Shrunketized

BitTorrent goes legit

BitTorrent's Bram Cohen has come to an agreement with the MPAA.

"BitTorrent Inc. discourages the use of its technology for distributing films without a license to do so," Cohen said in the statement. "As such, we are pleased to work with the film industry to remove unauthorized content from bittorrent.com's search engine."

This seems a crucial point in insuring the future of BitTorrent regardless of what results from the agreement. In the recent Grokster decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the primary intended use of an app must be legitimate, even if there are secondary illegitimate uses. Grokster didn't advertise their service that way. Cohen's declaration makes a solid case for the continued legality of BitTorrent.

As for the MPAA, it seems they've learned some things from the RIAA's missteps and might be more willing to embrace new distribution methods. We'll have to wait and see how much it will cost customers.

Coming down the Pipe

Doc Searls has scared the crap out of me. This is a must read. It feels like we've toppled a giant only to discover he's falling on us. There's a call to action here, but i'm not sure what individual users can do about it. I'd like to think that Google and others can use their leverage to prevent things from getting out of hand. Unfortunately they're big enough that they can also afford to just play the game, at our ultimate expense. Perhaps i'm overly optimistic, but I'd like to think the very nature of the internet would make it quickly apparent how misguided these notions are. There are so many ways to route around "damage".

Patently ridiculous

The putting-the-milk-in-the-cereal patent, the we-own-your-own-genes patent, the ruin-your-browser patent, and this-is-where-the-story-ends patent. When will the US Patent Office come to its senses?

Pushing the Network

SBC CEO Edward Whitacre is tired of giving Google a free ride. Via IP Democracy, "Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that...The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! (YHOO ) or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!" Wow, free internet? I'd like to get in on that action. Those phone companies are clever, charging customers on both ends to be connected, and then charging extra to use that connection. That's desperate logic. What caught my attention though was the word ain't, which leads me to believe Whitacre's Good Old Boy Network is doing better than his communications network. Vonage service is mediocre, but I'm happy to not be an SBC customer.

Apple v Netflix

The addition of TV shows to iTunes is a welcome one, but I wonder about the pricing. Steve Jobs believes that people want to own and not rent their music, but does the same hold true for TV? I'd pay a couple bucks to catch a missed episode of a current show, but would I buy one episode of Seinfeld? Probably not—I'd be more likely to buy an entire season. TV episodes do not stand alone as well as movies. But then you are talking about a serious investment of cash and time. And while you're at it, can you buy one season of an older show, or do you need to buy the whole series? I can't think of many multi-season shows I'd want to shell out that kind of money for. And after watching all those shows it would probably be a very long time before I'd want to watch them again, so is it even worth the purchase? That's what rentals are for.

I enjoy using my Netflix subscription to rent an entire season of a show for basically no cost, and watch them all in a marathon weekend. To make buying more worthwhile than renting you'd have to want to watch it over and over. The time requirement alone makes movies a different equation than songs. I do listen to songs over and over, and can do so passively. My guess is that at some point down the road, Apple will recognize the need to switch over to a rental format. At that point, they would be in direct competition with Netflix.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has said that Netflix has never been tied to a specific delivery mechanism, implying they could switch to internet delivery when needed. But unless they've been secretly developing and refining it, Apple most likely has a superior distribution experience in the iTunes store. But do they have the movie rental customer base that Netflix does? It's hard to say how much overlap there is between their music customers and potential movie/tv customers. It could benefit Netflix to partner with Apple, to use Apple's store as a distribution method, but how much does this benefit Apple? Access to digital delivery rights? If Netflix even has these yet, it might be useful, but I'm guessing Jobs has his own deals lined up.

Fonts...managed.

Linotype FontExplorer X is my new favorite program. This is the font management program that should have always been. At first glance it's a direct copy of iTunes, enough so that I wonder if they paid Apple any licensing fees. It even includes a store to purchase new fonts. After using it a while I can really appreciate the time they spent thinking over the details beyond the iTunes model. Font management is a little more complicated, but they kept it easy to use, and it just plain works. I love the font preview features, and the program is super speedy compared to Apple's default Font Book, which grinds to a halt with more than a couple hundred fonts. I'm really enjoying rediscovering my fonts.

Adobe Illustrator seems a bit sluggish when FontExplorer is running. Aside from that my only complaint is that they need some more foundries in their store—I can imagine this will change quickly.

How hard should a search engine search?

Robert Scoble thinks that search sucks. He's got some interesting ideas about how it could be improved, but there's a larger question raised of just how fine grained general search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN should be. I think his hotel example is playing to his point a little. If I want to find a hotel in New York my first thought would be to type in hotels in New York City, or more obviously go to Local Google or Local Yahoo and type in hotels in New York City, NY. Those deliver different results. By typing in new york hotel I think he was intentionally trying to pull up noisy data.

In my first search I was able to find the site Trip Advisor in the top 10 which gave pretty detailed information about hotels in specific areas with good customer reviews. That's where search succeeds now—it couldn't tell me the hotel I wanted, but it could find me another site that could. Google pointed me in the direction of a more expert site. To use a traditional metaphor, what is the goal of a search engine—to be the entire library? To be a librarian that has all the answers? Or to be a general librarian that knows which special collections librarian to point you to?

There are so many industries and areas of knowledge out there that adding the level of detail that Scoble is suggesting would weigh a search engine down considerably. Still, adding some interaction in the results on a basic level could improve existing search, but I don't think people are looking for complexity. When was the last time you used the advanced search?

Screw it

"Screw the nano," says Motorola CEO Ed Zander. "What the hell does the nano do? Who listens to 1,000 songs?" It's true, no one listens to 1000 songs. And no one reads 8 billion web pages. But we like to have them around, just in case.

You didn't fully succeed

And you just don't fit in. I caught the first episode of Martha's Apprentice last night. She's a kinder, gentler Donald, but there are a lot of similarities between the two shows which makes me wonder how much control Martha really has over what goes on.

It's hard to watch because like all reality shows the contestants are trying to game the system right out of the gate. Was Dawn really that awful, or was Jeff just trying to create false conflict to get her fired? Jeff didn't really want to work with anyone—he just wanted to get everyone else fired. This is the reason he was fired. I get the feeling the producers try to dumb things down a bit for the audience since admitting that he was too much of a player would show the flaws in this show. Jim is going to lose for this same reason, but Martha will probably come up with something more audience friendly when she gives him the boot.

Martha's version is better than Donald's, though instead of sending the loser a friendly note she should just run over them with her car.

Alpha

Five years ago I decided to start a weblog. Today i'm finally getting around to it. I hope I've got some interesting things to say.