insomnia bytes

When called to testify in an RIAA trial about music file sharing, Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation for Sony BMG, embarrassed herself with a rather simplistic statement:

“When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ’steals just one copy’.”

It follows that according to Sony BMG, the second largest record group in the music industry, making a backup copy of a CD to take it on vacation, ripping a CD you bought to play it on your computer or on your portable audio player, all these constitute an illegal act.

This is particularly puzzling since digital copies is the encouraged, and often only, way to listen music on MP3 or minidisc players. It is also the sole purpose of CD-copying devices. All of which are of course manufactured and sold by another division of Sony.

The Obscurantist Music Industry

It is not the first time the majors have waved around largely nonsensical statements about digital rights. The real issue is that they blur the meaning of “legality”, by assimilating a widely accepted practice (even your grand mother “makes a copy” when she imports a CD in iTunes) to the morally reprehensible act of theft.

The underlying goal is obvious: to create a state of fear and confusion where people are afraid to perform anything that the recording industry considers harmful. But the futility of this effort is just as obvious: you cannot convince the public that something they and everybody else has been doing for decades is wrong. Worse, the nuance will be lost between what exactly is illegal, and what isn’t.

An end must be put to this nonsense because it harms our society. The only acceptable definition of legality comes from the Legal code, which itself should reflect our society and culture, and not the mere interests of corporations.

Fortunately, while those gigantic capitalist dinosaurs graze happily in a fantasy world of theirs where bits are getting harder (and illegal) to copy, other actors of the music industry move on.
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New XMMS2 clients appear almost weekly, but their visibility has so far been limited to the IRC channel, the Wiki and, occasionally, the mailing-list. I thought it would be more exciting for the community to hear about the life (and death) of clients on the Planet, and thus I offer from now on to publish announcements here for all to see!

Just send me a blurb and selected screenshots, and you’ll get instant fame.

The first client to be announced is Konfetka, a Qt GUI interface recently released by afrol and BatteryCell. Try it out, it’s quite original and feature-complete!
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MP3Tunes may or may not be an Evil (as in Axis of ~) service, but it just announced a developer contest to encourage people to implement its API and create new interfaces (on the desktop, mobile phone, TV, toilet seat, whatever).

The contest page on the official website isn’t quite as verbose as one would have hoped, though, and the link to the rules points to a missing webpage. Some more intel is however available in a blog post on Michael Robertson’s blog. Yes, Michael MP3.Com/Linspire Robertson, who is also Michael MP3Tunes Robertson, obviously.

The deal: you have until November 5th, 2007, to submit an interface to MP3Tunes in one of the ten predefined categories (Desktop Player, Game Console, WebUI, PDA, etc). The winner in each category will receive a cosy $1000. I haven’t determined whether it’s a public vote, a closed jury, or some other semi-random algorithm involving car-driving girafes.

I haven’t yet checked what the API offers, either, but I sure wonder whether we could hack something together with XMMS2. If it could be hooked into the daemon, and apart from the obvious ever satisfying benefit of being neat and fun, it might allow using any of our interfaces (AKA clients) to play music from MP3Tunes.
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This remarkable HCI insight comes from a comment on Amarok’s blog, where people have been very busy trashing the latest Amarok2 UI mockup which happens to be, let’s be honest because it’s only a mockup anyway, quite horrible.

Wasted place all over the place, too small text placed within too large widgets, inconsistent style, a festival of duplicated information in the playlist view on the right, the ever-dreaded tabs on the left (yes, tabs are usually evil).

Seriously.

Someone has to wake up and fix this but hey, guess what, it’s just a mockup, so they might!

What is more interesting, however, is the shift of focus in the way users are supposed to interact with the player. The developers make it clear that they want to make the “context browser” central, and reduce the importance of the playlist. I’ve been advocating something similar since the early days of Collections (already in my initial manifesto), but I find it bold of them to push this change in an already widely popular program.
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I made a cameo appearance in Business Week’s article about our NEC C&C Innovation Lab entitled NEC’s “Big Brother” Lab (Aug. 16, 2007). It follows the inauguration day of the lab on July 12, when the press and officials came to visit the building and were shown prototypes of different projects happening here.

It is remarkable that most journalists, this one included, focused their interest and questions on the privacy concerns related to the ubiquitous monitoring of our lab. There were many other interesting projects shown that day (read the press release for a more abstract summary), but they hardly captured as much interest. (And note that the visualization part of the supposedly “proprietary mapping system” was implemented using the rather neat prefuse open source library.)

What is remarkable about the focus in this article is the lack of depth and context. First, the issue is not whether you’re being filmed, but by whom and why. Are you aware of it, and did you give your consent? The question of ownership and purpose of this data is premium, yet it’s barely hinted at by the author.

In addition, the article fails to put its arguments into the broader picture of our contemporary society: everyone is constantly tracked, whenever you use your credit card, your grocery store discount card or your RFID transport ski pass; whenever you buy books from the Internet or get filmed by a security camera in an elevator. More alarmingly than being spotted picking your nose at your desk, there are 400′000 CCTV in London, and 4′000′000 in the whole UK. There are thousands in Japan as well. And for all of those, you never signed any agreement and usage conditions.

The closing quote, “it would be a real hard sell in the [Silicon] Valley”, comes as a rather hypocritical remark in a country where the government gets increasingly more freedom at invading its citizens’ privacy without their knowledge.

This project would fail as a panopticon prototype, because it would lack the uncertainty of whether the participants are being observed or not. In the excitement of linking it with trendy topics such as privacy, the author confuses the danger of ubiquitous unapproved and unlimited surveillance with a circumscribed experiment.

Furthermore, it fails to capture a more important philosophical questions that underlines this project: inspiration, much like feelings, are traditionally credited as impalpable human traits; yet can you formalize, quantify, analyze innovation and inspiration? Are there patterns that can be exploited to stimulate and, eventually, simulate inspiration?

This is a repost from the article published in LWN and mentioned earlier on this blog. Thanks to LWN for publishing it in the first place, and to all the people who proofread and commented on it! I hope this will serve as a more up-to-date introduction to Collections in XMMS2 (I should probably post it on the wiki). Discussion is welcome, naturally.

The number of music players on Linux has been steadily increasing lately, but while these projects have been getting more and more polished, we have yet to see revolutionary improvements in terms of user experience. Indeed, the trend has privileged borrowing as many features as possible from other projects, rather than questioning the reasons behind their design.

This article describes XMMS2’s attempt to address long-standing limitations of music players, through its new support for Collections. First, I will summarize the rationale behind this feature, then present its concept and implementation. A conclusion about the current state and future directions of Collections will close the article.
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