Clare Townhill

"People are going to steal your music whether you like it or not"

Brace yourself. It's time for some more Trent Reznor worship (oh come on, I haven't posted anything for at least a few weeks, give me a break):

...Trent Reznor, lead singer in a band at the vanguard of bringing technology into the music industry, plans to take things a step further, creating an app that will transform the experience of being a Nine Inch Nails fan.

NIN: Access, which is awaiting approval from Apple, could be one way forward for a music industry decimated by downloading in recent years. The application, which will be downloadable free, will let users start multiple conversations with strangers at gigs, locate other NIN fans in their vicinity, stream music, download photos and upload their own remixes. It will create an NIN community orchestrated by the band itself - not by any record company and not via any of the many social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook.

"People are going to steal your music whether you like it or not; it's out there, it's free," said Reznor in an interview with the Observer. "You're never going to make a lot of money selling records like you used to, that's a fact. It's over."

This is an excerpt from a nicely data rich article on iPhone apps in the Grauniad. Well worth a shufty.
Thanks very much to Nog for tipping me the wink.

Baby Pirates

Good interview between TorrentFreak and 'Hannah' a 10 year old with a penchant for P2P piracy:

Like most publications, here at TorrentFreak we regularly interview adults. However, when a recent conversation with a child turned to file-sharing, we took the opportunity to give the P2P kids a voice. We had a little chat with a 9 year old girl who wants to be called “Hannah” (after Hannah Montana) and she talks to us about LimeWire, BEBO, YouTube and her perception of the rights and wrongs of copying - even her frustrations with DRM.

“Never work with children or animals” said WC Fields. TorrentFreak takes a chance:

TF. Hi Hannah! How old are you?

- I’m 10 in 12 days

TF. What sort of music are you listening to right now?

Sean Kingstone, Shayne Ward and High School Musical 2

TF. Where did you first get into music?

- On the music channels, on MTV.

TF. When did you get a PC?

- People had computers but I couldn’t go on them but my Dad bought me one last year. I have internet.

TF. What do you do on the internet?

- MSN, talking to friends and cousins, games and dressing-up games [dolls]

TF. When did you first start using the internet to get music?

- My cousin showed me YouTube and then LimeWire and I was like “whoa cool!”

TF. What was cool about it?

- Because you can put anything in and it will come up and you don’t actually pay for it. Well you have to pay for the internet and LimeWire comes with the internet but you have to pay for that so LimeWire isn’t really free.

TF. Ok…I see….Do you get music from anywhere else?

- My cousin gets it from BEBO. She copies it from other people’s pages and puts it on her own.

TF. Do you think it’s ok to copy the music?

- Yes it’s ok because she only does it to make her page better.

TF. So you’re sure that it’s ok to copy it? What do you think about copying?

- I suppose it’s not ok to copy but people copied it off her site so she just copies theirs. It’s like, you’re copying my t-shirt so i’m copying you on shoes.

TF. Ok, so a bit like copying school work?….Hmm….ok, let’s talk about copying on the computer again. When you started using LimeWire, did anyone ever mention that if you did certain things you might be breaking some laws?

- Why would they put it [music] on the internet and invent mp3 players if it was against the law?

TF. Confusing isn’t it?….You mentioned you like Sean Kingstone - what if I told you that Sean Kingstone’s boss might send you a letter asking for money because you shared his album on LimeWire? What would you say to him?

- W.E! [whatever!]

TF. Come on, play along with me. What would you say if he did?

- I’d say “tooooo strict!” and anyway he can’t make me do anything. He’s not the boss of me, he’s the boss of Sean Kingstone.

TF. What do you think might happen if you didn’t pay him?

- Nothing. I’m too young to be charged by the government so he can’t charge me.

TF. Would you carry on using LimeWire after he sent the letter?

- Yeah!

TF. Why?

- Because you can get good albums off there. Duh!! My CD’s don’t work in my mp3 player so LimeWire is the only way to do it. I bought High School Musical 2 on CD but it won’t go on my mp3 [player]

TF. How would you make LimeWire better?

- To speak to the person sending the music to make sure they send the right one, sometimes they send stuff that doesn’t even play.

TF. Do you know what a pirate is?

- They have parrots [effects 'arrrrr']

TF. Do you think its legal or illegal to copy a CD or DVD?

- Some men right, they sell you a DVD at the market but when you get home it doesn’t play, that’s illegal.

TF. Why is it illegal?

- Duh!! Because they tell you it works and when you get it home it’s rubbish and jumps in the middle and its a waste of money!

TF. Do you think you should be paying for stuff off LimeWire? You have to buy CD’s from the shop…

- You have to pay for CD’s because they’re actually on a disc not on the computer. My cousin, right, she uses LimeWire when she doesn’t have any money for CDs.

TF. Did you ever download anything by anybody and then go to see them?

- I got stuff by Lee Ryan and Simon Webbe and then I went to see Blue. Why don’t you ask me what my favorite hobby is?

TF. Ok, what’s your favorite hobby?

-  Dancing to music, it’s fun!!

Thankyou, Hannah. That’s it! Have a nice birthday!

Awww, or should that be argghhhh?

Thoughts in the dead of night

'The real world map shows what we humans have been given to work with. The Web shows what we have chosen to care about.' - David Weinberger

The return of insomnia has given me lots of additional time to think this week; the following post is likely to be a journey rather than a destination. Apologies in advance. Broadly, the following things hang it all together: digital technologies, material ownership, and genuine indexes of individual enjoyment.

There's been lots of hue and cry over the last couple of weeks about illegal downloads, threatened legal actions, gnashing of teeth on both sides. As E-books are refined the experience becomes much closer to reading from a page rather than monitor all the questions of IP and DRM that have beset and befuddled the music industry are now being fretted over by authors and publishing houses. Ruskin said that literature is 'divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.' Some of the books we'll read are likely to be ones that we'd never have bought, and if we had parted with hard earned cash for, we'd be damn well pissed off. I hope very much that ebooks will give me the same luxury that illegal music downloads do: (just for the record, I'm spending more money on music now than I ever have before) the ability to browse at leisure and in huge volume to decide what I am and am not willing to pay for.

I read this on NewScientistTech yesterday:

Here are some of the responses from NS readers:

The other six pages of comments proceed in a similar vein. The desire to consume and the desire to possess are radically different. Which brings me neatly back to books/ebooks and a comment from an article in The Times (dead tree version) today:

'Some books are worth the trees they're printed on, others are not. That is the distinction that the electronic book offers.'

Some music is worth the trees/discs/vinyl... you get the point. The things I want to read and the things I want to own are as radically different as the tunes on my iPod and the cds on my shelves. The baseline is a judgement of quality and worth. Make more books worth buying and I'll buy them, make more music worth listening to and I will willingly fork out for it. Until the various industries are able to work with this instead of pushing our technologically illiterate government towards empty, draconian and unenforceable threats, we will continue to feel no compunction in downloading 'illegally'.