Findory: personalized news based on usage

Findory is a website that watches your news reading habits to personalize articles that it presents to you on its homepage [findory.com]. In addition to using Findory through their website, you can also integrate Findory into your normal news reader. I created a custom RSS feed through Findory that I added to Google Reader. This is a very cool idea and one that I have been thinking of in one way or another for a while now. I’ll have to give it a shot to see how good of a job it does for me.

A few Web 2.0 sites that caught my attention

I spent a good part of the day today reviewing Web 2.0 sites that were featured on SEOmox Web 2.0 Awards [web2.0awards.org]. The following lists some of the sites that I thought were interesting and that I would probably use.

• Basecamp – Provides a project management “extranet” that pulls together a number of important tools into a single focal point. Includes calendaring, people, tasks, milestones, document management and discussions.
• PBwiki – I think the site’s tagline says it all, “Make a free wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich”. They live up to it to. It was incredibly easy to setup my wiki. They have me my own hostname when I registered and I could choose to make the wiki public or private. The editor used standard wiki markup, but also provided a toolbar to create the markup. Good for me since I always forget.
• CSS Beauty – A nice example of how concepts of weblogging and syndication can be brought together in an elegant and targeted content website.
• Pandora Internet Radio – Create custom, dynamically generated radio stations to help you discover new music. Based on the Music Genome Project.
• SWiK – OSS project database

There are many more sites out there… I will be looking for ones that have anything interesting.

Fair use and the state of digital media online

The other day, a friend of mine asked the following simple question. Though the question is simple, it highlights the current state of confusion among consumers when it comes to purchasing and using digital media online.

Can you give me a brief tutorial on how purchased digital music (single tracks) work in terms of copyright stuff? For example, if I purchase a DRM-protected song off the web, say from MSN music for 99c in WMA format, am I able to play it on another computer or burn it onto a cd and then play it on another machine or cd player? I’m thinking not, but that would be real prohibitive to genuine users like myself who do NOT intend to distribute the song, but to be able to play it in the car, on the home entertainment center, or on any of my laptops. For these “genuine” users, is there cheat software off the web that removes the DRM stuff (or encryption) or what have you, and just generates an mp3 or simple WMA for you?

In an attempt to clarify the options available, I will briefly try to cover a little bit about RIAA restrictions on digital music sales, Digital Rights Management (DRM) and the sources of licensed as well as unlicensed music on the Internet.

First a little about the RIAA… The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is the organization that is primarily responsible for the confusion that consumers feel around digital media. Of course, the RIAA simply represents the major labels and does their bidding. Currently, in the U.S., the major labels place restrictions on legal sales of digitally downloadable music. These restrictions usually include playback on 5 machines, transfer to a limited number of portable devices and a limit on the number of times a track may be burned to CD. In order to legally sell music, music sellers, such as iTunes or MSN must adhere to these restrictions.

In order to conform to these restrictions, resellers must implement technology that allows them to constrain how the consumer actually uses the content. This technology is known as Digital Rights Management (DRM). There are a number of DRM technology providers, but only two have gained any appreciable amount of market share; Windows Media DRM and FairPlay.

FairPlay is a DRM technology to which Apple has exclusive control. Because of this control and Apple’s desire to remain closed, FairPlay is not licensed to any other resellers or device manufacturers. Apple uses the FairPlay DRM to limit content purchased throughout the iTunes Music Store (iTMS). Furthermore, FairPlay technology may not be used on any device other than the Apple iPod. This creates the current situation where iTMS downloads may only be used on the iPod. Since Apple does not implement any other DRM technology on the iPod, the only store that iPod users can use is iTMS.

Windows Media DRM has essentially become the fallback DRM for everyone else. Windows Media DRM is supported on a large number of consumer devices as well as desktop players and applications. Yet, despite this advantage, Windows Media has yet to displace FairPlay due to the huge success of the iPod. This may be starting to change as growth in iPod sales has begun to decrease [The Observer].

Of course, DRM places limitations on consumers, afterall, that is what it was designed to do. But, as my friend asks, what about honest users that just want to download and listen to music? Well, I’m sorry, but the RIAA does not trust you or anyone else. They are trying to find a technological solution to a social problem. Interstingly, it is technology (the record, then the CD) that put the recording industry where it is today. However, those were technologies that were good for the consumer. Again, the recording industry is trying to maintain their position using technology (DRM), but in this case the technology is bad for the consumer. Will technology win? Yes, but DRM will lose. Be prepared to wait a while, though…

So, what options are available to honest users?
1) Purchase and rip the physical CD. This is the best solution as it results in high quality content with metadata and absolutely no DRM. The irony of digital downloads is that the Labels are spending so much attention on putting DRM on low quality downloads when CDs are sold without DRM and provide a much higher quality digital file.
2) Burn the “purchased” tracks to CD and the re-rip them to your computer. This will effectively “strip” the DRM, but is time consuming, especially since metadata about the downloaded track will also be lost once the track is burned.
3) Windows Media DRM has recently been cracked and there is now a tool available for stripping DRM [FairUse4WM]. Microsoft quickly came out with a “patch”, but the tool was quickly updated to work around this patch. The cat and mouse game has started and DRM will ultimately lose. Of course, even this solution is troublesome to the consumer and, AFAIK, only works for subscription content. At least you can fairly use subscription content now…
4) QTFairUse6 strips FairPlay DRM from tracks downloaded from iTMS. The cat and mouse game has also begun here with successive versions of iTunes patching the holes and subsequent versions of QTFairUse6 opening them back up [ArsTechnica].

Where can I purchase music online?
If you still insist on downloading music, instead of purchasing the CD, here are some of the more popular options:
1) iTunes: Despite their closed environment, iTunes still provides the best end-to-end experience. Of course, you are locking yourself into Apple and the iPod.
2) MSN, Napster, Rhapsody: Take your pick… In addition to downloads, these services offer subscriptions that give unlimited downloads that expire at the end of the month.
3) eMusic: Unlike everyone else, eMusic does not use any DRM. The reason they can do this is that they do not distribute any major label content. The advantage is that you can avoid the pains of DRM and play your music anywhere as often and how you like. The disadvantage is that much of the most desirable music is not available on their service. eMusic also offers a subscription service. It varies from other subscription services in that the content never expires (it is also DRM-free), but the number of downloads is limited. Instead, you get a limited number of downloads per month at a reduced price.

Where can I get free music online?
There are many people who want to “steal” music from the free sites. However, many more of us use the free sites to try new music or to download music that we may have already purchased, but without the hassles of DRM.
1) The Pirate Bay: This is the number one BitTorrent tracker on the web. You can go here to search for music, videos and other goodies online
2) uTorrent: You will need a BitTorrent client to use The Pirate Bay. I would recommend uTorrent.
3) SpiralFrog: This is a new service that has yet to launch, but recently signed agreements with Universal and now, EMI, to distribute these catalogs on their service. So, in addition to (probably) all of the content that you find on eMusic, this site will actually have some good music. The general thought is that where one major Label goes, the others will soon follow so it is a reasonable guess that this site may soon be able to offer the same catalog as iTunes. The unique aspect here is that SpiralFrog is ad supported. The content will still be DRM restricted, but, in this case, you get what you pay for.

There are many other topics that I could cover and a lot more detail to cover on these topics, but I hope this article will help answer a few people’s questions. Good luck!