Martin Gordon's Blog

Whatever little ethical integrity or journalistic standards the Daily Pennsylvanian still had left, it probably lost after a "guest editorial" ran this past week. The so-called editorial was basically an advertisement for the Ruckus Network, an online music subscription service that aims to compete with Napster, Rhapsody, et al by forming agreements with universities for campus-wide coverage instead of having to deal with pesky end users.

The editorial is "written" by Ruckus President and CEO Michael Bebel and tries to extol the benefits of using Ruckus over illegal services by running the RIAA line about how illegal downloading steals from the record industry ("According to industry observers, more than 25 million songs are illegally downloaded daily. This translates into roughly $4.5 billion worth of pirated music annually, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.") and how it can lead to getting sued ("Last year, the RIAA sent letters to 700 colleges nationwide, informing those students who ignore warnings and continue to engage in illegal downloading of music they will be sued.").

How do I know Ruckus paid to run this "editorial"? I don't. But why else run something like this? Surely the paper isn't starved for content; I haven't seen anything like this in the 3.5 years I've been reading the paper and there definitely hasn't been a shortage of news either (like what the University is doing about the string of assaults on campus?) Either it was a straight ad buy or there were promises of ad purchases or free iPods or something else fishy. I do think that running this type of ad under the guise of an editorial shows how morally bankrupt the editors of Daily Pennsylvanian are. This ad is a cut and paste/mail merge job. An almost identical piece was run in the Daily Princetonian on December 15th. And that was what I found from just searching for the last sentence of the article.

I've detailed why I don't like Ruckus when the Penn service was announced. Between this and the Brock Ruckus/Facebook incident that I just read about on the Wikipedia article, I like them even less. Only now I like the DP much less also.

Technorati Tags: Ruckus, file sharing, music, p2p, Ruckus Network, PayPerPost, Daily Pennsylvanian, Daily Princetonian, advertising, editorial, RIAA, University of Pennsylvania, UPenn, Penn, Pennsylvania, Ivy League

I just got an email from our Undergraduate Assembly chair announcing that Ruckus will be available to all Penn students for free (read: factored into tuition):

The Undergraduate Assembly, working with GAPSA, College Houses and Academic
Services, the Residential Advisory Board, and Information Systems and Computing
proudly provide a FREE, legal, music downloading service to all Penn students.

http://www.upenn.edu/computing/music/index.html

The Ruckus music library contains over 1.5 million tracks of music!

Ruckus offers:

* Unlimited downloads of music to your computer
* Downloads that are legal, virus free and sypware free
* New releases added every Wednesday
* Albums download in under a minute
* Online community, allowing you to trade playlists, share
recommendations and connect with friends
* Hundreds of movie titles and many current and classic television
series for an extra fee
* For more information about Ruckus at Penn, read the FAQ
-NOTE: Does not upload songs to iPod-

For what it's worth, here is the Daily Pennsylvanian article on it and the University FAQ page.

I do have to say that this is a huge disappointment. While I don't necessarily condone piracy and I do understand the University's need to cover their asses, they could have tried something a little more out of the box. Penn alum, Larry Lessig, spoke here for New Student Orientation. Why not work something out with Creative Commons? I'm sure the Podsafe Music Network wouldn't mind the exposure if they were willing to work out a deal. eMusic offers DRM-free (and hence cross-platform) music. What about a straight subsidy for a subscription based on the student's choice? I'll take $100/year from the iTunes Store over a worthless subscription to Ruckus. Now, I'm not discounting the evils of Apple's closed system, but if you want everyone to use your service, make it work on the devices everyone already used (I know this is impossible in the current state of things).

This is just stupid, stupid, stupid. Despite being pretty OS-agnostic, the University is now indirectly adopting Windows as the default OS choice. Imagine campus sales rep: "Well, the Mac would be ideal for your photography/filmography major, but you won't have access to the music service you're forced to buy into." And what about the 80%+ marketshare (probably a lot higher in college) the iPod holds? How do you explain to Joe English Major that his iPod can't play the music he's listening to on his PC? Even Microsoft's own Zune music player won't play PlaysForSure music from other services.

Is this new music service going to make music piracy disappear on campus? Absolutely not. Mac and Linux users gain nothing from the service and will continue to acquire music by the same means they used to. Windows users with iPods are in the same boat. They'll continue to pirate music or buy it from iTunes so it'll play on the iPod. Those that are able to might try it out, but it's not going to replace conventional means. Meanwhile, I'll be subsidizing this little experiment while listening to my free podcasts and live recordings.

Technorati Tags: University of Pennsylvania, Penn, UPenn, DRM, copyright, music, online music, Ruckus, subscriptions, Windows, PlaysForSure, Apple, iTunes, Creative Commons, iPod, Microsoft, Zune, eMusic, student government

Warner embraces YouTube and now Yahoo is offering an entire album DRM free. The album is Jesse McCartney's Right Where You Want Me and will be available for the iTunes-competing price of $9.99. While the music may be of questionable quality, it might be a good idea to urge people to pick this up to send the message that we are willing to pay for DRM-free music.

Technorati Tags: copyright, YouTube, Warner Music, Yahoo Music, Yahoo, DRM, rights, free, Jesse McCartney

Paul's post yesterday about why he pays for music made me realize something: no legitimate online music store will ever sell music in a lossless format. I originally posted this as a comment to his post, but I think it was important enough to share here:

Sadly, I don’t think we’ll ever see DRMed lossless music without serious CD-burning restrictions (read: no burning whatsoever). Once you get into the lossless realm, burning/ripping to/from CD doesn’t cause any degradation like it does with lossy formats, so it would be trivial to strip the DRM from a lossless file at the cost of a CD-R (and maybe not even that if you want to get fancy with disk images and such).

So while I do think we might get incremental upgrades in quality from iTunes et al (a small bump to 192kbps), we won’t see lossless from them because lossless = DRM-free.

Technorati Tags: music, digital, DRM, piracy, lossless, FLAC, SHN, Apple, iTunes, iTunes Music Store

The New York Times is reporting that Warner Brothers will be offering free downloads of classic TV shows on a P2P network run by AOL. The catch, they say, is that users will have to stay on the network and take some of the burden of distribution off of AOL servers. The TV shows will also have 1-2 minute ads that will help generate revenues for Warner Brothers and create an incentive for people to go out and buy the DVD sets.

This sounds like a good plan, but with every network doing their own thing (and their own DRM), will there be one portable video player that will be able to handle all these different formats? Is portable video really necessary to succeed in the downloadable video space? After all, video is an active medium, you can't really be doing anything else while watching it like you can with music and so the appeal of a portable device is diminished.

From personal experience with my video iPod, I can tell you that video isn't "there" yet like music is. In the month or so I've had with the iPod, I've watched 3 hours of video max. First off, getting the video on to the machine, while not difficult, does take some time. I have to download a video, then convert it and finally transfer it over. Second, if I have the time/resources to sit down and watch a video, I probably have the opportunity to watch it on a bigger screen. Like I said before, portable video requires much more attention than portable music. I can't watch a video while walking to class without looking up every few seconds to make sure I don't run into anything. I also can't watch a video if I am doing something that requires both hands, like eating, since I need one hand to hold the device up (yes, this is easily fixed with some kind of stand, but without it being integrated into the device, it's easy to not carry a stand around and so the problem still exists).

As much as I don't want to run a seperate player for each network's shows, its much easier to do so than it is to carry (and purchase, for that matter) a seperate device to take the video with me. Who's to say I want to watch the video on a portable device anyway? "Free as in speech" arguments aside, I for one welcome our new proprietary (but free) video overlords.

Technorati Tags: iPod, video, TV, downloads, Warner Brothers, proprietary formats, portable video, AOL, DRM