Here is this video on Digg if you want to give it a kick up the charts.

There’s also a news story about this that hit the front page of Digg video tonight. The discussion is quite disturbing, even if it isn’t surprising.

Via Technorati

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.

Click To Play

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.