WombatNation

The RIAA isn’t satisfied with just taking back existing consumers’ rights with respect to music recordings sold by record labels. They now want to greatly restrict the rights consumers have to record radio broadcasts via the proposed “Audio Broadcast Flag Licensing Act of 2006,” H.R. 4861.

The RIAA wants to eliminate automatic recording of radio broadcasts when used to record digital broadcasts. Technology providers would actually be forced to produce devices that require a person to push a button to start a recording. Also, devices would not be allowed to record in increments of less than 30 minutes. So, if you want to record someone being interviewed in a short segment on the radio, you’re forced to wait until 30 minutes is up, and then go back and hack out the other 28 minutes or so you didn’t want.

What technology giveth, greedy bastards want to take away. Don’t let them get away with yet another assault on our rights.

The EFF Action Center has more information on this issue and a very simple form you can use to send a personalized message to your US House Representative. I sent mine tonight.

If you’re not heavily involved in the development or use of free and open source software, I imagine it can be very hard to understand the subtleties and the importance of free (as in liberty and speech) software versus open software that you can use for free (as in gratis and beer). For most software users, it’s probably not the most important distinction in their lives for them to grasp. But for many users, and especially for developers, it is very, very important.

Karl Fogel wrote a very nice article at O’Reilly OnLamp.com that does an excellent job of explaining the difference between the two, and why both are very important. If you ever wanted to know more about these software movements, I highly recommend that you read this three page article. Karl did a great job of explaining the history, intellectual property concerns, and impacts on users and developers.

When I first read about podcasting music, or even podcasting talk with a little bit of music in the background, I didn’t think about the copyright and licensing implications. I also didn’t consider what happens when a podcast becomes popular, but the RIAA has shown with webcasting that they won’t stop until they have extracted every penny they can get from anyone who has at least one penny, so don’t think your safe just because your listening base is small.

Matt May and assorted commenters cover the podcasting and licensing issue well on Matt’s bestkungfu blog. Read Matt’s post for the details, but the short summary is that it’s going to cost you a lot if you want to include most forms of commercially released music in your podcast. Just for starters, the first song will most likely cost you more than $100. Once you get the songwriter rights out of the way, then your costs will be significant only if a lot of people are downloading your podcast. Yes, you read that right. You have track how many people download your podcast, because you have to pay these organizations a cut for each download.

So, what do you do? For starters, check out music that has been released under a Creative Commons license. Good places to start are the Audio section at Creative Commons and Matt May’s own Staccato podcast.

Matt’s article was brought to my attention by my wife, who runs the radio station at UC Berkeley. She said that Matt’s coverage of the issue basically looks correct.

As seen recently on Slashdot, MGM recently settled a class action suit involving the image quality of DVDs they sold under the classification of “widescreen”. The claim is that the image width of the alleged widescreen versions was no different than for the standard versions. As per normal class action settlement verbiage, MGM denies any wrongdoing.

The website has a link to a five-page PDF containing a long list of the movies in question. If you purchased any of these movies between December 1998 and 8 September 2003, you can trade in each one for either $7.10 or a new DVD from a list of 325 titles. You have to submit a request for a claim form before you get to see the list of 325 titles.

I very quickly scanned the list and found at least four titles that I had purchased or received as a gift potentially during that time period - 24 Hour Party People, Powaqqatsi, Koyaanisqatsi, and This Is Spinal Tap. So, I called the toll free number to obtain a claim form. As I was calling, of course, I was thinking about how an automated speech application would be a perfect solution for collection the information for the claim request.

I wasn’t surprised to discover that the “claims administrator”, The Garden City Group, had come to the same conclusion. They have a call center in Sarasota, Florida, and have an IVR system or systems that they claim can handle 380 simultaneous calls. The website didn’t distinguish between how many were DTMF-only ports and how many were speech-enabled ports.

The app wasn’t that great, but they might not have that much experience building speech apps. Unless you’ve had the chance to build a lot of speech apps, it’s hard to develop the expertise required to design a highly conversational app. While there are a lot of good, experienced website designers available, there aren’t very many good, experienced speech application designers.

Back to the app. The good news is there was no need for text to speech, because of the fairly static nature of the app. Of course, the reason it was static is that it didn’t do very much. Only one part of the dialog used speech recognition - the part where are you asked to name a DVD you purchased that you believe is covered by the specifics of the settlement. Since the female voice talent was able to record all the DVD titles in advance, her response included her saying the name of the movie back to you. Unless of course, the movie title wasn’t on the list. Their strategies for handling no matches and mismatches left a lot to be desired.

After the app either recognized a movie you said as being on the list or gave up after three or so no matches or misrecognitions, it proceeded to collect your name and address. Unfortunately, it did this by recording you while you said and spelled the requested information. Presumably, they then had a person transcribe the info. While this is cheaper than having live agents waiting to handle calls 24×7 (especially if they then outsource the transcription to a low wage country), it would be even cheaper if they used the speech recognition engine and a suitable interface to a database of names and addresses. We’ve developed a system like that at work, and it works great for automating the transcription. Our solution is built right into the app, so we can do the transcription in realtime and play it back to the caller for confirmation. If a live agent is confused by the recording of the address (whether due to accent, a poor cell phone connection, dogs barking, etc.), the caller is no longer on the line to ask for confirmation. Also, while automated speech recognition isn’t perfect, human speech reco and transcription isn’t exactly perfect either. Whether the agent misunderstood what I said or merely made a typo when entering the info, many times I’ve had my name or address transcribed incorrectly by a live call center agent.

I didn’t realize backing up my DVDs using Linux could be so easy. Time consuming as hell, but fairly easy.

Dvd::rip is a front end to a big pile of libraries that do the good deeds. One of the key libraries is transcode, but there’s a lot of other great software underneath the covers that a lot of talented open source developers have contributed to the cause. While dvd::rip presents enough options to make your head spin, you can back up one of your DVDs to a pretty good quality AVI or MPG file with just a couple of mouse clicks. Okay, maybe ten or twenty clicks, but I’m going to tell you which ones.

If you prefer to install from rpms, the rpm you want for dvd:rip is perl-Video-DVDRip. I installed perl-Video-DVDRip-0.50.18-0.lvn.2.2 on my FC 2 system and it works just fine. I tried to use a newer version 0.52.2, but ran into a problem with a dependency I couldn’t resolve.

Fortunately, I quickly found on the web a well-written, albeit somewhat outdated, tutorial for using dvd:rip and transcode written by Moritz Bunkus. This tutorial provided a lot of background info that helped me to quickly understand why the various options had the effects that they did.

I ended up going with XviD4 compression to an AVI file. Depending on the complexity of the video and quality of the audio, I chose targeted sizes of anywhere from 700 MB to 1.4 GB. I may try compressing some other files with an MPEG 2 codec. I also used a “smart deinterlacing” filter. That cut the encoding speed in half, but it seemed to significantly improve the quality of the final video.

Here’s the speed path through dvd::rip for a basic ripping and encoding with no subtitles:

1. Create a new project and give it a clear name
2. Move to the RIP Title tab and click Read DVD table of contents
3. Select the largest entry (other entries are individual scenes, previews, trailers, interviews, etc.) and click RIP selected title(s)/chapters(s)
4. Make prank phone calls for 45 minutes
5. When ripping is finished, move to the Clip & Zoom tab. Yes, it’s normal for the images to be upside down and backwards.
6. Unless the third image is cropped poorly, leave this tab as is. The default preset will have converted a normal 720×480 DVD video to 640 x 336
7. Skip to the transcode tab
8. Change video codec to xvid (xvid setting currently defaults to XviD4) and make sure 2-pass encoding is selected (slow, but worth it)
9. Change deinterlace mode to smart deinterlacing
10. Determine the final size and quality in one of the following ways:
• If you want to copy the video to a CD, set Target Media to the number of CDs you want to use. Look at your CD-R blanks to determine how much each can hold.
• Specify an exact Target Size. If you are encoding only a part of the video, check the Use Range box. I often do this when testing different algorithms on small bits of the video.
• Enter an exact bitrate. Click manual to overide the bitrate generated by the previous two options.
11. In the Target Track section, click MP3 and change the sample rate to 192 kbps. Change quality to 2.
12. Click Transcode. If you had chosen to multiple Target Media (i.e., multiple CDs), click Transcode & Split.
13. Go to sleep. Actually, this step took about 4 hours on average on my machine

Obviously, there are a lot of other options, but the above steps are a pretty good compromise for video quality, audio quality, file size, and encoding time. You might want to try out other deinterlacing options (choose none if you’re sure you don’t need it) or antialiasing options if there are a lot of sharp, high contrast transitions in the video. If you want to keep the Dolby digital and surround sound and are willing to use more space for audio, stick with AC3 over MP3.

If you want to do a quick test encoding, set the range to a few hundred or so frames somwhere in the movie where something interesting is happening. You will have to disable Use PSU core. Click the Yes radio button next to Preview window. Click Transcode. You will send a window pop up and the encoded video will start to play as it is encoded. Depending on the options you chose, the video could be close to real time. If you want to hear the audio too, click View AVI after the range of frames you specified have been encoded.

If you want to backup your newly encoded video to a CD, move on to the Burn tab. You can use a lot of other tools to accomplish this, but dvd::rip makes it pretty convenient.

I think I started backing up my DVDs not a moment too soon. The first one I backed up had a weird glitch 2/3 of the way through. The problem seemed to be in the vob files on the DVD, since it reappeared no matter how I tried to encode the video. The glitch is just barely apparent when playing the DVD with a regular DVD player. I ended up having to split the encoded video into two files. The next two DVDs I tried were fine.

Do you think you have mastered all forms of logical thinking? Well, prepare to enter the Jack Valenti Logic Zone - The Engadget Interview: Jack Valenti. A place where hyperbolic bluster, falsehoods, and ignorance rule the day.

Jack Valenti is the departing head of the MPAA. Valenti, you might remember, is most notorious for his 1982 statement that:

“I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”

In the interview with J. D. Lasica, Valenti continues to make outrageous statements that are so provably false that I find it hard to understand what point he is trying to make. He’s not as bad as Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, but they’re entertainment tools working gimmicks to sell ads and books. While the MPAA effectively represents entertainers, Valenti’s not one himself. At least I assume he’s not trying to be funny.

“I really do believe we can stuff enough algorithms in a movie that only the dedicated hackers can spend the time and effort to try to plumb through those 1,000 algorithms to try to find a way to beat it.”

Okay, so no one expects Valenti to have a deep understanding of technology. Fair enough. But, doesn’t it seem like he would have at least a very superficial understanding of the technology that his industry depends on?

“We know that with DVDs and VHS, we lost $3.5 billion a year worldwide due to analog or hard-goods piracy.”

Valenti shares this approach with the RIAA and the BSA, that is, first produce an estimate of how many movies, music recordings, or commercial software products were illegally copied. While they are likely to overestimate the total, it’s reasonable to try to estimate (with an emphasis on estimate) the total. But, then they multiply that number by the full price of those items to get a grand total of lost revenue. While I can’t say just how many people who made illegal copies of movies, music, or software would have paid full price if making copies had been impossible, I assure you that the number is not 100%. Not even close.

“Now, fair use is not in the law.”

As Ernest Svenson and Ed Felten (see below) posted, Valenti needs to get acquainted with US Law, specifically 17 U.S.C. 107. He can plug his fingers in his ears and shout “I don’t hear the monsters” all he wants, but that law won’t be going away anytime soon.

“Where did this backup copy thing come from? A digital thing lasts forever. “

Guess what, Jack. Fox Home Entertainment, a division of MPAA member Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, is so convinced that DVDs don’t last forever that they offer an official DVD replacement program. From their website - “This DVD replacement program allows customers to replace damaged DVDs for $6.99. If you have a Fox Home Entertainment DVD damaged by scratching, sun exposure or other means, you may be eligible for this low cost replacement program.” Of course, not all companies make this offer. Also, not everyone is willing to pay $6.99 and “allow 4-6 weeks for delivery” to get a replacement, especially when technology is available to make the back up yourself.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that Valenti is a complete raving lunatic. He provides some perfectly reasonable answers in the interview. It’s just his occasional ventures far from reality that make you wonder how much he is taking up extreme positions in hope for a compromise versus how much he really believes what he says.”

Thanks to Ernest Svenson and Ed Felten for posting excellent commentary on their blogs about this Valenti interview.

W3C risks patent tussle in standard push | CNET News.com

A software patent problem continues to hang over VoiceXML 2.0, which reached proposed recommendation status this month. The problem is that the Patent Advisory Group that was supposed to make sure that any relevant patents would be offered on royalty free terms never got Rutgers University to respond in regards to a relevant patent. Rutgers previous position was to offer it under Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory Terms (RAND), which could mean license fees.

While the patent is an immediate concern for the VoiceXML standard, I believe it is an equal concern for the SALT standard that is primarily advocated by Microsoft. It may also be an issue for certain types of software used to audio enable the web for blind users. Furthermore, it could affect proprietary IVR systems that use URLs to retrieve “audio enabled pages”.

Last year the W3C established a Royalty-Free Patent Policy with respect to software patents affecting potential standards. The policy states that the W3C will not adopt any standard that cannot be implemented on a royalty free basis. While it is acceptable that a relevant technology be patented, the owner of each relevant patent must offer the patent under a royalty free license, as opposed to RAND.

The patent that is assigned to Rutgers University is titled “Method and system for audio access to information in a wide area computer network” and was originally filed in December 1996.

I am not a lawyer and I have not read the entire patent filing, but it seems fairly clear to me that this patent covers some uses of VoiceXML and SALT. Specifically, the patent makes claims regarding the use of an audio web server to make data from resources on a wide area network available through an audio interface. The patent focuses on audio enabling existing data resources that are accessed a WAN, and it suggests that the WWW is an example of such a network.

While audio enabling standard websites is a common use of VoiceXML and a likely use of SALT via Microsoft Speech Server, it is by no means the only use. However, the patent also refers to audio enabling databases. I could not find any claims related to conducting transactions, only accessing data.

But, many of the claims (and there are 31 of them) are very vague. Hopefully, that backfires and reduces the effectiveness of the patent. Many of the claims refer to other claims and are very difficult to keep straight.

The common reaction of software engineers to software patents that they hear about in the news is that they are obvious ideas and should never have been granted. Of course, lots of inventions sound obvious once you hear them described. Although I am obviously biased, I do think much of this particular patent falls into the obvious category. There are some novel and interesting ideas, but those ideas account for only a small handful of the claims. Also, very similar work was conducted at Lucent, and possibly at IBM and Motorola, as early as 1994.

A recent article in Forbes.com states that the 2006 World Cup in Germany will be broadcast only in wide-screen format. On conventional TVs, the image will be letterboxed.

Philips Electronics struck this broadcast deal with FIFA. Philips, of course, is a major manufacturer of TVs and would love to start selling more of their higher profit margin, wide-screen TVs.

The problem for TV manufacturers is that they are still on the short end of the network effect. People are hesitant to buy wide-screen TVs until there is enough content available that would take advantage of the format. Apparently, all the DVDs that provide the full 16:9 aspect ratio in which the movies were originally filmed hasn’t been enough. Broadcasters and their content providers are hesitant to produce and broadcast wide-screen content until enough consumers have wide-screen TVs. Otherwise, they face the ire of all the consumers who are unhappy to see all those pixels “going to waste” when the content is letterboxed on their current 4:3 aspect ratio TV.

This hopefully won’t be an issue for us, as we plan to actually be in Germany for World Cup in 2006. For the games we don’t attend, we will try to find pubs, bars, or restaurants with wide-screen TVs. I expect that most places in Germany will have upgraded by then.

We almost certainly will have purchased a wide-screen TV at home by then, anyway. I need to read more about the Broadcast Flag (more here) to decide if we need to make the purchase in time to beat the July 1, 2005, implementation of this seemingly quite misguided ruling by the FCC.

I’m starting to think that when Philip Morris paid to enter the corporate villian protection program and was renamed Altria, another part of the deal was that the RIAA and SCO agreed to act like World Wrestling Foundation bad guys to draw away the heat. I mean, it’s not like the RIAA and SCO are literally killing their customers, but they aren’t exactly breeding much customer loyalty, either.

The RIAA’s amnesty offer is absolutely laughable. You have to send in a photo ID with the affidavit. How many people are stupid enough to do that?

The only thing you get out of the program is that you won’t be sued by the RIAA for past infringement. But now, you’ve admitted you’ve knowingly downloaded music illegally in the past and you’ve given them an easy way to track you in the future. You get no legal protection for future actions, and you can guarantee they will be trying to track everything you do from here on out. Then, when they later take you into court on trumped up evidence for alleged new copyright infringements, they will parade out the affidavit you signed as evidence of you being a recidivist, just like a heroin user who couldn’t stay away from the smack.

You should participate in the shamnesty program only if:

1. you have done a very large amount of copyright infringing in the past
2. you believe that you infringed only RIAA copyrighted works
3. you honestly believe you will never infringe RIAA copyrighted works again
4. you trust the RIAA (whose website, by the way, gets regularly owned by hackers) with any private info contained on your photo ID
5. you did a very poor job of hiding your identity while using file sharing networks
6. and you think the RIAA is just about to sue you

I’m tempted to send in a couple hundred affidavits with fake photo IDs of Hillary Rosen, but I suspect that they would send the FBI after me, while at the same time counting those affidavits as part of the total number of participants in their soon to be labeled “generous and well-received” amnesty program.

The Digital Mix benefit last night for EFF was a highly entertaining mix of music, art, education, and motivation.

Ray Beldner, a local artist and educator, talked about the Illegal Art exhibit that has been showing at Fort Mason for the last three weeks. Unfortunately, today (Saturday the 26th) was the last day. Ray has created some very cool art works using US currency to emulate works by artists like Duchamp, Picasso, and Warhol. It turns out that defacing currency actually isn’t illegal, at least not seriously so, unless you do it with the intent to defraud someone, e.g., by making a $1 bill look like a $100 bill. I wonder if he was disappointed when he learned that he wasn’t as much of an outlaw as he thought he might have been. Of course, he’s still under potential legal and financial pressure from the estates of the artists he has copied. Ray showed photos of some of his work and work by other artists at the exhibit. He told several cautionary tales about how many of the artists involved with this exhibit have been threatened with legal action that has forced them to destroy previous works and alter their plans for future works.

FreshBlend performed before Ray spoke, but I had arrived too late. The first musical performance of the night I did see/hear was the polka electronic death country musical stylings of Mochipet. Unfortunately, the sound level was way too high for the acoustics of that room, and most of the audience quickly made their way back to the front room. You can download some of David’s music from his website.

Glenn Brown, the executive director of Creative Commons, gave an excellent summary of what Creative Commons is all about. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend watching the animated short at the CC website. That will give you a similar overview of the basics, at least.

Check out my previous post for an experiment with PhoneBlogger at the Digital Mix show. I tried to phoneblog one of the speakers, but the sound level wasn’t high enough from where I was sitting. Obviously cellphone designers design the mic placement to pick up just the person speaking into the cellphone from a very close distance. In this case, what would normally be considered background noise was the desired signal.

I wish I had tried to phoneblog part of Cat Five’s performance later that night. However, I didn’t think my attempt with Uprock had succeeded, so I didn’t even try. The audio quality of my telephone recording of Uprock isn’t that great, but it will give you a decent feel for their music. The heavily saturated visuals were pretty cool, but they really needed more material, as the images repeated a little too frequently to keep things interesting.

Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual property attorney with the EFF, gave a very educational and motivational speech about why it is incredibly important that each of us act now to defend our digital rights. He’s a really great speaker, which is obviously extremely important, given the vital litigation work he performs for the EFF. If you haven’t donated to the EFF recently, do it soon. That means me, too. I was member number 323 when I joined back around 1990, the year the EFF was founded. I still have a 3.5″ floppy disk labeled “EFF-Austin InfoDisk version 1.0 August 1992″ that I picked up at a meeting along with a floppy disk Bruce Sterling gave me that is stamped Garbage In Garbage Out. EFF accidentally fell off my list of charities to donate to one year, and I kept forgetting to put them back on the list. Lazy, lazy, lazy. I won’t forget this year, though.

Meanest Man Contest definitely stood out from the other performers, if for nothing else because of the vocals and the guitar, though the guy on the left didn’t happen to be playing it when I took this photo. Check them out if you like intelligent rapping over sampled, cut-up music.

One downside of seeing a live performance of laptop music is that most of what you usually see are a couple people seated at laptops with the backs of the laptops facing you. Other than watching them move around a mouse and tap on the keyboard, they might as well be behind a wall. Mochipet’s performance would have been a lot more interesting if I they had projected the image from his laptop up onto the big screen. Some of the other groups has some interesting videos projected on a big screen behind them, which leads me to…

Cat Five walked out wearing fright wigs, settled in behind their Mac laptops, cranked up the dry ice smoke, and launched into “American Military Operations”. The visual collage projected during their performance was a great backdrop for their music. This was definitely my favorite performance of the evening. The above photo has some weird artifact in between the two guys on the left. This is not a UFO, a ghost, a dinner plate, or a part of the show. Stuff like that sometimes happens with my camera when I try to take photos with way too low light levels. I had to crank the brightness way up from the original image. Anyway, Cat Five were very cool and you should definitely check them out if you get a chance.