This NYT story is a big sign of our times. DJ Drama, the leading hip hop music mixtape producer in the US has been arrested with an associate at the behest of the RIAA. I wasn’t aware that hip hop mixtapes were the foundation of major lable sales, as the Times and many other sources are now saying. It’s fascinating – both that remixing is truly breathing life into a creative industry and that the practice is being criminalized. Here’s DJ Drama’s MySpace page. Here’s the some very good coverage at MP3.com. That article says that the mix tape medium is one made up promotional music from artists with albums about to be released, though in many cases the songs may use background music from other copyrighted music.

It reminds me of stories I’ve read about MPAA armed raids in SE Asia of buildings suspected of housing DVD piracy operations. Crazy 007 tactics and battles to catch people in the act of dubbing Die Hard movies. It’s like farmers no longer alowed to save seeds that have been patented by western pharmaceutical companies or indigenous people who are convinced to give up their DNA for drug development.

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In this case though it’s a beautiful act of creativity that almost everyone, including music lables, appear to be benefitting from.

Super interesting to me is this quote:

“Statistics prove that you can make a 400 percent markup on a kilo of heroine or cocaine, and statistics also show that you can make up to a 900 percent profit on the resale of counterfeit CDs,” the RIAA’s Matthew Kilgo told Fox 5.

DJ Drama may be white but the racism in that statement is clear.

People aren’t going to stand for things like this. Things are going to start changing in a hurry and I don’t think it’s overstated to say this story is an important part of the history that’s unfolding.

I just posted over at SplashCast about an awesome piece written up by OurMedia and TechSoup comparing the details of 9 popular video hosting sites’ Terms of Service. Found via the Revver blog. Though I think that all the posts I put up at SplashCast are pretty groovy, this one in particular is something I wanted to make sure readers here got a chance to see.

Here’s a show stopper: I tried to submit the OurMedia piece to Digg – only to be told that OurMedia.org is on the list of banned domains! That’s an awful shame! Is it because people are taking advantage of the site’s free media hosting and then spamming digg with media spam hosted on OurMedia? For whatever reason, it’s a major loss of high-quality content – like this post I’d like to submit. Digg has a tough job on its hands but as many people have been writing lately, the banned domains list may be overzealous some times.

One of the many things I love about GMail is the usually fantastic spam filter. Lately though it’s been in a slump. 19 of the last 26 emails in my inbox this morning have been spam. I’m really surprised.

The big news this morning is that Linden Labs, owners of Second Life, has opened up the source code for the client side of SL (the part users interact with, not the servers) under a GPL open source license. Fred Oliveira at web design firm WeBreakStuff writes that this is the only way that the interface is going to be kept up to date. Linden can’t do it and it desperately needs improvements so let a wide variety of parties create new SL interfaces just like the early proliferation of browsers made the web much more usable.

This would indicate that the problem with SecondLife is in the front end and I’m not sure that a statement that can be made definitively. There could well be substantial performance problems on the back end that make it a slow and troubled service. There are definitely core sociological issues that are troubling, like the silliness that is discourse about SL’s 2 million users and gobs of money changing hands in-world. It’s a great vision – competing front ends making the SL back end like a new WWW, but I wonder if the foundation is really there. The company says it’s not desperate, but embracing the inevitable. I don’t know enough about SL to judge that statement.

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing is of the belief that the client side of SL is only the beginning and that the server side’s opening would mean that other hosts could compete with Linden Labs for users. That would keep Linden more honest and require a business model other than scarcity of land. Doctorow writes that “…by opening up the source code for Second Life, Linden is inviting a competitive marketplace for Second Life hosters. Indeed, they describe a ‘Second Life grid’ of multiple Second Life hosters who interconnect — the way that today’s Web consists of a single Web with millions of servers that are all linked together by their users. ”

I don’t read the same thing from the official Linden announcement, but then I don’t have the technical chops that Doctorow has either. Here’s one excerpt from the Linden post:

A lot of the Second Life development work currently in progress is focused on building the Second Life Grid — a vision of a globally interconnected grid with clients and servers published and managed by different groups. Expect many changes and updates in the coming months in support of this architecture. Much of the recent work has centered on securing the code against potential threats. More recently and still in development, we are moving more of the communications to reliable and cryptographically strong secure channels.

I would think there’s some difference between distributed servers being managed by various parties and those servers being owned by others and competitive with Linden. I’m not seeing any indication that this is the plan, though I just woke up and perhaps I’m missing it.

This is going to be a big issue today, you can track the conversation on this page among others. I’ll be keeping an eye out to see what James posts on this too, he’s a very likable expert on SL.

While I’ve been trying to work over the past day, my last post here on Microsoft’s PR backpedaling on the laptops they sent out to some bloggers has seen more than 60,000 page views (in case you were wondering). I’ve been called some incredible names, some quite funny. Inbound links were perfectly pleasant but many nasty comments. I probably deserved some of that criticism, the tone of the post was pretty obnoxious – but I stand behind it. It was a PR blunder for Microsoft to say “keep them as long as you like,” then after one day of criticism urge people not to keep the laptops. Whatever. I’ll make sure the thing is put to good use, either by myself or by someone who needs a laptop more than I do. Quite a few people emailed me to ask me to give it to them.

Ok, back to work.

**Some more thoughts on this after further reflection – and fresh traffic from a BBC link, strangely to this post and not the previous one.

Sending laptops to select bloggers to test out Vista seems like a perfectly viable PR strategy. Telling them they can keep them as long as they like increases the likelihood of software being installed and a more serious personal investment being made in giving the hardware a serious look. Sending out hardware for review is a very common practice but it clearly upsets some people who believe it to be an unfair, illegitimate use of resources and a shot at bloggers’ integrity. (I’ve said that if your integrity can be bought for a laptop, then you don’t have much integrity in the first place.) None the less, it’s a tough catch 22. Backing down after a day of criticism and not having a clear position at any point was Microsoft’s biggest problem in my mind. Did I mention that I don’t like Windows, too? That’s just how it goes. I’m not terribly happy with my Mac either, for what that’s worth. Get me to the web and let me use my web aplications.

PR in a changed media landscape is tough and I’d love to see some more examples of big, old companies doing a better job of it. What a strange episode this has been.

I’ve just posted a long review of ten top RSS feed readers and their handling of video, audio and images over at the SplashCast blog. It was one of those posts motivated by personal need – I need to find something better than NetNewsWire for my new video-intensive job. I believe that online video and audio are going to become an increasingly important part of what almost everyone does on the web – so this was intended as more than just a post on what’s out there now.

I won’t be writing here about all the posts I make at SplashCast, but this is one that I think is of relatively general interest and could help folks out in making decisions about RSS readers for themselves.

Switching readers can be done at any time, of course. The secret code word is “OPML.” Any decent feed reader will let you export and import a list of all your subscriptions in OPML format. Most will require you to download the file to your desktop then upload it elsewhere, but some readers give you an URL of your subscriptions in their service that you can just point to when you want to put those subscriptions in another reader. It’s a little tricky with Bloglines, but if you’re a long time Bloglines user you should make sure to try out some other tools. Desktop readers in particular. Bloglines users have to import from their desktop, following this path: MyFeeds, Edit, Import (see very bottom of left sidebar).

If you want to practice importing OPML files, try this one out. See that link next to the orange OPML icon? Right click (or cntrl click on a Mac) and save the link to your desktop. They you can import it into your feed reader and sha-pow – you’re subscribed to all of these at once. Bloglines won’t respect your folder, but other feed readers will put all of these together in their own folder titled “Big Pic Eco News.” Enjoy!

Big Picture Eco News

Not local, not issue specific, not necessarily from any particular perspective but big picture, popular news from folks who focus on environmental issues.

Contains:

1. Popular recent items tagged “environment” in Del.icio.us
2. Environmental News Network
3. Gristmill, the blog of Grist.org
4. Sprol.com, using maps and pictures to examine eco troubles world wide
5. Tree Hugger, eco news for the hip and urban – I think.
6. WorldChanging, a great group blog on many issues including eco solutions.