise cancellation headset with a dynamic perspective on what noise is. Rather than identifying background sound as noise, it identifies a constantly changing (but well known) stream of audio signal as noise. The constantly changing audio is none other than a recording of a song which you hate.

Hated songs are identified via audio fingerprinting, like Shazam. You allow your Shazam-like live audio fingerprinting system to be on constantly, so that any time a hated song appears in your audio environment, the software recognizes it. The software activates the Imaginary Dynamic Noise Cancellation (IDNC) controller. The IDNC switches on your noise cancellation headset using the hated song previously identified as the target. Henceforth to the end of the song, that source is filtered from your reality.

*Wham*! Or more precisely, *no* Wham any more, ever, if you don’t dig them. They’d be snipped out of reality.

Between my smartphone, tablet, and laptop, it’s a problem if I have a file on local disk instead of in the cloud. The file is only accessible on FOO computer? Ridiculous.

When I was helping my brother set up a link between his digital camera and his laptop last weekend, he specifically didn’t want the photos to go to the laptop because then he would lose them as soon as he changed machine.

I’ve been backing up to Backblaze instead of a disk lately. Partly it’s that I’ve had several backup disks go bad and take down my history. Partly it’s that the files are then accessible via the cloud.

Not long ago this was spacey and futuristic. Soon it won’t be worth remarking on.

From the Viacom vs YouTube summary judgement (pdf):

The DMCA notification procedures place the burden of policing copyright infringement—identifying the potentially infringing material and adequately documenting infringement—squarely on the owners of the copyright. We decline to shift a substantial burden from the copyright owner to the provider …

That makes sense, as the infringing works in suit may be a small fraction of millions of works posted by others on the service’s platform, whose provider cannot by inspection determine whether the use has been licensed by the owner, or whether its posting is a “fair use” of the material, or even whether its copyright owner or licensee objects to its posting.

This is a deeply wise decision. Solomonic.

The next hurdle is a method to enable rights holders to police infringement at internet scale. They need to be able to send takedown notices fast enough (and have them take effect) for their will to be respected.

YouTube won summary judgement motion against Viacom. This means that the DMCA safe harbors for ISPs have passed judicial review. That would mean a big reduction in legal risk for internet developers whose products are able to implement notice-and-takedown. Just be very careful to get the legal details right and your startup will be on predictable footing.

But caveat emptor. This is just one bit of data in a very complex landscape.

“Filesharing music amongst UK teens down by a third” (PDF):

Overall levels of regular file-sharing music are down, particularly amongst UK teenagers:

• The overall percentage of music fans file-sharing regularly (i.e. every month) has gone down since the last national survey. In December 2007 22% regularly file- shared tracks, but in January 2009 this was down to 17%, a comparative drop of nearly a quarter.
• The biggest drop in those regularly file-sharing occurred amongst 14-18 year olds. (In December 2007 42% of 14-18s were filesharing at least once a month. In January 2009 this was down to just 26%)
  This is despite the fact that the percentage of music fans who have ever file-shared has, unsurprisingly, increased, rising from 28% in December 2007 to 31% in January 2009. The move to streaming – e.g. YouTube, MySpace and Spotify – is clear with the research showing that many teens (65%) are streaming music regularly (i.e. each month). Nearly twice as many 14-18s (31%) listen to streamed music on their computer every day compared to music fans overall (18%). More fans are regularly sharing burned CDs and bluetoothing tracks to each other than file-sharing tracks.

David Barrett (aka Quinthar)‘s comment on the quinthar edition blog post:

The fact that an insignificant pirate outfit like Limewire is within an order of magnitude to the revenue earned by Apple on content sales is stunning. Apple is worth $240 *billion* dollars; it earns over $40B a year in revenue. For it to only earn $150M on content sales should be proof that nobody else should even bother. As a comparison, they sold 2M iPads in 2 months. Those cost $500 each, so that’s roughly a billion dollars. In 2 months, from one product. iTunes will never, ever be significant to Apple. Indeed, I believe the only reason Apple has iTunes is to distract from the fact that Apple is the major beneficiary of piracy. Nobody can argue with a straight face that people buy $30K worth of iTunes music to fill up their ever-expanding iPods; Apple *is* the largest inducer of piracy in the world. They’re just more clever about monetizing and hiding it.

Yup! I agree. I just don’t agree that unauthorized distribution matters to the recording industry except where it reduces profit. My case is not that the Sue Em All strategy has given consumers an direct incentive to stop filesharing.

My case is that the Sue Em All strategy has lead to new products being created which stay as far away from infringement as possible, and they are successfully drawing attention from filesharing. Pandora, YouTube, Hulu are all licensed, and they’re all doing significant volume. And out of the current wave of music products, nothing interesting is coming out of vendors with significant legal exposure.