Be The Media

Music rebels seek to tame P2P

From CNET.com, by John Borland:

"After years of bitter battles between copyright holders and file-swapping services, the outlines of a partial truce are emerging that may soon see major record labels partner with peer-to-peer networks to create legal online music stores.

At the center of the detente is Napster creator Shawn Fanning, whose new company, Snocap, has spent the last year building technology designed to identify music on file-swapping networks and turn free song trades into purchases. The company plans to emerge from stealth mode by the end of the year and has already secured licenses to the song catalog of the Universal Music Group.

Fanning's technology is designed to work behind the scenes of other companies' services, rather than directly replacing either file-swapping networks like Kazaa or today's download stores such as Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store. But several companies are already planning to use the technology, which could allow peer-to-peer networks to become online stores that sell music legally, much like iTunes.

In order to get there, though, peer-to-peer companies would have to agree to keep unauthorized music out—something large networks that support millions of users might be loathe to do.

Fanning's technology is just one element in a series of pieces that are rapidly falling into place to allow new kinds of peer-to-peer music distribution. Another change, possibly more significant, has come in the form of growing flexibility on the part of record label executives, who increasingly see how using peer-to-peer technology as a legitimate distribution system could offset its use for piracy."

Congress may act on internet piracy bill

From the Washington Post, by David McGuire:

"The entertainment industry is pushing Congress to approve a bill that could send thousands of Internet music and movie downloaders to jail, but the legislation faces opposition from groups that say it would unfairly punish consumers.

The package combines eight bills that the entertainment industry supports as part of a large-scale effort to crack down on the rampant spread of piracy on the Internet. The bill also would criminalize using a video recorder to copy films while they are still in the theater, and allow the Justice Department to file civil lawsuits against song-swappers."

The internet changing some political rules

From Mercury News, by Dan Gillmor:

"In recent times, Republicans have been adept at raising money from small donors, and this cycle was no exception. However, the Democrats began to catch up. Howard Dean and his team raised tens of millions of dollars via online pitches, with most of the donations coming in small amounts. John Kerry followed suit.

Dean's campaign was also profoundly decentralized in other respects, largely because he had no choice when he was unknown to most Americans. His team, led by strategist Joe Trippi, used the Net to organize volunteers — and let the volunteers organize themselves.

The Dean forces also used the Internet to have what amounted to a conversation with their supporters. The campaign had an official blog, which became a touchstone for media and potential primary voters. Its informality provided a view inside the campaign, and there was evidence that the politicians at the center were actually listening to the people out at the edges."

Free Press challenges Sinclair licenses

From Broadcasting and Cable, by Bill McConnell:

"Less than two weeks after Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. aired a news special about anti-John Kerry documentary Stolen Honor: Wounds that Never Heal, a media activist group is asking the Federal Communications Commission to begin revoking the company’s TV licenses.

Free Press Monday asked the FCC to deny renewals of Sinclair licenses in North and South Carolina.

Free Press alleges that Sinclair is illegally operating duopolies in Asheville, N.C., and Charleston, S.C., in conjunction with local marketing agreement partner Cunningham Broadcasting."

Click Fraud

From the New York Times by Tom Zeller:

"E-mail has spam. The Web has pop-up windows and spyware. Even the market infant, Internet telephony, has analysts bracing for an onslaught of what is been called "Spam Over Internet Telephony," (or "spit," of course).

It should come as no surprise, then - and some might say it is a bit of poetic justice - that online advertisers are becoming acquainted with their own special plague: click fraud.

The variations are many, but it essentially works like this: merchants typically pay a fee to the sites that play host to their ads whenever those ads are clicked by a visitor.

In an ideal world, the visitor, now transported to the advertiser's Web site, hangs out for a spell, examines the wares and eventually makes a purchase. In click fraud, those clicks that the advertiser is paying for are not coming from potential customers, but from scam artists, automated scripts, and even underhanded competitors."

Reverse Privatization: Ammiano wants SF to get into the broadband business

From Camille T. Taiara in the San Francisco Bay Guardian:

"At a time when public services are being privatized and corporations are consolidating their control over every aspect of digital communications technology, Sup. Tom Ammiano has an idea that's downright revolutionary. He wants San Francisco to create its own public broadband network.

If he succeeds, the city could go into the business of providing Internet, cable TV, telephone, and high-speed data-transfer services to its residents, in the process opening up access to independent media producers and Internet service providers that are being squeezed out by the big telecom companies. And it could bulldoze the ubiquitous "digital divide" by providing services to residents and small businesses at a fraction of current costs – even making it free for certain low-income families and cash-strapped nonprofits if it so chose.

Information policy would be placed in the hands of the community rather than being dictated by undemocratic "market forces." Rates would go down. Options would increase. And it could generate hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even millions, for the city to provide better social services."

Instant Messenger

For more, see The Holographic Universe, by Michael Talbot

"In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light.

Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something."

eXreme democracy and co-intelligence at the Future Salon

Went to Mark Finnern's Bay area Future Salon last night, featuring Ross Mayfield, Tom Atlee and Zack Rosen.

"One of the inspirations is the upcoming Extreme Democracy book: "Extreme democracy" is a political philosophy of the information era that puts people in charge of the entire political process. It suggests a deliberative process that places total confidence in the people, opening the policy-making process to many centers of power through deeply networked coalitions that can be organized around local, national and international issues. Ross Mayfield CEO of Socialtext is well known to Future Saloners and has writting chapter ten of Extreme Democracy. He will present its overall concept.

Another inspiration is The Tao of Democracy by co-founder of the Co-Intelligence Institute Tom Atlee, who has thought about, written and spoken for twenty years on innovations in democracy.

Third inspiration are the tool makers, like the volunteers that created the DeanSpace and now are knitting CivicSpace, an open-source grassroots organizing web-application toolkit. Zack Rosen the driving force behind DeanSpace will talk about his experiences and show the current status of the reincarnation of the DeanSpace: The CivicSpace. Dan Gillmor wrote a nice article about him too."

New P2P software could end illegal music squabbles

From The Register:

"Welcome to the world of legal online music ambiguity. Say hello to Grouper.

Grouper - a temporarily stealth software project - has gone up for download and instantly created a confusing divide between the old world and the new. Unlike most P2P software that shares music and other files with world+dog, Grouper focuses on sharing files between friends. Users can set up mini-P2P networks and open up their photos, music, movies and documents. This approach seems much more similar to old-style content swapping where friends handed each other a mixed CD or recording of the UT versus Texas A&M football game, just with a techie twist.

In addition, the Grouper software does not let users download each others' music. Instead, it only permits streams of music files, while permitting downloads of other content. This creates a nice response to subscription services from the likes of Real and Napster that allow customers to stream and download all the music in the world, ignoring the fact that most consumers want music they like instead of all the music ever produced. People can now browse their friends' music collections - a tempting proposition given that friends will likely have similar tastes but also have new flavors to share as well."

Fortify Software!

Fortify Software recently named John M Jack as CEO and President. He was previously president and CEO of Covalent Technologies. Covalent is the leader in products and services for Apache, the world's leading Web server. He was previously president & CEO of Shaman Corporation, an Internet-based software reliability company; COO of The Vantive Corporation, now part of PeopleSoft (Nasdaq: PSFT); and an original member of the management team at Sybase Inc. (Nasdaq: SYBS).

Fortify Software secures software applications from the inside-out. My main man Arthur Do is a co-founder and CTO. Arthur was previously co-founder and CTO of Kinecta, which was acquired by the Stellent Corporation in April, 2002. Fortify is backed by the venerable Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Keep your eyes on these guys!

You can find out more about Fortify here, in an article written in the Wall Street Journal this April.

"One early tester is eBay Inc.'s PayPal unit, an online-payment service. "The thing I'm attracted to is being able to find problems as they are being introduced into the application, instead of later" during a security audit, said Chuck Geiger, PayPal's chief technical officer.

One influential programmer, Sun Microsystems Inc. co-founder Bill Joy, said he was impressed enough to invest in Fortify.

"We clearly need new tools and methods," said Mr. Joy, who helped popularize the Sun programming technology called Java before resigning from the company last year. "I'm encouraged that people are trying to do this."