59 Bootleg Beatles Tracks Released Officially -- For All The Wrong Reasons

Back in January, Sony released the 'Bob Dylan Copyright Collection Volume'. As its name shamelessly proclaims, that was purely to take advantage of an EU law to extend the copyright term on recordings from 50 to 70 years there. Copyright is supposed to offer an incentive to create new works, so extending it after they are written is clearly nonsensical. Similarly, the idea that musicians will suddenly be inspired to write more new songs because of the extra 20 years of protection that only kicks in 50 years from when the song is recorded is just silly. 

On Techdirt.

E-book Industry Gets E-diotic

Learning nothing from the decade-long series of missteps by the music industry, publishers want to repeat that history in all its stupidity:

Digital piracy, long confined to music and movies, is spreading to books. And as electronic reading devices such as Amazon's Kindle, the Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble's Nook, smartphones and Apple's much-anticipated "tablet" boost demand for e-books, experts say the problem may only get worse.

Gosh, the sky is falling.

"Textbooks are frequently pirated, but so are many other categories," said Ed McCoyd, director of digital policy at AAP. "We see piracy of professional content, such as medical books and technical guides; we see a lot of general fiction and non-fiction. So it really runs the gamut."

Er, you don't think that might be because the students are being price-gouged by academic publishers that know they have a captive audience?

And how's this for a solution?

Some publishers may try to minimize theft by delaying releases of e-books for several weeks after physical copies go on sale. Simon & Schuster recently did just that with Stephen King's novel, "Under the Dome," although the publisher says the decision was made to prevent cheaper e-versions from cannibalizing hardcover sales.

In other words, they are *forcing* people who might pay for a digital edition to turn to unauthorised copies: smart move.

And it seems old JK doesn't get it either:

Some authors have even gone as far as to shrug off e-book technology altogether. J.K Rowling has thus far refused to make any of her Harry Potter books available digitally because of piracy fears and a desire to see readers experience her books in print.

Well, I'm a big fan of analogue books too - indeed, I firmly believe it is how publishers will survive. But I wonder if JK has ever considered the point that reading digital versions is rather less pleasant than snuggling down with a physical book, and so once you've got people interested in the content - through digital versions - they might then go out and buy a dead tree version?

But no, instead we are going to get all the inane reasoning that we heard from the music publishers, all the stupid attempts to "lock down" texts, and the same flourishing of publishers despite all that.

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Hell Goes Sub-Zero, Sony Does Open Source

For me, Sony has always been the antithesis of open source. So this comes as something of a shock:

Sony Pictures Imageworks, the award-winning visual effects and digital character animation unit of Sony Pictures Digital Productions, is launching an open source development program, it was announced today by Imageworks' chief technology officer, Rob Bredow. Five technologies will be released initially:

* OSL, a programmable shading language for rendering
* Field3d, a voxel data storage library
* Maya Reticule, a Maya Plug-in for camera masking
* Scala Migration, a database migration tool
* Pystring, python-like string handling in C++

Imageworks' production environment, which is known for its photo-real visual effects, digital character performances, and innovative technologies to facilitate their creation, has incorporated open source solutions, most notably the Linux operating system, for many years. Now the company is contributing back to the open source community by making these technologies available. The software can be used freely around the world by both large and small studios. Each project has a team of passionate individuals supporting it who are interested in seeing the code widely used. The intention of the open source release is to build larger communities to adopt and further refine the code.

OK, so it's only a tiny, non-mainstream bit of Sony, but it's surely a sign of the times....

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The Internet's Infinite Exploitation

Talk about opening your mouth and putting your foot in it....

Here's Michael Lynton, Chairman and CEO, Sony Pictures Entertainment - yes, the one who famously said:

"I'm a guy who sees nothing good having come from the Internet. Period."

Realising that this was not the most astute statement, he's back, desperately trying to spin. Here's a sample:

But, I actually welcome the Sturm und Drang I've stirred, because it gives me an opportunity to make a larger point (one which I also made during that panel discussion, though it was not nearly as viral as the sentence above). And my point is this: the major content businesses of the world and the most talented creators of that content -- music, newspapers, movies and books -- have all been seriously harmed by the Internet.

Well, no: music, news, films and books and the people who create them are all thriving; what *isn't* thriving is the old way of providing access to them - things like Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Anyway, let's pass over that and hear what the man who insists "I am not an analogue guy living in a digital world" has to say:

Contrast the expansion of the Internet with what happened a half century ago. In the 1950's, the Eisenhower Administration undertook one of the most massive infrastructure projects in our nation's history -- the creation of the Interstate Highway System. It completely transformed how we did business, traveled, and conducted our daily lives. But unlike the Internet, the highways were built and operated with a set of rational guidelines. Guard rails went along dangerous sections of the road. Speed and weight limits saved lives and maintenance costs. And officers of the law made sure that these rules were obeyed. As a result, as interstates flourished, so did the economy.

Well, I have to confess that sounds pretty analogue to me. The Internet doesn't need "guardrails", because there are no safety issues. In particular, there are no lives or maintenance costs to save. It's a completely bogus analogy, trying to draw on a romantic image fromthe past livened up with a little fear-mongering about those lives that need saving.

But the real give-away is the following:

without standards of commerce and more action against piracy, the intellectual property of humankind will be subject to infinite exploitation on the Internet.

What a wonderful phrase: "infinite exploitation on the Internet" - a perfect description of *precisely* what humanity needs. The inability to provide that "infinite exploitation" is precisely why the current system ought to be superseded. And finally, the fact that this glorious possibility is meant to be a *criticism* of the Internet shows that poor Mr. Lynton is indeed an analogue guy in a digital world - worse, one whose mind keeps bumping up against his own, internal guardrails.

Update: Don't miss Mike Masnick's even more thorough debunking.

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Dell Joins Netbook Race to Bottom

There are two schools of thought about netbooks. The first is that they are simply another kind of notebook - smaller, a bit cheaper, but otherwise nothing really new. The second is that they are a completely new market sector - a view that I have been propounding for almost as long as they've existed

One indication that they are distinct is that the prices of netbooks are still falling rapidly - and will continue to fall. That's in contradistinction to notebooks, where prices tend to be much more stable, but features are added over time. The netbook is about *minimum* acceptable functionality, while notebooks are about achieving near-desktop capabilities (themselves constantly improving) in a package that's portable.

Here's another proof-point:

Dell fires back at the Taiwanese market leaders with the Mini 9n. Starting at just $250, this Ubuntu netbook is easily one of the cheapest on the market from a brand-name manufacturer.

The catch? The netbook only comes with 512 MB of RAM and a 4 GB hard drive. But remember it uses Ubuntu, which runs significantly more efficiently than Windows. This means of course that it can only run Linux programs but give me Firefox and Open Office and I can conquer the world.

This is just what notebook manufacturers fear: a "race to the bottom", as Sony so memorably put it. Dell's participation in that race will send shivers down the spine of manufacturers who thought they could ride the netbook wave with their low-end notebooks.

Do I hear $200?

The Net Net of Netbooks

Netbooks have been one of the surprise successes over the last year. They have also been one of the most contentious areas of computing. There are conflicting reports on most aspects of the sector – in terms of market share, rate of returns etc. - and it is easy to assume that it's all fad and fashion. Against that background, it's good to have some figures – any figures – that might throw a little light on this promising sector.

On Open Enterprise blog.

O Hypocrisy, Thy Name is Sony

Do as I say, not as I do, seems to be the case with Sony:

PointDev, un éditeur français, attaque la maison de disques en justice pour avoir utilisé sans licence un de ses outils d'administration : Ideal Migration.

[PointDev, a French software publisher, is taking the record company to court for having used one of its administration tools, Ideal Migration, without a licence.]

Well let's hope these scurvy Sony dogs feel the full force of the law. (Via Planet Creative Commons.)

Hardware's Race to the Bottom

I've written several times about the importance of the Asus Eee PC; here's another way of looking at it:

At Sony's annual Open House event, Sony's IT product division senior vice president Mike Abary said if the Asus Eee PC starts to do well, it could potentially shift the entire notebook industry into a race to the bottom.

If mainstream PC buyers start to find their needs met by a lightweight, simply featured, inexpensive portable, it's likely to impel all of the major players in the industry to pile on by lowering their prices.

This, of course, is precisely what open source has done to proprietary code, so it's interesting to see the same happening to hardware, again driven by free software.

Confirmed! Sony is Barking

Sony BMG Music Entertainment on Jan. 15 becomes the last major record company to sell downloads without copy restrictions

which would be great, were it not for that this tiny sting in the tail:

— but only to buyers who first visit a retail store.

Now, why do I get the strange feeling that Sony doesn't fully understand this tubey Internet thingamy-bob?

Sony Reads the e-Leaves

I have to admit that I hate Sony computers. I bought a Vaio portable once, and it was awful in just about every respect - overpriced, weird backup discs, and a battery that soon died on me, with no sensibly-priced option of getting a replacement. So I don't come with many positive feelings towards its new e-book device, the PRS-505. But apparently it does a couple of things right:

the Reader is powered by Montavista Linux and uses code from projects like OpenSSL and Freetype

There again, you'd be mad not to use GNU/Linux on a system like this. Now all Sony needs to do is reduce the price by a factor of about ten and I might be vaguely interested.

Or maybe not.

"Secure" As In Manacled

I hadn't really taken on board this insidious bit of weasel-wordery before, but that's just my negligence:

The new NWZ-A810 and NWZ-S610 series will have a QVGA screen for video playback...more importantly, the players support secure Windows Media Audio (WMA), as well as non-secure AAC and MP3 music formats

What? You mean MP3 isn't secure - that somebody might break into my PC if I foolishly adopt that format? Who would have guessed?

Oh, I see: that's "secure" as in "securely manacled to the wall"; this is not "secure" WMA, it's DRM'd WMA. C'mon Rafat, you can do better than this: PaidContent readers look to you to be told things as they really are in the content world, not to be fed marketing disinformation like this.

Don't Mess With Our Thing

This litany of music industry woes is an object lesson in what happens if you fight the (Net) Family:

The major labels are struggling to reinvent their business models, even as some wonder whether it's too late. "The record business is over," says music attorney Peter Paterno, who represents Metallica and Dr. Dre. "The labels have wonderful assets -- they just can't make any money off them." One senior music-industry source who requested anonymity went further: "Here we have a business that's dying. There won't be any major labels pretty soon."

Amazingly, it could have all been so different:

Seven years ago, the music industry's top executives gathered for secret talks with Napster CEO Hank Barry. At a July 15th, 2000, meeting, the execs -- including the CEO of Universal's parent company, Edgar Bronfman Jr.; Sony Corp. head Nobuyuki Idei; and Bertelsmann chief Thomas Middelhof -- sat in a hotel in Sun Valley, Idaho, with Barry and told him that they wanted to strike licensing deals with Napster. "Mr. Idei started the meeting," recalls Barry, now a director in the law firm Howard Rice. "He was talking about how Napster was something the customers wanted."

So near and yet so far. (Via IP Democracy.)

The Sun Sets on Sony

Sony is a strange company. Despite its numerous mis-steps - remember that DRM rootkit? - people still seem to harbour a certain affection for the outfit. Maybe it's that all those years spent playing on the Playstation have addled their brains...(well, it couldn't be because of the Walkman, could it?).

Me, well, I never played on the Playstation. I did own a Vaio laptop once (The horror! The horror!): I hated it, and I have sworn never to buy another. So this story about the possibility of Sony going permanently down the tubes rather warmed the cockles of my heart. Pathetic, I know. (Via Monkchips.)