A Thing or Two

An economist's view of society's shift toward the individual

JP Rangaswami, in his Confused of Calcutta blog, posits the economic and societal basis for the shift from institutions to individuals as drivers for products and innovations. This article, which he calls The Kernel for This Blog, proposes the need for new business models that:

One, make a clear stance on values and ethics.

Two, allow relationships and collaboration to take place, rather than control the relationships.

Three, intermediate to enable trust and fulfilment rather than channel towards lock-in.

Four, recognise that the customer wants to create and co-create value rather than just receive.

More here, in the article that isn't short, but worth a read.

Why?

I find it inspiring that a corporate leader such as JP "gets it" and makes an effort to educate others. We can change things from the ground up, but it helps when thoughtful agendas are promoted from the top, as well.

Moms stand up to RIAA

This (long) article describes three Moms who are standing up to the spurious lawsuits being brought against their kids for "downloading music illegally." It is revealing in its description of the actual facts surrounding the RIAA and their techniques, and how the justice system can be invoked to support the moms and kids being bullied. Very interesting!

PS: Did you know? Peer-to-peer file sharing is not the same as downloading to distribute. Sharing files is what we do when we send each other that list of "How you know you're over 40."

Thought Thieve$ short film competition

THOUGHT THIEVE$ is a short film showcase about corporate appropriation of knowledge, culture, and creativity. It is a grassroots response to the Micro$oft short film competition of the same name.

A EULA that bit its own tail

Okay, pay attention. This is a windy road and the turns are tight. Sun Microsystems engineer Tim Boudreau read someone's blog posting that said in order to download NetBeans (Sun software that Tim helped to open source), you are forced to accept a license agreement that restricts your use of the software, perhaps so much that in essence, the software isn't open source at all. So Tim went to the download page, read the license, and thought, hmmmm....that does seem to be what the license is saying, but this has to be a mistake. After consulting the legal eagles at Sun, he saw the language embedded way down in the scrolly fine print that says...well, here's how he puts it:

"This license covers everything except the parts that are covered by open source licenses." Which, in this case, happens to be...all of NetBeans. For a lawyer, it is perfectly clear because it says it doesn't supercede the open source stuff - how could anyone read it and not figure that out?

Tim's full blog posting is here. See if you can stay on the trail as he unravels the issue and goes for the fix.

And the next time you're about to hit the Accept button, think for a minute. What's in that fine print, anyway?

One step ahead of the bloodhounds

Today's NYTimes includes an article (free registration required) about new ways to anonymously share music and other files peer-to-peer, including a method being developed by "Irish programmer Ian Clarke, a 28-year-old free-speech advocate who five years ago introduced a software system called Freenet that was intended to make it impossible for governments and corporations to restrict the flow of any kind of digital information."

Ian Clarke works at music recommendation site Indy. Indy uses COfe, the COllaborative filtering recommendation engine being developed at Oregon State University. Lead researcher Jon Herlocker is also the CIO at MusicStrands, which is based in Corvallis and Barcelona. It will be interesting to see how Indy's and MusicStrands' world of social recommendation networking intersects with Ian Clarke's world of Internet anonymity.

How Did "Mad Hot Ballroom" Survive the Copyright Cartel?

Stay Free! interviews documentary maker Amy Sewell about her ability to negotiate music rights for her hit film Mad Hot Ballroom on an independent filmmaker's budget. The article includes two clips from the film.

Full disclosure: we are playing Mad Hot Ballroom at the Darkside Cinema. Come see it! You'll leave the theater happier than when you arrived.

I learned about this article in edition 18.23 of the Elecronic Frontier Foundation email newsletter, "EFFector."