I’m in the airport, waiting for a flight to Denver. By the time you read this, of course, I’ll be in Denver. Because I can’t access the Internet in the air and I have to pay an outrageous amount for it in the airport. I used Google Gears to download my feeds, which is mostly useful since most of my feeds are full feeds. But if I want to hop on for 15 minutes to download some things to read on my 4-hour flight, I can’t. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could pay by the minute or something? The pricing structures for most airports/hotels/etc. are daily rates, usually around 10 bucks for 24 hours. I’m usually in an airport for less than an hour so it doesn’t make sense to pay for a full day. And it’s much more efficient to download some items to read offline than to read everything online. We used to do that in the days of dialup, but now not so much. Wireless and broadband are ubiquitous and mostly inexpensive (as a subscriber) so we just stay online all the time. But there are still these situations where momentary access would be useful. And honestly, in some cases, it might save money, energy and time.

Oh, I know I could have one of those wireless cards offered by the telecoms, but they’re pretty pricey too. Most don’t have a “pay-as-you-go” feature and require you to sign up for a plan at around $30/month. Considering I’m not in this situation that often, it doesn’t make sense to pay for something I’d use 2-3 times a year. Most of these products are geared toward the frequent traveler or business person not the casual user. It’s a shame. They’re missing out on a few bucks from me and I’m looking around at several hundred people who would probably have chipped in a buck or two to do a quick email check or check the weather at their destination. If you want to go in on a business plan with me, call. No email, of course cause I’m off the grid.

I’ve posted an update on the hd-dvd code incident on my other blog and my thoughts about why educators (really, everyone) should be paying attention.

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08. March 2007 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

The RIAA is increasing its efforts to stop downloading on college campuses. Their new strategy involves sending out settlement letters to students. The letters, presumably, will be more threatening than the current takedown notices they send out regularly. I happen to be our campus DMCA agent. I’m the one who receives those takedown notices and who forwards them to the students. I had read the article referenced above, but because we receive so few notices in the first place (about 1/month), I figured we probably didn’t have anything to worry about. Monday morning, however, I received a notice that one of these letters would be sent soon. The language was indeed more threatening and the word “subpoena” appeared in the letter. So we traipsed off to the lawyer’s office to discuss strategy.

I’m not thrilled to be the DMCA agent. I know downloading is illegal. I don’t condone it. But I believe that it is (maybe just was) a reaction to an industry that didn’t keep up with the capabilities of new technology. Even though the industry does now provide legal ways to download music, movies, and tv shows, there’s still the DRM issue. Many people, myself included, have issues with DRM. For some, that means they find legal ways to obtain DRM-free music. Others resort to downloading.

Even though I will do my job as the DMCA agent, I was still feeling a little creepy about the whole thing. The new strategy felt a little more draconian, and I didn’t want to become more draconian in response. Kenneth Green articulates a possible reason for my discomfort. College students may be unfairly targeted. Why isn’t the RIAA going after more individuals in homes? Or better yet, people who make pirate copies of CDs and DVDs? In fact, Green says, the strategies offered by the RIAA to combat illegal downloading smack of extortion (one option is to provide access to legal music downloading). Green says that when asked about why the RIAA was focusing on colleges instead of ISPs, they said “the consumer broadband providers view litigation as a cost of doing business, while, in contrast, the RIAA knows that colleges and universities, when presented with the threat of litigation, will ‘jump.’” In other words, we may be low-hanging fruit for them.

At some point, I think the RIAA is going to have to figure out ways to allow people to buy music legally and to share it legally, not via these P2P programs, but in similar ways that we always have–the digital version of mixtapes. DRM sometimes makes this difficult. Maybe I’m being idealistic, but maybe if they stop treating their consumers as criminals, they’ll stop acting like criminals. A little mutual respect might go a long way.

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12. February 2007 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,
Several stories in the news are discussing the possibility of buying music DRM free. Steve Jobs, I guess, is urging music companies to drop DRM and now EMI is in talks with several music services about the possibility of selling its entire catalog to them without DRM. I’ve always hated DRM. It punishes the wrong people. Oh, I’m sure there are plenty of “regular” people out there downloading and sharing copyrighted music, tv shows and movies, but in general, the big violators are the pirates selling cds on the streets. And you know, we all go over the speed limit sometimes. The worst thing about DRM though is that it prevents most of us from doing what we want with our music, and you know what, that might include making a cd for a friend (which usually means eventual sales for the record company, just FYI), or having music on multiple machines (like home and work) without any hassles.



I just had a nasty run-in with DRM last night. I finally got around to buying the new BNL album and so I was updating my iPod when I got a lovely message saying that 51 of my songs were not authorized to play on my computer. Now, that was a weird message because I’ve had the same computer for almost 6 years now. I authorized my work computer, so that’s 2. It took me a while to figure out what the problem was. It turns out that those 51 songs were purchased using my .Mac account, which I no longer have. I now use my Google email. At first, I think iTunes didn’t really notice this switch, but now recognizes that I’m using a different username. I am not happy about this and have sent a note into the iTunes Customer Service to see if they can fix it. Honestly, I used to strip the DRM from my purchased music, but at some point the third-party software I was using to do so couldn’t keep up with the upgrades to iTunes. 51 songs is a lot of music to be missing, especially since it includes some of my favorites (like Death Cab for Cutie). And I was just singing Apple’s praises last week. Let’s see if they live up to my expectations.





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