Someone Who Is About To Be Fired At Warner Music Issues DMCA Takedown On Larry Lessig Presentation

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Last night, Larry Lessig tweeted that Warner Music had sent a takedown notice to YouTube over one of his presentations, claiming that it infringed their copyright. Lessig, of course, is one of the nation's leading legal scholars, particularly when it comes to fair use and electronic media. His presentations are filled with examples of companies like Warner sending bogus takedowns over fair-use inclusion of their copyrights in YouTube videos. And there's a burgeoning body of law that affords stiff penalties to companies that send these bogus takedowns.

If there were anyone out there to whom you would not want to send a random takedown notice for an online video, it would probably be Larry Lessig. Given that Lessig has become the public face for those who feel that copyright has been stretched too far, as well as being a founder of Stanford's Fair Use Project, and who's written multiple books on these issues, you would think (just maybe) that any copyright holder would at least think twice before sending a DMCA takedown on a Larry Lessig presentation.

Apparently, you'd be wrong.

Lessig, of course, is a lawyer, and a big supporter of fair use, so it's no surprise that he's also said he's going to be fighting this.

The thing that I can't understand is who at Warner Music would decide this was a good idea? We've seen Warner make a number of highly questionable moves over the past six months, but this may be the most incomprehensible. Warner Music may claim it was an accident or that it didn't mean to send the takedown, but that's hard to fathom as well. The DMCA rules are pretty clear, that the filer needs to clearly own the content, and previously lawsuits have said they need to take fair use into account. I'm going to make a BIG bowl of popcorn to watch as Warner Music gets pwned.

Update: Some people have been asking which Lessig presentation was taken down. It's been reposted elsewhere, so you can check it out, and then explain how Warner Music has any claim to a takedown.

 

Curse and WoWInterface Declare War on the WoW Community

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So WoWInterface & the Curse sites have blocked WoWMatrix. Today. On patch day. Do they seriously want hundreds of thousands of angry people with torches and pitchforks at their doorstep? They claim that they are in the "right" because WoWMatrix is "stealing" from them. They say you should use their own respective craptacular addon update clients. The problem is that for all the well intentioned efforts of WOWI and Curse, they are simply too busy/incompetent/unfocussed enough to provide a decent client experience. Add to this their need to try to restrict everyone to one site only and you have a model that flies directly in the face of what is ideal for users.

Obviously, we can't have what is ideal for users (free everything + one click updating + cross site addon support). So while the site maintainers can claim they're all eager to make users happy, that isn't their end goal, it's to make sure they have a functional business model. Hmmm....who does this sound like? Oh yeah, I know...THE RIAA!

There's nothing wrong with that. The part that annoys me is their unwillingness to let someone else do the work to make the users happy. There is a significant community out there that can write very functional and user-friendly updaters that work cross platform. Why not punt off the hard work of writing a non-retarded updater to them?

There was an ace updater back in the day. It worked flawlessly with the ace repo, and was quite pleasant to use. The author wanted to make it work with Curse, and when he spoke to the Curse guys, the response was 'go away, it's our client or nothing, we don't want one click updating, we want to force everyone to click through ads'. Now, that makes sense from a business perspective, but let's not pretend it's in the best interest of users.

Given the lack of resources/skill/willingness to develop useful clients, wouldn't it be better if the site maintainers instead focussed on their piece of the puzzle, the sites themselves? Why not for example allow for a web API to query, download, and update addons? Why not allow such a service for premium customers only? That way I can write an updater and ask them for their curse credentials or API key, and I can tell users that my addon is only useful if they pay up to Curse/WOWI/whoever. I can evolve it at my own rate, as can any number of developers, and we'd all stop being held hostage by the woefully inadequate, highly dysfunctional, and rarely updated Curse client.

I have no interest in 'stealing' from anyone. However, I will also happily steal if you won't give me a good alternative, and I'm sorry but right now the website and curse clients are very far from 'good alternatives'. I would happily download music before from newsgroups/bittorrent/napster/kazaa, nowadays I check itunes first because I'm happy to support the industry and the application that Just Works. The same applies to wow addons.

I for one will be cheering for WoWMatrix to work around whatever measures Curse/WOWI put in place. In turn, I stronly urge that WoWI & Curse find another method to make money rather than trying to protect their business model - at the expense of their users. Until that happens, a big F*** You to WoW Interface & Curse and a huge shout out to WoW Matrix to quickly circumvent whatever blocking they have put in place.

Etymotic Research: Kickass Customer Service

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I purchased a set of ER 6i Isolator Earphones back in the summer of 2007 from Amazon after hearing Leo Laporte rave about them on TWiT and other TWiT Network shows. First of all, for someone who works in downtown Washington, DC and rides the very noisy Metro every day, these Earphones are fantastic. Their rubber grips go down inside your ear canal blocking out 80%+ of any exterior noise. They produce high fidelity sound for their size, and albeit a bit pricey, are very nice. They have an extra-long chord for reach into a messenger bag or a backpack if you do not wish to store your iPod in your pocket and feature a nifty little clip to latch the chord onto your clothing so as to not allow it to get caught on objects as you walk by.

Now all of this is very well, except that I am very rough on my equipment. Within about 8 months of my owning these, the left earphone began to cut out. The connection of the earbuds to the mini-jack began to become stretched or frayed (I'm guessing). I was kind of frustrated but found out they came with a 1 year warranty. I called up Etymotics and to my surprise, did not hear a phone tree when the line picked up, but instead, a nice woman on the other end who promptly diagnosed my problem. She happily told me that it was covered under the warranty and told me that Etymotic Research would replace them for me. After getting an RMA number I shipped these back to Etymotic the next day, and within a week, had my replacement set back.

Fast forward to this last week. I now have an iPhone (as of December 2008) and purchased a set of Hf2 high-fidelity hands-free headset + earphones. These have even better sound quality than the ER6i's, but are made specifically for the iPhone, duplicating the functionality of the microphone built into the chord along with the single button for controlling the answering of calls or flipping through music when in iPod-mode. I love this set of Earphone, or at least I did until I took them out of my bag last Friday to discover one of the plastic housings around the base of the left earbud had become cracked. I SUSPECT it was my fault in that they were crushed inside my bag up against something. I called Etymotic Research and once again, a very cheerful customer service rep who answered gladly told me they would replace them, gave me an RMA number and told me they would ship a replacement as soon as their recieved my damaged ones. As of right now, it is the Friday after that call, and my UPS tracking number says that UPS will be delivering my replacement set today.

 

Etymotic Research is awesome.

Off to South by Southwest (SXSW)

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All my bags are packed and I'm ready to go.....

I'm heading to the airport (Reagan/National) in just a few minutes to catch my flight from DCA to Houston, to Austin for the spring break of geek conferences, SXSW. I'm incredibly excited at all of the panels that are going to be available for me to attend in addition to all of the conference parties that happen each night (especially the Bigg Digg Shindigg).

Nate Silver of fightthirtyeight.com is the keynote speaker for Sunday.

Merlin Mann (43folders.com) and John Gruber (daringfireball.net) are doing a panel together on Saturday, called "HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility".

Gina Tripani of Lifehacker will be sitting in on a panel called Curating the Crowd-Sourced World.

One of my personal heros, Lawrence Lessig, will be doing a panel called "Politics, Technology, and Pop Culture."

These are just a few I'm most looking forward to. I could go on and on, listing the 20 or so on my personal conference schedule, but names such as Andy Baio, Daniel Burka, Brian Cain, Andy Carvin (NPR & local DC techie), Ana Marie Cox, Jonathan Coulton, Felicia Day, Tara Hunt, Guy Kawasaki, Tom Merritt Kevin Rose, Alex Albrect, Robert Scoble, Christina Warren will be sprinkled throughout the panels over the course of the conference. Representatives from all of the major web companies/orgs/presences will be on hand to meet with, talk to, discuss, etc.


Now can you see why I'm excited? Well - look at the time. Off to the airport!

Tuzworld.com is no more.

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When I first attained internet access from our small local ISP in my hometown of Rocky Mount VA, my first online community I joined was the Emperor's Hammer, a online gaming community based and organized around the theory that we were all members of the Imperial Fleet. Rather than go into a further explaination of what this organization's purpose was, you can go find out for yourself from the link above. The reason I'm telling you this, is that I needed a screename. I chose Tuz due to it being short, easy to spell and easy to remember. This worked very well for me, for years, until the late 90's when many sites started having minimum character counts for many of their login names. I added Y2K to this, as this was the year I graduated highschool, in 2000. Tuz became Tuzy2k.

Anywho - in 1998, when I first decided on a domain name for my website, I came up with Tuzworld. This site was originally just a page of links for my own purposes. In 2003 it became a blogger account and in 2005 was exported into a Wordpress install. It is 2009 and I've now decided to move to squarespace.....and ditch tuzworld.com. I get a lot of questions as to what Tuzworld means, and to me, it meant something but to many other people - it doesn't. Furthermore, I want to be identified with what I do online with myself in the offline world. To this reason I've went with the new, completely unoriginal, JoelHousman.com