iam(still)kevin.

Update: And here’s the link to his talk: http://www.craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

That’s the first thing I thought when I walked into the room at U-W where Cory Doctorow gave a talk last night. I don’t frequently go to too many places where there’s such an exclusive collection of geeky people. Not like my friends are the epitomy of non-geek, on the contrary, but they aren’t as unabashedly geek as the people at Cory’s talk. Nothing wrong with that of course, it was just kinda funny.

I talked to Cory a little before his talk, before I actually realized that he was the person giving the talk. He’s a pretty cool guy, and I learned a neat camera trick from him. If you want to take a long exposure shot, and you need to steady the camera, you can use a neck-strap to help you out. Loop the neck-strap around your leg and pull the camera away from your body until it’s taut. As long as you keep the tension, you’ve got a pretty good makeshift tripod. It’s good for taking night pictures when you don’t have a good flash or you don’t want to use the flash, so you need to take a longer exposure picture.

Cory is, among other things, a sci-fi writer, a freelance journalist, he runs boingboing.net, and he does a lot of Digital Rights work for the EFF, Electronic Freedom Foundation. He has been involved in several cases, most recently the EFF was able to get DirectTV to change their Anti-Piracy campaign, which involved DirectTV raiding smart card manufacturers to obtain a list of their customers, and sending over 170,000 demand letters to customers, filing mor than 24,000 lawsuits against them. (here’s the press release)
He has written a few books, and published them under the creative commons license, which means you can download them for free from his website in various forms, or if you want you can buy them in book form from various online sellers, and a few stores. His philosophy is that you’ll sell more if you give it away free, because the more people know about something, the more chance someone will buy it, and giving something away is very good advertising.

Anyway, about the talk: First Cory read the third act from a short story/novella he’s going to be publishing in a collection called Up, to be relased at some point in the future (the previous collections from the man putting them together have been notoriously late, 4 years in one case). It’s a pretty neat sci-fi story set in the future, when we have developed an ant-hill algorithm to improve efficiency automatically. LA is now the most livable city, traffic is improved %5000, and things run more efficiently. Then a network failure causes a man’s surfboard to navigate him into choppy water, where he dies, and a lawyer moves to new york to get the anthill technology to be less invasive. It was a pretty funny and interesting story.

Cory then talked about some of his work, such as trying to defeat a bill that would give any broadcaster of content (not the creator, participant, etc) a 50 year copyright on anything they showed. For example, if a radio station played a song, they’d have a 50 year copyright on the song, Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, as there are many more peopel involved in the creation, distribution, production, etc of the song than the radio station, which had fuck-all to do with it other than playing the music.He mentioned 3 or 4 other campaigns that he’s working to kill that infringe on digital rights and make no sense at all. Very interesting stuff.

Today Cory is giving a talk Microsoft Research to try to convince Microsoft not to get into the DRM business, and in fact to convince them to get into the business of making the device that can play all copyright protected files, because that’s where the real money can be made. As Doctorow said, no consumer has ever asked a company to produce a tool with disabled functionality. The iTunes music store means that Apple can tell you which player you can use to play the music you purchased - iPods, and iPods alone. I There’s nothing at all wrong ith iPods, but there should be no reason that you ca not play your purchased music on a different player, be it a rio or an iRiver. Just because Apple said so isn’t a good reason.
Other than the fact that I like to actually be able to hold what I bought in my hand, the limitation to iPods is why i’ve only bought one song on iTunes, and don’t really see a good reason to buy another.

I’d like to go to the talk today, because i’m curious what the Microsoft side will say, but it’s in half an hour, and I’m probably a little too busy. I might sneak out anyway though, we’ll see. He’s going to post a copy of his talk online, to which I’ll put up a link later on.

Oh yeah, I managed to snag the manuscript Cory read from at the talk, signed of course. Maybe i’ll Ebay it in the future when Doctorow becomes rich and famous, and make myself some cash…

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