Matt Yglesias makes a good point about the Birdmonster story:
I have to think it would be odd to see tons of folks want to follow down this particular path over the long haul. Just because technological changes may make it easier to do publicity, marketing, distribution, etc. on a DIY basis doesn’t necessarily make doing things that way appealing or advisable. After all, there’s no particular reason to think people ready and able to produce music people want to hear are going to have enormous aptitude or inclination to do this other stuff once they’re in a position to get someone else to do it for them in exchange for money. That could be the case even if, in some sense, the numbers “don’t add up.” The simple added convenience of outsourcing functions outside one’s core areas of interest/competency has value. More likely, you’ll just see the nature of services that bands get in exchange for a chunk of their earnings will shift as the structure of the music industry shifts with it.
I think this is obviously right. Division of labor is a good thing. The guy who’s good at playing the guitar is probably not the same guy who’s good at writing press releases, booking shows, or handling media inquiries. Labels have traditionally handled those functions, and clearly there will be continued demand for people to do that.
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Ed Felten has responded to Diebold’s criticism of his paper. Felten emphasizes that the most interesting thing about Diebold’s response is what they don’t say. They cite a lot of supposed security measures–tamper-evident seals, encryption, digital signatures, etc–but at no point in the response does Diebold specifically claim that any of those measures actually would have prevented the attacks Felten describes in his paper. Diebold waves their arms a lot in the hope you won’t notice this. But the bottom line is that Diebold has given us no reason to believe that the vulnerabilities documented in the paper have been corrected.
The Long Tail has an interesting example of the phenomenon I described a couple of weeks ago, in which bands are increasingly finding fans without the labels as intermediaries. Anderson tells the story of Birdmonster, a band fronted by a former Wired staffer. He describes their climb through the ranks of the indie music scene:
Birdmonster courted Internet radio stations, which have none of the constraints of traditional broadcast. As it happened, it was “Ted,” the owner of San Francisco’s BagelRadio.com, who convinced the booker to give Birdmonster its first big break, an opening gig for Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. That (and a batle-of-the-bands contest) led to an opening for the White Stripes, which was at that moment the pinnacle of indie rock. Birdmonster had arrived.
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Variety reports that Yahoo’s lobbying effort to get the labels to ditch DRM reached another milestone:
In a first for mainstream pop music, Yahoo! will sell Jesse McCartney’s new album “Right Where You Want Me,” from Disney-owned Hollywood Records, in the unprotected MP3 format. That means consumers will be able to play it on any digital music device, including Apple’s iPod. MP3 files are the only type that will play on an iPod besides those downloaded from iTunes.
But because they have no copy protection, MP3 files can be easily traded on peer-to-peer networks, emailed to friends or burned onto an endless number of CDs.
“We’re trying to be realistic,” said Ken Bunt, senior VP of marketing at Hollywood Records. “Jesse’s single is already online and we haven’t put it out. Piracy happens regardless of what we do. So we’re going to see how Jesse’s album goes (as an MP3) and then decide on others going forward.”
Yahoo! previously sold an exclusive version of Jessica Simpson song “A Public Affair” as an MP3, but it has never offered a major-label album for sale elsewhere without copy restriction, nor have any of the other digital music stores.
That’s the most sensible quote about DRM I’ve seen from the recording industry in… well, probably ever. I’ve never heard of Jesse McCartney, but I’m tempted to buy a copy of his album on principle. If it sells well, maybe that will encourage other labels to be equally realistic.
Hat tip: Derek
Update: I poked around on Yahoo’s site for a little while, but couldn’t find an easy way to buy the album. Perhaps you have to do that through their client software, which doesn’t appear to have a Mac version. If anyone knows of a straightforward way to buy the MP3 version of the music, please let me know.
So I’m having a party this evening, and while poking around the web, I discovered this tidbit: if you’ve got Airport Express, you can now play your music to multiple speakers. That means I can plug my laptop into the speakers into my bedroom, plug a second set of speakers into the Airport Express in my living room, and have perfectly synchronized music playing to both speakers simultaneously, filling the whole apartment with music.
The equipment needed to do this cost a grand total of about $200. Ten years ago, I’d guess the equipment required to do this would have cost thousands of dollars. Thirty years ago, home consumers probably couldn’t have gotten equivalent functionality at any price. The best you could have done would be to run wires through your ceiling, and even then, you would have been limited to playing records or casette tapes.
All of which is an excuse to link to my friend Will Wilkinson’s great article about inequality. Will points out that while monetary inequality is increasing, what we should be really worried about is material inequality–and by almost any measure, this has been rapidly decreasing. My $200 iTunes/Airport music setup has features that would have cost thousands of dollars a decade ago. In this sense, technological progress is the greatest egalitarian force the world has ever known. Although the financial gap between the rich and poor is growing, the gap in the material quality of life between rich and poor is shrinking, as more and more luxuries once available only to the rich become widely affordable to everyone.
Will puts all this much better than I can, so go read his article.
Update: I’ve got another story along the same vein: I’ve been to several weddings recently, and all of them have dispensed with DJs, using their iPods as electronic DJs. None of them has regretted it. Indeed, in at least one respect, the iPod is better: you get to decide exactly what’s on the playlist. No worrying about whether the DJ has good music taste, or whether your guests will request bad music. One more distinction between more-expensive and less-expensive weddings has been obliterated by technology.
Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. This week our patent comes via Ars, which reported on Thursday that a company called Paltalk has sued Microsoft over allegations that its XBox Live gaming platform violates two of Paltalk’s patents.
We’ll consider the older of the two patents, which you can see here. It covers a “server-group messaging system for interactive applications.” In a nutshell, this “invention” coordinates the transmission of packets among video game players in precisely the same way that mailing list software coordinates the transmission of an email to multiple email addresses.
The patent describes a variety of functions of this “invention.” For example, it offers the ability to aggregate messages from several different sources and send them out bundled together as a single message. This is precisely analogous to what mailing lists do with their “daily digest” feature. It also includes protocols for creating groups and adding and removing computers from groups. There are, again, precise analogues to these functions in ordinary mailing list software.
Mailing list software existed years before this patent was filed in 1998. The only difference between this invention and mailing list software is that the type of message they send is different (emails versus realtime gaming notifications), and the time horizons involved are different (minutes or hours versus seconds). But neither of those difficulties really changes the technical design principles involved. This is an obvious patent.
This is a recurring problem with software patents: often someone takes a well known software design, apply it in a new context, and declare it a new, patentable invention. But although the result may look superficially different, under the hood the software is very similar. The power of computer programming comes from the ability to use a small number of well-understood software techniques to solve a wide variety of problems. We’d think it absurd to patent the idea of using a hammer on a new kind of nail. It’s no less absurd to patent the idea of using a well-known software technique in a new domain.
This week Microsoft released details about Zune, Microsoft’s purported iPod killer. Techdirt is reporting that Zune won’t be compatible with Microsoft’s previous digital rights management technology, which, ironically enough, was branded “Plays for Sure.” Microsoft’s marketing folks might want to look into changing that. In addition, nothing seems to have come of rumors that Microsoft would “buy out” iTunes users by giving them copies of the songs they’d previously purchased at the iTunes store. Which is really peculiar, given that it would have been a big win for both the labels and Microsoft.
I doubt Steve Jobs is losing over sleep over this.
OK, this will be the last voting machine post for the week, but I couldn’t help plugging Avi Rubin’s new blog, which was pointed out to me by Mike Masnick. In particular, Rubin has a chilling account of his experiences as an election judge. He describes how two of the machines didn’t have the right security tags, and so they were set aside. However, later in the day, facing high turnout, they got a call from the elections board telling them to put those machines back into service. And there’s more:
Throughout the early part of the day, there was a Diebold representative at our precinct. When I was setting up the poll books, he came over to “help”, and I ended up explaining to him why I had to hook the ethernet cables into a hub instead of directly into all the machines (not to mention the fact that there were not enough ports on the machines to do it that way). The next few times we had problems, the judges would call him over, and then he called me over to help. After a while, I asked him how long he had been working for Diebold because he didn’t seem to know anything about the equipment, and he said, “one day.” I said, “You mean they hired you yesterday?” And he replied, “yes, I had 6 hours of training yesterday. It was 80 people and 2 instructors, and none of us really knew what was going on.” I asked him how this was possible, and he replied, “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but it’s all money. They are too cheap to do this right. They should have a real tech person in each precinct, but that costs too much, so they go out and hire a bunch of contractors the day before the election, and they think that they can train us, but it’s too compressed.” Around 4 pm, he came and told me that he wasn’t doing any good there, and that he was too frustrated, and that he was going home. We didn’t see him again.
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Luis Villa urges Red Hat to join the voting machine industry. He suggests that the open source model would be a good fit for voting machine development:
Security- As Ed Felten demonstrated spectacularly yesterday, the current generation of electronic voting machines are painfully insecure. Go watch the video. Open souce security auditing can do much better than that. (Diebold’s defense, by the way, is that Felten should have asked them for more information. That would not be a problem in an open source context.)
Cost- Governments are fairly price sensitive, especially in low-profile areas like voting. Open source is traditionally very cost competitive, and in this particular case, the closed-source systems have to license components like WinCE, so they are definitely at a disadvantage.
Pre-existing community- Corporate-sponsored open source work does best when it works in hand with existing bodies of volunteers and expertise. Such groups already exist in open source voting; open voting consortium is the first hit on google but I believe there are others as well.
Political motivation: one of the most tried and true ways to motivate open source contributors is to give them a bad guy. Voting fraud is replete with bad guys on all sides; if a project got enough backing (i.e., RH) to make it look like it might get actually used in an actual election, people would come out of the woodwork to audit and patch it.
And he points out that Red Hat is one of the few open source companies with a track record of building complex, mission-critical hardware-software systems.
I find this argument pretty compelling. I still think the best solution would be not to use computerized voting machines at all, but if we must have them, it’s hard to beat open source for security, transparency, and affordability.
Diebold has released a response to the Felten study. It appears to me to be misleading in several important respects, so I thought it merited a quick fisking:
Three people from the Center for Information Technology Policy and Department of Computer Science at Princeton University today released a study of a Diebold Election Systems AccuVote-TS unit they received from an undisclosed source. The unit has security software that was two generations old, and to our knowledge, is not used anywhere in the country.
As I noted yesterday, this response would be a lot more credible if Diebold had a habit of submitting its machines to independent review. It’s hardly Felten’s fault that he had trouble getting access to a newer version of the machine.
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