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One-Click™ colonialism

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The music industry has a long and shameful history of robbing black artists of their rights. Now along comes some new software that will help speed up the job. Think of it as a sort of 1-Click “non-payment” system.

Liblicense is a project that Creative Commons hopes to integrate with MIT Media Lab’s OLPC, or One Laptop Per Child initiative. That’s the rubbishy sub-notebook designed for developing countries, that developing countries don’t seem to want very much. (Shockingly, the ungrateful recipients seem to prefer real computers).

The genius of the move is that instead of needing to hire shifty lawyers to bamboozle artists out of the right to be paid, Creative Commons makes the process not only voluntary, but automated, too. Liblicense will greatly ease the process of assigning a Creative Commons license to creative material straight from the desktop.

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Smart radios are still pretty dumb

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More than three years ago, your reporter got a good taste of how miserable technology utopians can be. It was at Intel’s Developer Forum in San Francisco, and the debate was about liberating analog TV spectrum for exciting new digital uses. The analog switchover is slated for February 2009. On behalf of Microsoft, Google, and … Read more

Google Health offers reputation massage

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“Fire the publicist. Go off message. Let all your employees blab and blog!” fantasised the writer Clive Thompson in a recent WiReD magazine cover story.

“The name of this new game is RADICAL TRANSPARENCY, and it’s sweeping boardrooms across the nation,” burbled the mag.

But the perils of allowing employees to “blab and blog!” were splendidly illustrated over the weekend by Google.

“Does negative press make you Sicko?” asked Google health account planner Lauren Turner. She was referring to the new documentary by left wing demagogue Michael Moore about the US health provision.

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‘Fucked’ record companies in ‘cataclysmic’ meltdown – Tim Clark

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As some of the biggest figures in the music business weighed in on the future of music this week, there were very mixed views on its future.

“If Ford’s revenues were down 40 per cent, the shareholders would be revolting,” said Tim Clark, former Island Records MD and co-founder of management company IE Music, whose roster includes Robbie Williams.

The latest CD revenue figures suggest 40 per cent declines in some markets. “Their model is fucked. It is. Physical revenues are going down like nobody’s business and it’s cataclysmic,” Clark told a panel at the London Calling music expo at Earl’s Court.

Clark hears the sound of pigeons are coming home to roost, and outlined a post-major label future that would be a lot more flexible.

“Deals have been struck with ISPs, but I’ve yet to hear of a single penny going back to an artist. Leaving aside the black boxes, is it anybody’s surprise that an artist doesn’t trust the record company?” he asked.

“Record companies deserve to be attacked for many of the things they’ve done,” he added. “There are great A&R people and great marketeers at these companies, but they haven’t been serving artists [or] fans over the years.”

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Psion: The story of the Last Computer

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This long (40-page) history of Britain’s last computer company, Psion, was written over four days. It’s the longest piece The Register has ever run, we made it available as a PDF (for a small fee). Included are full transcripts of interviews with David Potter, Martin Riddiford, Mark Gretton, David Tupman and Nick Healey. (Charles Davies … Read more

Parliament must listen to the blogger in his pyjamas

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Parliament may soon be debating whether to legalise incest, reclassify insomnia as a mental illness, microchip all children at birth … or give pantomime actor Richard Griffiths a Knighthood. That’s if opposition leader David Cameron has his way. A Conservative Party task force examining democratic participation proposes that online petitions should help set the parliamentary … Read more

Rob Lewis on MusicStation

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MusicStation, the service that aims to give unlimited mobile access to music worldwide for a small weekly fee, finally went live today.

The success of the venture, from British start-up Omnifone, will tell us a lot about whether punters are prepared to pay for digital music, rather than scoop it up for free. MusicStation is a Rhapsody-like service customised for mobiles: there are no extra data charges over the £1.99 weekly subscription, which goes on your mobile bill, and “file sharing” is encouraged – at least with other MusicStation users.

Omnifone has signed up the big four labels, made inroads into the indie sector, and has 30 carriers around the world. Today sees Norwegian-based Telenor, with 80 million subscribers, push MusicStation out first.

Founder and CEO Rob Lewis said the aim was simply giving people a service they can’t do legitimately today:

“Customers are forced to do this illegally now. We’re trying to give very easy access that’s intuitive, doesn’t need credit cards or wires, so they can discover and recommend music among themselves,” he said. “And artists get paid.”

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Public jeers at Ofcom’s Nathan Barley quango

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Ofcom has published the public consultation responses to its PSP concept. And they don’t make comfortable reading for the regulator.

The PSP, or Public Service Publisher, is a new quango that would cost taxpayers between £100m than £150m a year – handing out money to new media types for interactive websites, and other “user generated content” gimmicks. Ofcom loves the idea – and gave the task of investigating it two new media production houses who would stand to gain handsomely from the new gravy train.

Unsurprisingly, they thought a Nathan Barley Quango, or NBQ, was a splendid idea.

The public responses should be sobering, however. Most are skeptical of the need for the new quango, while many more are completely indifferent. And some are very scathing. Step forward, W Jackson:

As a self-actualizing media node, I welcome this redistribution of government funds from provincial luddites to new media ‘creative’ Sohoites.

Cool Britannia lives! The creative industries initiative was good but didn’t radically empower young creatives and their 360-degree thinking. Unleash the collective wisdom of new media and see us swarm!

If Tony had done this when he first got in (and I know how hard you tried, Ed) then thousands of people could already be employed – let’s use those redundant factories to turn out polyphonic ringtones.

Critics – like Orlowski at The Register – will complain that this is pork-barrel politics for tech. utopians. That this has no relevance to’ ‘ordinary’ people and their lives.

Well, I’ve had enough of that patronising rubbish. I’ve launched a post-ironic web brand – nar.ciss.us – that was created using the competitively-priced labour of redundant industrial workers. It shows that anyone can ‘get’ asynchronous java – even people from the North.

If anyone wants to brainstorm this – then twitter/IM/SMS/Skype/email me. I’m up for an ’emergent conference’.

Ed Richards’s initiative ‘gets’ new media on so many levels. Let’s flashmob this bitch up to escape velocity.

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Google at CISAC

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Google gave a keynote speech to the biggest global gathering of authors’ societies today. The internet advertising giant is embroiled in several areas of copyright litigation. Publishers and authors object to its mass scanning project, Google Books. News agencies and publishers have sued it over its use of links and excerpts in Google News. And Viacom is suing Google for using infringing clips on YouTube.

So the audience at CISAC’s Copyright Summit was presented with Google’s EMEA chief Nikash Arora. Would he tell the authors he felt their pain? Would he speak a language they understood?

Not likely. Arora may as well have chosen to speak in Klingon. He was also the first non-government speaker at the summit to avoid answering questions from the audience. Instead, we were treated to a stage-managed 15 minute Q&A which avoided the tricky subject of litigation all together.

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“People misunderstand me from all directions” – Lessig at CISAC

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Professor Lawrence Lessig is used to hostile audiences – but he faced the most prickly and feisty gathering of 500 he’ll ever address yesterday in Brussels.

CISAC is the body that represents the collectives who gather up the royalties on behalf of authors, composers and songwriters – and this week it’s holding its first ever Copyright Summit.

A lot of money passes through these collectives’ hands – they distributed €4.3bn back to authors in 2004 in Europe alone. But these pots of money, so painfully clawed back from large media conglomerates, are distributed amongst very many original creators. So as you can imagine, Lessig – who extolls amateur “user generated content” and litigates against professionals – was always going to be in for a rough ride from people who barely scrape a living from their own creativity.

What was the audience really vexed about? Well, when Lessig talks “rights”, he means the right to specify how a work is used by other users of digital computer networks. This doesn’t include the right to be paid, which is why everyone is here in Brussels this week. This pits a very American kind of individualism – the right to express oneself, dammit! – against a very European tradition of collective action.

In particular, the audience is keenly aware of this tradition of rights won through collective bargaining. Any weakening of this movement for authors’ rights is regarded in the same way as a striking union member regards a strikebreaker: as scab labour. Yet Lessig styles himself at the vanguard of a “movement”, too, which riles them even more: the creatives see this as not only undermining them, but pinching their slogans and clothes.

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