Monthly Archives: July 2006
MySpace revises their terms and conditions
Billy Bragg has written an articulate letter (would you expect anything else) with regards to MySpace’s new terms and conditions. In the past, MySpaces terms were pretty heavy handed. It seemed as if uploading a song to MySpace would give MySpace license to do pretty much whatever they wanted with it. Now, this has changed, and for the better.
From Billy Bragg:
I am very pleased to see that MySpace have changed their terms of agreement
from a declaration of their rights into a declaration of our rights as artists,
making it clear that, as creators, we retain ownership of our material. Having
been adopted by the biggest social networking site on the block, I hope their
recognition of the right of the artist to be sole exploiter of their own material
now becomes an industry standard because there is much more at stake here
than just the terms and conditions of a website.In the past, songwriters and performers needed a record company to
manufacture, market and distribute their work, and in exchange for that, the
company expected to own the rights to exploit the recordings for as long as the
material was capable of earning royalties - life of copyright in legalese which
currently means 50 years.Ive always had a problem with that arrangement, arguing that the recordings
Ive made should provide my pension not that of some record company
executive. In order to achieve this, I have held on to my rights, signing licensing
deals in which ownership of the records reverts to me after a stipulated period,
usually ten years. I figure that if a company cant make their money back after
that time, they dont deserve to put out my records anyway.Every few years, the reversion clause kicks in, my back catalogue returns to my
ownership and I begin the licensing process all over again. Not only does this
strengthen my hand in contract negotiations, it also allows me to take account
of new technologies in a rapidly changing industry.Now that the popularity of downloading has made physical manufacturing and
distribution no longer necessary, the next generation of artists will not need to
surrender all of their rights in order to get their music into the marketplace. It is
therefore crucial that they understand, from the moment that they first post
music on the internet, the importance of retaining their long term right to
exploit the material that they create. This is doubly important on a networking
site where many of the songs posted will be by unsigned artists. Ownership of
the rights to such material is somewhat ambiguous. Thats why I hope that the
groundbreaking decision of MySpace to come down on the side of the artists
rights will be followed throughout the industry.I also welcome the new wording of the terms and conditions in which MySpace
clarify exactly why they require specific rights and how they intend to use them.
Again, I hope more sites follow the lead of MySpace in ensuring the use of clear
and transparent language in contracts. The last thing any of us wants to see is a
situation in which everyone posting a song on the site has to have a lawyer
sitting next to them.Im glad my music is available to the community again and Im glad that
MySpace chose to act on my concerns. In order that we might avoid any such
confusion in future, can I suggest that MySpace notify its members of any
changes in the terms and conditions whenever they take place.Billy Bragg
Here are the (now quite reasonable) revised terms:
Proprietary Rights in Content on MySpace.com.
MySpace.com does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) that you post to the MySpace Services. After posting your Content to the MySpace Services, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content, and you continue to have the right to use your Content in any way you choose. By displaying or publishing (”posting”) any Content on or through the MySpace Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com a limited license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on and through the MySpace Services.
Without this license, MySpace.com would be unable to provide the MySpace Services. For example, without the right to modify Member Content, MySpace.com would not be able to digitally compress music files that Members submit or otherwise format Content to satisfy technical requirements, and without the right to publicly perform Member Content, MySpace.com could not allow Users to listen to music posted by Members. The license you grant to MySpace.com is non-exclusive (meaning you are free to license your Content to anyone else in addition to MySpace.com), fully-paid and royalty-free (meaning that MySpace.com is not required to pay you for the use on the MySpace Services of the Content that you post), sublicensable (so that MySpace.com is able to use its affiliates and subcontractors such as Internet content delivery networks to provide the MySpace Services), and worldwide (because the Internet and the MySpace Services are global in reach). This license will terminate at the time you remove your Content from the MySpace Services. The license does not grant MySpace.com the right to sell your Content, nor does the license grant MySpace.com the right to distribute your Content outside of the MySpace Services.
Coming Zune…
Everyone is curious about the new microsoft player/online service known as Zune. Engadget has some speculation, but John Gruber sums it up succinctly with style and wit to spare.
The most shocking thing about all of this is that the new microsoft player and online store does not support microsoft’s own ‘plays for sure’ technology that napster and other onlines services use. ‘Plays for sure?’… How about ‘might play, but don’t hold your breath’ or the less verbose ‘cross your fingers!’
I do have to admit it though, I think the ‘comingzune.com‘ corporate site has a great URL…
UPDATE: Microsoft employee Sean Alexander discusses the ‘Plays for sure’ angle…
The future of album art
In this day and age of mp3 supremacy, I feel something missing from the experience of listening to music. I don’t want to sound like an old man here, but I get a feeling of satisfaction looking at my vinyl jazz collection that just isn’t replicated by seeing all my mp3’s sitting in a directory on my hardrive.
To address this problem, the XIPF group was created.
From the mailing list:
“The focus of this group is to discuss and begin to define an XIPF - Extensible Interactive Packaging Format. How do we add value to digital media by creating a standard packaging around it. What’s the digital version of the standard CD jacket?”
Recently, Lucas Gonze proposed an interesting idea of using XHTML as a packaging container. I had been thinking all along of XIPF just being a zipped or compressed folder containing resources (audio, images, etc…) and an xml manifest file that described the contents of the package. But by putting everything into a single XML (XHTML) document, including binary data for resources like images and audio, you get a single page mini app. Which I think is a really cool idea. As Lucas points out, it’s kind of like tidlywiki for audio.
The advantages of this approach are near ubiquitous adoption (what device or application can’t read XHTML), high ‘tinker’ factor (people will LOVE to build JS players, experiment with microformats for parsing, etc…), and portability (a single file is really nice).
There are some good reasons why munging binary data into an XML document is not a good idea, and there are some browser issues that need to be resolved with IE, but I think this could be great. Maybe this single XHTML audio file should be contained inside of a more traditional package?
Heavyweight Dub Champion
Yes, it’s time for another IODA Promotrack release.
Survival Guide For The End Of Time
Heavyweight Dub Champion
Champion Nation Recordings, Inc.
Buy at iTunes Music Store
- Download “Return Of The Champion (feat. A.P.O.S.T.L.E., Wailer B & Jack Ruby Jr.)” (MP3, 192kbps)
Identity Open Space in Vancouver
Today I am headed off to the Identity Open Space, happening in Vancouver BC (Got to love those hometown events). My colleague Boris Mann was planning to go, but got called away to Germany for one of our large clients, so I am attending in his stead.
Identity is not an area that I have a lot of experience in, but I’ve been doing some reading to try and brush up, and I feel like someone peering down a rabbit hole. Pretty fascinating.
I like the simplicity of address based schemes (OpenID, LID, SXIP), but they seem like they might be vulnerable to phishing attacks. Despite this, SXIP seems quite interesting, and I like how the system supports the storing of SAML tokens. The WS-* metasystem also seems quite robust, and in particular, InfoCard sounds impressive (although as a newbie, I have no practical experience with any of these).
Recently Lucas Gonze posted some thoughts about his experiments with URL based schemes. As someone involved in many cool music projects, I was wondering what he thought of the relationship between DRM and Identity. While I still maintain that DRM in general makes no sense, DRM tied to a user (rather then devices) makes slightly more sense. Back in 2002, Brian says:
“The point is, information producers over time will tend to want stronger controls over exactly who and how information consumers can use the information. Customer-empowered identity. Big studio DRM. It’s all the same problem pattern from a software perspective, and one which (I believe) can never be satisfactorily solved with software alone. We’re all going to want teeth on our side.”
In any event, looking forward to learning about (and getting schooled) in a new topic!
Vancouver Folk Fest
So I’m spending the weekend at the Vancouver Folk Fest, and it looks to be a great time. I’m especially looking forward to seeing Feist, who just rules live. As a teaser of the Saturday evening show, here’s two great LIVE Feist tracks from Park West in Chicago.
My slide guitar hero Kelly Joe Phelps will also be there.
Listen to Kelly Joe Phelps on Itunes
But really, I’m just looking forward to sitting on the beach in the sunshine listening to good music.
Wow.
The Daily Show - Ted Stevens and the Internet
This is just unbelievable. We are all screwed.
Promonet Rocks
The post below is a test of the cool Promonet service from IODA. The basic idea is promonet provides a slew of quality, rights cleared mp3’s that you can (legally) post to your blog, add to your podcast, or do (almost) anything with.
I still find it a bit strange that rights cleared music is itself a big deal, but these days, it IS a big deal. I am also curious to see the difference in sales numbers between IODA artists who participate in Promonet (and *gasp* give their music away for free!) and the ones who abstain, but my gut feeling is that Promonet is an invaluable way for artists to gain exposure and generate new sales.
While I like the “blogging” tools that Promonet provides, I think it could be made even easier. Currently Promonet uses a code generation tool that creates an html snippet that you can then paste into your website or blog (including your own affiliate ids), but one suggestion that I might make is to offer “blog this” functionality like Flickr. This way posts could be made automatically to your blog with a few clicks on the promonet site. One other suggestion would be to provide webservices so developers can leverage the large amount of rights cleared music IODA has gathered.
Lastly, I would love to see some sort of ‘promonet flash player’ that can be embeded into a page. This would make it easier for people to listen to music, and might even add some useful reporting stats. For example, you could track if someone listened to the first half a song and then bailed out; all useful information. I bet a flash player (that included money generating affiliate links) would also do pretty well in places like myspace. But I wouldn’t be surprised if IODA is already working on such things…
It’s fun just to explore the broad base of music on the Promonet site, and you can get a small glimpse of what the world might be like if congress ever enacts a compulsory license (like that will happen).
Et Ret - Gasworks
Gasworks
Et Ret
Western Vinyl
- Buy at iTunes Music Store
Buy at RealNetworks / Rhapsody
- Download “Community” (MP3, 192kbps)
Rhapsody web services
Rhapsody has announced their new web services and a contest for the best rhapsody mashup. A contest is certainly an ingenious way to get developers to look at API documentation. Looking forward to seeing what people come up with…
UPDATE: Great post on Read/WriteWeb about Rhapsody.