RIAA Sues You Tube Users

Hat tip to this person’s blog…

If there’s one thing that the RIAA loves to do, it’s to sue people. These people are clearly idiots. I have no sympathy for some music exec that’s complaining about how he only made a few million. Guess they find it hard to believe that people are on to them.. and are smart enough to know that CD’s don’t cost 20 bucks a pop to create. The latest and dumbest move by them? I’m not kidding about this….. suing users of YouTube who are dancing to some background music. The crime? They didn’t licence the music to make the homemade video. Not making this stuff up folks! If you’re not familiar with YouTube, it’s the hottest and latest user content driven site. Basically 1-5 minute videos that people post for others to view. So the next time you make a home video of your baby’s first walk, don’t put any music on the background.. unless you want to pay some music exec big bucks to licence the music. Morons. (RIAA, not you.) I’d like to get a cease and desist letter from them for using their logo in my blog (unlicensed of course.)

Open Office

Since Frankin and Marshall College has been paying the tab for Microsoft Office, I must admit, it is my primary office suite.  I am now, however, using Open Office exclusively on my personal laptop.  I wish I could say this was because my values got the best of me, but in reality, I know just enough about my computer to screw things up.  Now, MS Office won’t install.  A great benefit to open source software is it seems to be resilient to whatever I fool around with in the registry or wherever else.

If you have, for whatever reason, been using Open Office check out this blog.  The blog contains many tips and tricks on how to use Open Office.

How to Wow ‘Em Like Steve Jobs

Apple Computer, now celebrating 30 years of innovation, has revolutionized the way we use computers and listen to music. Now its charismatic co-founder, Steve Jobs, has transformed the corporate pitch…

 1.  Sell the benefit

2.  Practice, practice, practice

3.  Keep it visual

4.  Exude Passion, Energy, and Enthusiasm

5.  "And one more thing…"

You may be asking what this has to do with Free Culture.  The challenge that Free Culture has always faced is the soundbite or, more generally, the presentation of the message.  A great place to look for advice is among the innovators of technology.  Learning from people like Steve Jobs and other technological leaders who have been able to boil down their product to a slogan.  Take a look at some of these from Wikipedia:

• "Multimedia You Can Use" ~ Apple Computer, 1990s
• "Once you go Mac. You'll never go back" ~ Apple Computer
• "Play More" ~ Xbox 360
• "Power is Macintosh" ~ Apple Computer, 1990s
• "Rip. Mix. Burn" ~ Apple Computer
• "So powerful, it's kind of ridiculous" ~ 3dfx (for Voodoo 3 cards)
• "The Network is the Computer." ~ Sun Microsystems
• "The power to be your best" ~ Apple Computer, 1990s
• "Think" ~ IBM, 1914
• "Think different" ~ Apple Computer, Chiat/Day, 1998–
• "Think outside the box" ~ Apple Computer, 1990s
• "Welcome to the World Wide Wow" ~ AOL (play on World Wide Web)
• "Where do you want to go today?" ~ Microsoft, 1996
• "Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia" ~ Wikipedia
• "Your Potential. Our Passion. Microsoft." ~ Microsoft
• "The Browser You Can Trust" + "Rediscover the Web" + "The browser, reloaded" ~ Firefox,Mozilla 2004-present

It surely doesn't cover everything, but what Free Culture needs is to rally around the underlying principle of freedom and to form a non-technical message that reflects the principle.  

Open Software Review: 7-Zip

If you have been using winzip or some other program to unzip files, I recommend giving 7-Zip a try.  This program has 7 main features according to its website:

• High compression ratio in new 7z format with LZMA compression
• 7-Zip is free software distributed under the GNU LGPL
• Supported formats:
  • Packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
  • Unpacking only: RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS
• For ZIP and GZIP formats 7-Zip provides compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip
• Self-extracting capability for 7z format
• Integration with Windows Shell
• Powerful File Manager
• Powerful command line version
• Plugin for FAR Manager
• Localizations for 63 languages

What this means is the program works.  Whenever you receive a compressed file, chances are that 7-Zip can deal with it and you can go on your way.  This piece of software can make you more productive.  You simply double click on the .zip file, or whatever other format it is, and you will see the files within in after 7-Zip loads.  

Click here to download or just visit the application’s official website. 

Free Culture on the Map

From the freeculture.org national blog.  Take a look at this post and you can see where the movement has planted in colleges across the country.  

Net Neutrality Disinformation Campaign and Call Senator Santorum and Specter

Please take a moment to watch this Pro-COPE cartoon.  Basically, the argument is that by differentiating the content there will be more stability to that content: lanes for ‘extra traffic’ VOIP, high definition video, etc.  According to the cartoon, it creates a ’smart network.’  Let us count the ways this isn’t right:

1.  The cartoon says that net neutrality people will cause stifle creativity with ‘one dumb pipe’: the show doesn’t mention this but the internet has always been ‘one dumb pipe.’  That’s really the point!  Creating lanes for certain type of traffic is another inhibiting factor for creation.  Say there are lanes for bittorrent, P2P but an innovator develops a system far better than these current options.  Likely the bandwidth needed for such an application would be enormous if it caught on with even a fraction of the internet using public and would end up using the bandwidth in the catch-all pipe.  Basically, the telecommunication companies’ ’smart networks’ aren’t as smart as the users.  

2.  If there are lanes for specific types of traffic, they are also subjected to differentiated pricing.  Once fiber optic cables are in place, we will have the infrastructure for high definition video; once most households are capable of using this technology, imagine if it was in a different ‘lane’ than the one in which you check your email and read DailyKos.  Supply and demand kicks in and we have a product that will be much more expensive.  High definition video, VOIP, other technologies that we haven’t even thought of will be the equivalent of an HBO package on cable reducing accessibility and mitigating innovation.

For more in depth information about net neutrality and COPE check out Save the Internet.   

If you haven’t read the book that inspired the movement…

Lawrence Lessig is the founder wrote the book, Free Culture, that spawned the student movement originating at Swarthmore College.  Lessig's website says he is "One of America’s most original and influential public intellectuals, his focus is the social dimension of creativity: how creative work builds on the past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and technologies. In his two previous books, CODE and THE FUTURE OF IDEAS, Lessig concentrated on the destruction of much of the original promise of the Internet. Now, in FREE CULTURE, he widens his focus to consider the diminishment of the larger public domain of ideas. In this powerful wake-up call he shows how short-sighted interests blind to the long-term damage they’re inflicting are poisoning the ecosystem that fosters innovation."

The book has been remixed several times over so no matter whether you would like to listen or read, in quite a few formats, check out Free Culture, the book that catalyzed the student movement.   

Send Pitt’s a Message

There is one person in the race for US Congress for the 16th Congressional district that voted for COPE, a direct attack on net neutrality, his name of Joe "the pits" Pitt's.  Send him a message and vote for Lois Herr on Democracy for America's online poll, which could give Lois access to a grassroots army and a pool of new contributors.  She is currently in 3rd place and could bring our free culture message to Washington if we give her(r) the tools to do it!

Democracy for America is running a "Grassroots All-Star" vote to determine which Congressional campaign will earn their next national endorsement. We want to be that campaign! Please, vote for Lois now:

www.democracyforamerica.com/housevote

Success in this contest would be a huge boon to the campaign. Placing among the top five would earn us a $2000 contribution from DFA's PAC, and winning outright would mean receiving "a national DFA-List endorsement and an email appeal from DFA's Chair Jim Dean to all 500,000 DFA members." In other words, winning would mean a huge boost in the resources we need to spread our message throughout the district and across the country!

Please, go to the link and vote for the Herr for Congress campaign (PA-16). And then tell your friends to do the same! Every vote counts – right now, we're ranked fifth nationally, and if we keep up the momentum we've got, we could win this thing. Please vote:

www.democracyforamerica.com/housevote

Thanks!

Flexibility versus Installation

Getting the general public on board with open source applications and the model at large is in many ways easy and in others more complex.  The easy part, for the average Joe, is 1) this softare is oftentimes easier to use and superior to proprietary software and 2) heck, it's free as in beer.  

A big problem is getting started.  There are many exceptions to this: firefox and other mozilla products, OpenOffice, many p2p applications, a web-based WordPress, etc.  But say I wanted to use a MS Publisher-like program.  Scribus is a great way to go, but let's see part of the process – or this could be a really long post – one has to go through to install it:

1.  Try the download page

There are many options to choose from.  Releases, scripts, etc. compromise the 74 downloads in 14 categories on this page.  Which do I choose?

Assume that the prospective user goes to the latest release – granted, somewhat intuitive.

2.  Off to another download page with another dozen possible downloads.  Suppose the user again chooses the most downloaded option or something else that might make sense to get what he or she wants

Now, the user has an .rpm file.  What to do with it?  It's not an executable file; what is it?  

The person really wants Scribus, so let's look it up.  Google the definition for RPM and the last possible definition is:

rpm or RPM may mean: * Revolutions per minute* RPM Package Manager (originally called "Red Hat Package Manager")* RPM (movie)* RPM (band), a Brazilian rock band* RPM (magazine), a former Canadian music industry magazine* In firearms, Rounds Per Minute: how many shots an automatic weapon can fire in one minute* On roads in the United States, RPM stands for Raised Pavement Marker.* Revolutions Per Minute, an album by punk rock band Rise Against. …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPM

Ok, so it's a file that was originally called "Red Hat Package Manager."  

3.  Figure out how to use an RPM file

Google for Red Hat Package Manager and two click later and we are in the how-to section, which reads more like War and Peace than it does a how-to.  An average user has to traverse such technical jargon just in the outline as: spec file, changelog, source directory tree, optflags, and macros.  Perhaps the logical link is 'using RPM.'  It is if you want to read Greek:

Using RPM shows what it can do, installing a file:

rpm -i foobar-1.0-1.i386.rpm

Uninstalling a file:

rpm -e foobar

Etc.  If you're still reading, perhaps you should get out more, but let me just get the point.  Perhaps in the search for flexibility, applications that can run in all any environment, that there has been too much of a sacrifice on the ease of installation and use end.  If you're going to create a type of program that generally computer-using public may enjoy such as KOffice, Scribus, a host of great database software, it would be a great investment to create installation files that are quick and simple.      

Surreality

Free Culture has taken up patent issues with growing concerns surrounding Cereality – a cereal bar and cafe.  Check out the <a href="http://www.uspto.gov/index.html">USPTO</a> for their patents and patents pending.  "It has also applied for patents covering dozens of business processes, from cereal-storage methods–no one likes stale granola–to ways of combining Kix and Trix in a takeout box."

Among the more ridiculous:  "Cereal based snack food; cereal based snack mixes; prepared menu items consisting primarily of a blend of branded oatmeal, fruit toppings and nut toppings; prepared menu item consisting primarily of a blend of branded breakfast cereals, and fruit, nut and/or syrup toppings and milk, including soy milk; cereal based parfait, featuring granola, yogurt and/or fruit; cereal based parfait, featuring yogurt, fruit, nut, and/or syrup topping; coffee, cocoa and chocolate flavorings; beverages made with coffee, cocoa and chocolate; bread, pastry and confectionary"

And: "Tableware, namely, spoons, forks, knives, egg cups, coffee cups and saucers, sugar bowls, salt and pepper shakers, napkin rings, plates, dishes, drinking glasses, bowls, cups, mugs, spice racks"

Here is a basic rationale for trademarks: "Nick Burns writes in to point out the latest misuse of trademark law — not just for profit, but as a publicity stunt. As has been discussed way too often, trademark law is supposed to just protect consumers from confusion (that is you can't sell some other soda and call it Coca-Cola, as that will confuse people)" from TechDirt, click for the rest of the article. 

For this reason, trademarks of the kind Cereality and a host of business ventures are pursuing are so incredulous.  Cereality is processing trademarks to threaten potential competitors and eliminate competition in the marketplace.  David Roth should be congratulated for his innovative idea, the creative mind and the entrepeneurial spirit is a hallmark of business in America, but trademarks that seek to stifle economic development and competition should not be tolerated.