Personal — Page 25

I’m just now

November 3, 2000 by Michael Boyle

catching up with Groove and Groove Networks, and what I see is very very cool. Camworld pointed me to an article in Byte.com that describes it well. The main message I get so far is that Groove is what wireless networking will have to be. And the artistic potential is very interesting as well.

Screw WAP – too closed, too small. Give me instant, secure, flexible nets on a dozen or a hundred personal wireless devices (like, almost anything you can imagine up to and including each light bulb in my house and its switch) and I’ll go wireless. Meter every second of my use of crappy portal content and I’ll pass, thanks.

This new Napster

November 2, 2000 by Michael Boyle

-Bertelsmann (BMG) deal is pretty cool, and if it’s a blanket deal including “immunity” for songs already being served up by Napster users then I think it stands a good chance of success. I would definitely pay $60 for the ability to continue to use Napster in a relatively unfettered way. Essentially, under this plan Napster becomes a personal copyright clearinghouse, serving consumers as ASCAP or SOCAN serve radio stations and others who present music commercially.

The problem, though, is the same as when a newspaper I used to freelance for decided it wanted to put its content online. The problem was they hadn’t bought that right from me – they’d only bought the right to first publication. I would have been more than happy to allow them to put it online as well, or in a CD-ROM archive – but my price for such usage is different in that case – and they weren’t interested in paying me that rate, they wanted the same rate. So the question that remains to me is – are the artists going to be paid by Bertelsmann for this? Or is it just added to their deals for no additional consideration?

September 20, 2000 by Michael Boyle

from Matthew Fuller, one of the i/o/d guys: WARNING… This Computer Has Multiple Personality Disorder; Eating Disorder: The Story of a Shape (from CTHEORY); Neurocity (from frAme); People would go crazy (from Nettime‘s archives); etc.

The big news

August 19, 2000 by Michael Boyle

while I was away (no, not the sub or DemCon2K) was that my friend Michael‘s company was bought by Peregrine Systems, which is really cool. Someday I want to start a business with Michael, or to work for him or something like that. He is a huge geek in a way that I am not nor will ever be – and he’s also deeply interested in the more personal, quotidian applications of networking and whatnot. I like people who can work the heavy steel end of networking and the web but also understand and appreciate the everyday, individual applications as well.

What if it were

July 20, 2000 by Michael Boyle

illegal to buy a copyright, if they could only be assigned for a limited time? What if, unless you were a salaried employee (hence making your work a product of the company paying you), you owned your work, period? If you were permitted to lease it, but not sell it outright?

I’m always torn in a discussion of Napster and the other digital music schemes. I have, from time to time, made my living (or an important part of it) as a writer. My brother’s a musician. Many, if not most, of my friends are writers or artists of some sort or another. These people work hard at what they do. But when I look at a particular acquaintance of mine’s CD, she doesn’t own the copyright, the record company does. When I write an article, I own the copyright – the newspaper or magazine it is published in only owns certain rights; usually the right to first publication.

I think a clearheaded study of how copyright works and a legal expression of how that system should function would go a long way to solving a lot of the current issues. It’s one of those situations, I think, when the road ahead in terms of the specifics will only be apparent when the first principles are reiterated and strengthened.

Trouble is, the pattern is clearly in the other direction – away from privileging the rights of individual copyright holders, towards rights of corporate copyright holders and other businesses involved in such matters. I have personally been involved with a number of publications that have asserted that their purchase of first publication rights includes, with no further compensation, the right to place the work in databases that, essentially, exist in perpetuity. And the DCMA points in that direction pretty clearly as well.

For the moment, I don’t have a huge problem squaring my deep belief in copyright – the right I have over my creative and intellectual work with the free distribution of songs on the net, but that’s only because of the total belligerance and seeming cluelessness of the recording industry, and it won’t hold indefinitely. At some point, I believe that copyrights should be inviolate. So my conclusion, for now, is that the whole concept of copyright must be strengthened and affirmed. Trouble is – I doubt it would be by those with the deepest pockets in this ongoing dialogue.