[advocacy] Open source and business (was Open/Free/Personal music licenses)

[Daniel James]

> Daniel, as I thought, I think your interests are quite
> different from EFF or GNU.  The are non-profit
> organization:  They can speak for the rights but not
> for the profit of the artists.  Therefore, it is very
> natural of them not to list Personal License.

I wouldn't entirely agree with that in the case of GNU. RMS told me 
he thinks the Personal Music Licence is OK, and he's never had any 
objection to people being paid for 'free' stuff - remember it's free 
speech, not free beer that he's interested in. He sold tapes of emacs 
to make a modest living, in the days before he was famous enough to 
win awards and earn fees on the lecture circuit.

As for the EFF position, I don't think it will appeal to musicians. 
There needs to be a recognition that the content industry is 
historically different from the software industry, and that musicians 
have suffered financially. Having just said that, if Bill Gates is 
Eric Clapton, then whoever wrote the TCP/IP stack that ended up in 
Windows must be Elmore James.

> However, Open source cannot be set into
> practice without profit-making companies.

Perhaps it needs the promotion that only commercial companies can 
afford, in order to be heard amongst the loud hype of the proprietary 
services.  

> Jack's recommendation: www.downslam.com

Interesting licencing, but personally I'd like my music to be 
downloadable at high quality. This service archives MP3's at 
AM-radio-like bitrates.

> Therefore, we need to have
> good contact with them as long as they are politically
> correct and not imitating patent-abusing companies.

Or artist-abusing companies...

> Jack or Daniel, how about making directories for those
> 'politically correct' business sites as 'open source
> partners' or so?  Or have you got better ideas to
> promote them?

I'd really like to see an Ogg Vorbis portal, although that would be a 
lot of work and of questionable financial viability. Better would 
be an .ogg filter on Google. It can already search inside PDF's for 
text and search for images - it should be feasible to select 'Audio 
search' and then list results by the contents of the comment tags. We 
can only suggest it...

Does anyone have contact information for Chuck D of Public Enemy? I 
believe he is very interested in net music technologies and 
countering artist exploitation. 

Daniel

--- >8 ----
List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'advocacy-request at xiph.org'
containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No subject is needed.
Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.