"piracy" entries

Old-school DRM and new-school analytics

Piracy isn’t the threat; it’s centuries old. Music Science is the game changer.

Download our new free report “Music Science: How Data and Digital Content are Changing Music,” by Alistair Croll, to learn more about music, data, and music science.

350px_Stephan_Sedlaczek_Mozart_am_SpinettIn researching how data is changing the music industry, I came across dozens of entertaining anecdotes. One of the recurring themes was music piracy. As I wrote in my previous post on music science, industry incumbents think of piracy as a relatively new phenomenon — as one executive told me, “vinyl was great DRM.”

But the fight between protecting and copying content has gone on for a long time, and every new medium for music distribution has left someone feeling robbed. One of the first known cases of copy protection — and illegal copying — involved Mozart himself.

As a composer, Mozart’s music spread far and wide. But he was also a performer and wanted to be able to command a premium for playing in front of audiences. One way he ensured continued demand was through “flourishes,” or small additions to songs, which weren’t recorded in written music. While Mozart’s flourishes are lost to history, researchers have attempted to understand how his music might once have been played. This video shows classical pianist Christina Kobb demonstrating a 19th century technique.

Read more…

Publishing News: No dismissal for Apple, Macmillan and Penguin

A request to dismiss is denied, an attempt to end Internet piracy, and a look at reading behaviors.

Updates on the DOJ and antitrust lawsuits against Apple, Macmillan and Penguin; Russian startup Pirate Pay targets BitTorrent file sharing; and Steve Rubel muses on digital media, social sharing and news consumption.

Creativity isn't one size fits all, so why is copyright?

Google's Bill Patry on market signals and copyright terms.

In this video interview, Bill Patry, senior copyright counsel at Google, addresses the one-size-fits-all concept and says it doesn't make sense for copyright terms. He also talks about piracy and whether or not we should eliminate copyright.

Publishing News: The threat of censorship, from a non-government entity

PayPal is censoring, pirates are opportunities, and newspapers are doomed.

PayPal's demand on Smashwords is a wolf in sheep's clothing. Elsewhere, proposals to get publishers past piracy and a newspaper study reports grim results.

Piracy is not a pricing signal

Lost sales from illegal downloads are lost because of convenience, not price.

The inconvenience of current downloads and streams are not a technology problem, they're a business problem. And rights holders perpetuate the piracy "problem" by not giving consumers the convenience that piracy does.

Publishing News: Let's remember why we got into this business

Lavar Burton on the power of storytelling and other highlights from TOC 2012.

LeVar Burton's TOC keynote takes publishing back to its fundamentals; Joe Karaganis says opposition to SOPA isn't enough, we also need we good alternatives; and bookseller Praveen Madan says the future of bookstores hinges on experiences … and perhaps partnering with Amazon.

Strata Week: The Megaupload seizure and user data

Megaupload's demise raises data questions and Bloomberg opens up its market data interface.

In this week's data news, Megaupload users face data deletion, Bloomberg opens its market data interface and Pentaho changes its licensing for Kettle.

Top stories: January 23-27, 2012

Finding the real pirates, Microsoft's plan for Hadoop and big data, and thoughts on a theoretical Amazon store.

This week on O'Reilly: Mike Loukides offered a different take on the piracy debates, Edd Dumbill looked at Microsoft's Hadoop-driven plan for big data, and we learned why Amazon retail stores aren't out of the question.

On pirates and piracy

The media industry's wholesale takeover of creativity is the real piracy.

Mike Loukides: "I'm not willing to have the next Bach, Beethoven, or Shakespeare post their work online, only to have it taken down because they haven't paid off a bunch of executives who think they own creativity."

Putting money where our mouths are

The business that can't deliver the goods doesn't deserve to survive.

SOPA and PIPA are attempts by established companies to preserve an industry that has been fundamentally unchanged since the 1950s, if not the 40s.