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Cory Doctorow: Essential Readings on Content and Copyright

cory-doctorow

Every now and again I like to publish book reviews on titles relating to music, the content industries, copyright reform, and the future of media. Recently a Joycean scholar recommended that I explore the writings of Cory Doctorow on these very subjects. I quickly realized I’d had a few of his titles on my reading list already, so I wasted no time and read two of his books this week. The first was CONTENT: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future from 2008, and the second was the more recent Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age from 2014.

Doctorow is no stranger to the legal world surrounding digital content. A Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author, Doctrow serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of Creative Commons, publishing many of his books under CC licensing. His writings and lectures focus on digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics.

Doctorow worked in London as the European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and helped establish the Open Rights Group. He was named a Fellow of the EFF and the 2006–2007 Canadian Fulbright Chair for Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. He’s served as a professor at the University of Southern California and was the first Independent Studies Scholar in Virtual Residence at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and is also a Visiting Professor at the Open University in the UK. In 2012 Doctorow was awarded an honorary doctorate from The Open University.

CONTENT features many of Doctorow’s essays and keynote speeches on digital media and copyright. It opens with a talk he delivered to Microsoft’s Research Group on the developing technologies of DRM outlining five key points:

  1. that DRM systems don’t work
  2. that DRM systems are bad for society
  3. that DRM systems are bad for business
  4. that DRM systems are bad for artists
  5. that DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

The subsequent essays in CONTENT and the chapters of Information… expand upon and contextualize these ideas with discussions of copyright control at critical moments in digital content’s history, and outline the true costs and inherent ineffectiveness of anticircumvention. Doctorow offers a brief history of copying technology, from the piano roll to the Luther Bible, to the Betamax Ruling, the proto-DRM of Discovision, RealAudio, OpenMG, Blu-ray, TIVO, the 3DS, and on through the present day. He calls attention to each of the industry’s attempts to suppress the usability of a technology, from the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group to the Copy Protection Technical Working Group to closed-door meetings of the RIAA and MPAA, noting that each attempt at anticircumvention imposes critical security flaws into the affected components and greatly hinders further development of that technology.

But Doctorow is clear to differentiate the impact of DRM on technological revolutions of the past from its catastrophic effect on the current climate of the Web. In a chapter titled, “It’s Different This Time” he states:

We are remaking the world and everything we do in it. In the past, a regulation applied to VCRs would impact a few other industries or activities (making it hard, say, to record a home movie), but it wouldn’t have changed everything. You could regulate the VCR or the radio or the record player without regulating the automobile, the hearing aid, and voting machines along with them. That’s not true anymore. The stakes for getting copyright right have never been higher. There has never been a fight over entertainment-related technology where the consequences for everyone outside the entertainment industry were potentially more disastrous than they are now.

Later essays in CONTENT discuss the practicality and curious marketplace of ebooks, the grand potential but admitted caveats of metadata, and the world of fanfiction in an age of rampant copyright litigation. While earlier chapters establish a contextual history of content sharing innovations, the book closes with advice for content creators and artists and speaks for the viability of Creative Commons. The essays are brief and written in simple plainspeak, making the text a breeze of a read.

Information… picks up where CONTENT closes diving deeper into the impact of ever-restricting copyright laws. Doctorow examines the draconian consequences of unfettered censorship brought about by the engineered renewability of DRM technologies, citing the example of Amazon removing Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four from all its Kindle users’ digital libraries in 2009 as just one case of potential abuse.

These texts also explore the consequences of The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and ruling surrounding The Pirate Bay, the Grokster decision, and other anti-piracy acts. He calls attention to the ramifications of these actions, adding some important context to the events:

In 2006, the Swedish police raided the data center that housed the Pirate Bay, an infamous BitTorrent tracker that had made a sport of taunting the entertainment industry. The circumstances surrounding the raid were contentious: it seemed the action had been improperly ordered by a government minister who was supposed to have an arm’s-length relationship with the police, at the behest of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

But what was more controversial in wider Swedish society was the collateral damage of the seizure: hundreds of websites went down at the same time as the Pirate Bay, as the police enthusiastically seized a data center’s worth of servers. These other servers—which hosted sites for businesses, nonprofits, and individuals—had nothing infringing on them, but the police couldn’t be certain of this at the time, so they took the lot. It’s like they decided that, since one store in the middle of town was carrying unlicensed products, they were going to shut down the entire shopping district while they figured things out.

Doctorow’s specific contextualizations always return to the broader global impact. In a chapter on the effects of copyright misuse on human rights, he describes the implications of the suit Viacom brought against Google and YouTube for not doing enough to keep their copyrighted works off their service. Viacom argued that YouTube was complicit in acts of infringement because it allowed users to mark videos as “private,” rendering them inaccessible to Viacom’s copyright-enforcement bots. He states clearly that:

Under Viacom’s legal theory—which was supported in amicus briefs filed by organizations representing all the major studios, broadcasters, publishers, and record labels—companies should allow the giant entertainment corporations to access all of our private files to make sure we’re not storing something copyrighted under cover.

Later chapters of Information… such as A World of Control and Surveillance, and What Copyright Means in the Information Age explore the present and future of copyright and cautions us of the consequences of unrestrained access in the hands of a few content distribution conglomerates. By this point, my notetaking consisted of highlighting entire chapters as every paragraph made a concisely-phrased critical remark about the state of technology and copyright. Snowden is mentioned, of course, as is the state of the music industry – both for the limitations brought about by licensing restrictions crippling the art of sampling as well as the transformation of the industry in an era of filesharing.

Doctorow points out that pivotal recordings like Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique could never have been made in today’s copyright climate. He notes that “extending the scope and the duration of copyright doesn’t just criminalize a whole genre of music—it also puts the labels in charge of the only legal route open to musicians, effecting a massive wealth transfer from artists to labels.”

Doctorow’s writing isn’t all doom-and-gloom. He does propose that concepts such as blanket licensing have an incredible potential to benefit content creators, distributors, and consumers alike. And he is a tireless advocate for Creative Commons. He summarizes his position quite effectively when he states:

Content-blocking and surveillance are the province of book burners and censors, not creators and publishers. We have fought for generations for the freedom of conscience necessary to have a robust intellectual and creative sphere… …And since the Internet is likely to be a fixture in our lives and the lives of our children, we all have a duty to stop arguing about whether the Internet is good or bad for us and our particular corner of the world—a duty to figure out how to make the Internet into a force for helping people work and live together, with the privacy, self-determination, and freedom from interference and control that are the hallmarks of a just society. It’s not enough for creators and their industry to love free speech. We have to learn to share it, too.

The final chapter is a statement of great hope for the future. The internet provides the world with a potential for connectivity and collaboration and a richly diverse domain of access for the history of creative works. Artists are empowered to distribute their content directly to their fans, and the relevance of the old world distributive intermediary is shrinking. There has never been a better time to be an artist or a citizen of global culture. Doctorow’s books inspire both an appreciation for that fact and a participatory role in the shaping of our world to come.

Cory Doctorow offers his books for free at http://craphound.com/. If you enjoy his writings, please consider purchasing a copy for your library.

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on November 7, 2017 at 9:52 pm  Leave a Comment  
Tags: 1984, 3ds, Beastie Boys, bible, blu-ray, boing boing, censorship, content, copyright, cory docrotow, craphound.com, creative commons, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, digital rights management, discovision, DMCA, doctorow, DRM, economics, eff, electronic, file, filesharing, foundation, frontier, George, Google, Grokster, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, iTunes, Luther, metadata, MPAA, Nineteen Eighty Four, openmg, Orwell, Paul's Boutique, post-scarcity, Public Enemy, realaudio, RIAA, sharing, snowden, surveillance, Technology, the pirate bay, TIVO, tpb, Viacom, youtube

The Complete Guide to Music Discovery

Over the last eight months I’ve conducted a multi-tiered experiment to develop a complete system of music discovery on the web.

The first stage of the experiment analyzed the top aggregate metadata websites to see which yielded the most productive media recommendations.

The test began with one of the longest-established contenders –

STAGE ONE – LAST.FM

I provided 25,367 scrobbled tracks between March 20th and November 22nd, (an average of 102 tracks per day) to build a viable sample set of my listening preferences.

The case study –

LastFm breaks your recommendations into genre tabs, which is a plus-3 for organization.

The resulting artists, however are far from enlightening.  Nearly every result was either an artist already in my play history, or a token “poster-boy” artist for their genre.

For electronica (a terrible term we’re still trying to bury,) the top suggested artists were Faithless and Orbital.

For jazz, it suggested Charlie Parker, Eric Dolphy, Lee Morgan, Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor (appealing to the free and avant-garde jazz trends of my listening)

And for modern classical avant-garde, Pierre Schaeffer, Terry Riley, Kronos Quartet, Pierre Boulez, Michael Nyman and Arvo Pärt.

There were no surprises among them, which I suppose is to be expected from a popularity-contest recommendation system.  I don’t fault LastFm for using this method; it’s simply not a resource I would utilize to find anything new.

STAGE TWO – STREAMING SERVICES

Sites evaluated:

RDIO – http://www.rdio.com

SPOTIFY – https://www.spotify.com

RHAPSODY – http://www.rhapsody.com/start

SOUNDCLOUD – https://soundcloud.com

GROOVESHARK – http://grooveshark.com

8TRACKS – http://8tracks.com

After repeatedly giving these sites a try over this past year, I’ve been disappointed every time by the lack of user control, the low bitrate of their streams, the advertisements, and most of all the universally abysmal selection of available tracks.  The fundamental flaw with these services is that if the rightsholder(s) of any particular record haven’t worked out a deal with these services, you won’t likely find their content any time soon.

And furthermore, there’s an excellent editorial from this user who gave up on Spotify after 400 days of compounding problems.

STAGE THREE – MUSIC BLOGS

A few years ago, I subscribed to a handful of absolutely exceptional music blogs.  But one after another, these sites were taken off the web for claims of copyright violation.  Most were sharing massively obscure content not available for purchase anywhere on the web, but by the end of the last year all of my favorite blogs had been taken down.

Still, new blogs are born every day, and sites like Hypemachine and NPR track the most active and best-ranked blogs at the links below.

Hypemachine’s searchable index of 800 blogs – http://hypem.com/blogs

NPR’s most-recommended blogs – http://www.npr.org/music/blogs

And the ever-popular http://www.gorillavsbear.net/

But if you’re more interested in a daily, up-to-the-minute feed of new and interesting tracks, perhaps this guide is more your style.

STAGE FOUR – A GUIDE TO GENRE SUBREDDITS

This list organizes the most active and most popular subreddits for every genre you can think of.  It also includes composite lists grouping related subreddits together into a single stream.

One of the better subs is r/vintageobscura which has strict policies for its users –

– Under 30K Views on Youtube video and related videos by the same artist.

– Under 50K listeners on Last.fm.

– Recording dates ranging between 1930 and 1980

They’re looking for space age bachelor pad music, early electronic, proto-punk, library music, jazz, chamber pop, exotica, krautrock, ambient, and space rock – all of my favorite things.

Vintage Obscura also has a web radio station on radd.it – http://radd.it/r/vintageobscura

STAGE FIVE – RATEYOURMUSIC

But if you want simple, hands-down, best-of-the-year/decade/genre/artist/etc lists – rateyourmusic.com is the answer.

The rateyourmusic site is an  online collaborative metadata database cataloging 1,026,663 artists,  3,065,684 releases, and 37,955,810 user-contributed ratings as of April 2015.

Search their index here – http://rateyourmusic.com/lists

(Or browse by category at the right of your screen at the link above)

Custom user-defined charts – http://rateyourmusic.com/customchart

Or start from scratch here – http://rateyourmusic.com/find/

And The GNOD Engine

Or if you prefer a down-and-dirty text-based artist cloud, mapping related artists by proximity, check out http://www.music-map.com/.

They also have a recommendation engine called http://www.gnoosic.com/.

These just scratch the surface, but will introduce you to more music than you could hear in several lifetimes.

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
PUTTING ALL THIS DATA TO WORK

From pp35-46 of
The Innerspace Library Reboot Manual
2014 Ed. v2.75

All right, so you’ve found a new microgenre or an artist you really dig.  What do you do with all this data?

Here is the official Innerspace Guide.

1. Discover something which would be of value to the archive.

2. Research the history of genre, historical/social context, etc.

3. Read the Wikipedia entry for the genre and log all relevant artists.

4. Read related literature (e.g. Mark Pendergast’s The Ambient Century in the case of ambient music, The Penguin Guide to Jazz, all related manifestos, the Rough Guides series, biographical texts, etc.)

5. Check for essentials Collages of the genre on the world’s largest private tracker.  Download all as reference material.

6. Generate a Custom Chart at rateyourmusic.com with the following parameters:

TOP + ALBUMS + ALL-TIME + ONLY INCLUDE GENRES: + [GENRE] + SUB-GENRES + AS RATED BY RYM USERS

7. Log the top 20 entries / albums with a score of 3.5 or higher.

8. Cross-reference Collages, Wiki recommendations, literature highlights, and RYM Top 20 to find recordings named in 3 or more sources.   These are the albums you should pursue first.

9. Obtain all box sets and compilations related to genre.

10. If there is a label directly associated with the genre, pick up a complete label archive (such as Ninja Tune, Warp, Ohr, Nonesuch, Deutsche Grammophon Avant Garde, Command, Chess, Philips Prospective 21e siecle, FAX +49-69450464, et al.

11. Pick up all albums, EPs and singles from the artists within the top 20 release map.

12. Structure %album% tags and folders chronologically by date of release: “[%year%] %album%” and uniformly tag the %genre% value to populate as a chronological autoplaylist of the genre as a whole in MediaMonkey or a similar player with dynamic playlist support.

13. Construct a tier of standard playlists:

A. ~60-100 disc map of albums best-representing the genre.

B. Record label playlists (if applicable.)

C. A top 10 essential albums set (as determined by metascore.)

D. Separate playlist for featured artists with 50 or more albums in their discography.

14. Listen to recordings, beginning with albums from step 6, followed by the top 10 essentials list, and then first 2 LPs from each artist, and so on.

15. As most of these recordings will likely be decades out of print or have never been produced in a digital format, you will not be able to purchase (or even preview) these albums from commercial sources like iTunes.  Utilize other resources to acquire these albums, explore and discover the ones which resonate most with you, and purchase original issues via Discogs and your local shops specializing in rare and import vinyl.

 

CLOSING THOUGHTS

While this methodical and systematic approach to musical discovery may appear somewhat “clinical,” it is an efficient and refined means of employing the rich systems of metadata available and the largest assembled music databases in the history of recorded sound.  This should prove particularly advantageous for the music scholar faced with the daunting challenge of poring over decades of rare recordings.

By no means do I intend to downplay the critical role your local used record shop owner plays in the search for new music – no amount of metadata can match his or her years of experience living the sounds you seek.  But for the eager listeners who do not have access to such a shop, there are multiple resources like those described above which return a wealth of information you will never find on popular streaming services like Spotify, Rhapsody, or Rdio.

Through this system of discovery, you can combine the available information from blogs, literature, RYM, the Wikipedia, trackers, box sets, label archives and your local record gurus and organize the resulting data in an accessible fashion which will inspire many rewarding purchases for your library.

Happy hunting!

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on November 22, 2014 at 7:06 pm  Comments (2)  
Tags: 8tracks, blogs, data management, genres, gnod, gnoosic, gorillavsbear, grooveshark, hypemachine, last.fm, metadata, metascore, music discovery, music-map, New Music, npr, radd.it, RateYourMusic, rdio, reddit, rhapsody, RYM, scrobble, soundcloud, spotify, subreddits, vintageobscura, Vinyl

Digital Music Management – Taking Full Advantage of Your Data

You don't even want to begin to re-catalog THIS.

You don’t even want to begin to re-catalog THIS.

One of the challenges of a 77,000+ song library is the hundreds of artists a user may never hear. I decided to tackle this dilemma this week and found a solution.

The first task was to shed my database systems and Explorer navigation and find a way to manage my library from within a single application and really take command of the music metadata.  I decided that, moving forward, I would reserve my database strictly for physical media, and put Media Monkey Gold to the test of managing my digital library.

To facilitate the process, it seemed appropriate to lose some dead weight. I spent the first evening methodically rounding up my adolescent-era artists and relocating them to a folder outside the primary directory, aptly titled “Plebian Audio.”

Let's get to work.

Let’s get to work.

The process of elimination was simple.

If %GENRE% includes “rock” but does not include “progressive” or “avant-garde” then [Plebian.]

If mean album track %length% < 210sec then [Plebian.]

If demographic age < 20 then [Plebian.]

Else [Primary Audio Folder]

The resulting folder was a pool of p2p-era albums. Many had not been case-corrected. The file naming conventions were anything but uniform having sourced the tracks from multiple users, and not a single artist’s folder was a complete discographic archive. These were the millennial mix-tapes of the early days of file-sharing.

The next step was to clean-up the remaining digital files. For beginners considering this task, I recommend this article to get you started.

This was followed by an evening of fine-tuning – tailoring the %GENRE% values to be consistent throughout the library.

Trip Hop / Trip-Hop
Neo-Classical / Neoclassical / Modern Classical
etc.

It was at this juncture that I made the most valuable discovery of the project – that semicolons can be employed to apply multiple values to the %GENRE% field (or to any other field) in an ID3 tag.

Mp3tag_Logo

I used Florian Heidenreich’s lightweight but powerful MP3tag utility to batch-replace all comma separators in my library with semicolons. The process took 36 minutes, and I confess that I did not take my eyes off that progress bar for the entire duration of the task. I just kept thinking of the incredible control that multi-genre categorization would offer. For the very first time I was able to navigate my entire catalog by genre without having to tie albums to one specific tag.

Mp3tag app

The Mp3tag interface

It was a difficult lesson to learn, but digital music inherently stores all its data within its ID3 tags, making an external music database redundant. I’d dedicated considerable time to indexing my vinyl, CD and digital music into a single database, but the reality is that it stagnates your data. The realization was reinforced by the fact that private trackers no longer have a need for massive discographic torrent archives, and have instead replaced them with decentralized manageable and crowd-sourced collages. If for example a newly remastered edition of a recording is released, it can easily be introduced to the library and is seamlessly integrated into the collage with a single click – a vast improvement to the previous method, which would require reconstructing and redistributing the entire static archive.

The same principle applies to local digital music libraries. Changes or updates to tag information, whether for a single track or for 77,000 tracks is a simple task, and is instantly reflected within your digital music application.

Perhaps my epiphany is common knowledge for the general public. I’m curious, because mine is the only library I’ve ever managed. I’d be interested in seeing statistical data with regard to what database solutions the average music consumer uses to manage their own personal libraries.

Discogs-Logo
Discogs.com
appears to be the most popular tool for record library management at present, with the particular benefit of real-time value assessment based upon up-to-the-minute sales data from the Discogs marketplace. And recently, Libib.com has premiered as a web-based library application to manage users’ book, movie, music and video game collections. I contacted the site’s support team, but was disappointed to learn that they are entirely UPC and ISBN-based, with no plan to implement record catalog numbers or digital music data in the foreseeable future (alienating perhaps the two fastest-growing collector demographics.)

libib logo
But whatever software you use for your digital library, be it foobar2000 or MediaMonkey, the applications of audio metadata are empowering. For example, I could use this new multi-genre data to host multiple web radio stations (providing I can set up a server with sufficient dedicated bandwidth.)

foobar2000-logo
Which brought me to my next discovery – the concept of autoplaylists. By entering criteria such as BPM range, genre keywords, or targeted folders, MediaMonkey’s autoplaylists will automatically populate qualifying tracks, relieving the user of the burden of manually-adding new music to existing playlists.

Unfortunately, my current personal media server does not support autoplaylists, so I am considering moving from Subsonic to a MonkeyServer system. This reinforces my realization that the MediaMonkey Gold may be a single-solution for all my music management needs.

mediamonkey-logo
Over the next two days I created 85 primary playlists to showcase my catalog, based on the library’s most prominent genres and for artists between 30 and 381 albums to their name. With an average of a 258 hour running time per list, these playlists totaled more than 2.5 years of continuous 24hr playback and will automatically update as new qualifying recordings are added to the library.

The immediate advantage is that these playlists will surely expose me to hundreds of artists I might otherwise never have heard.

In the evenings ahead I’ll be experimenting with MM community plug-ins to really get some analytical power out of the application.

So there you have it. With a weekend project-duration of approximately 20 hours I’ve re-evaluated my cataloging system, standardized the metadata of 103,633 files, retagged every recording, constructed 85 autoplaylists and relocated my database from a static system to a dynamic environment with an incredible number of potential applications.

Below are the first pieces of data I’ve exported from the new library.  These charts were constructed based on %GENRE% data clustered by autoplaylists with run times ranging from 10 – 8,501 hours.

Genres 2

Genres 3

Genres 5

Happy listening everyone.

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on May 25, 2014 at 9:17 am  Leave a Comment  
Tags: autoplaylist, CDs, collage, database, digital music, discogs.com, FLAC, foobar2000, ID3, large libraries, libib.com, Mediamonkey, Mediamonkey Gold, metadata, MP3, mp3tag, music, music management, organize, playlist, plug-in, torrent, Vinyl
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