As Ars Technica reports, the Open Rights Group has published an estimate how revenue -- created if musical copyright in the EU would be extended by another 45 years -- is going to be distributed:

Ars Technica reports on changing traffic patterns, with streaming video rising while p2p traffic, overall, stagnating, now accounting for only one quarter of the overall traffic. They conclude:

Seems like there is no learning in the music industry. What happens when you kill a centralized service that might not have all the right licenses, but at least an address and presumably someone willing to do business (think Napster)? Well, a decentralized service appears with no address and no business model (think Bittorrent, the protocol, not the company).

So, here we are again. Ars Technica writes:

http://www.kreidler-net.de/productplacements-e.html

music piece / performance ("music theater")

70,200 samples in 33 seconds: nightmare for GERMAN RIAA

If you want to register a song at GEMA (RIAA, ASCAP of Germany) you have to fill in a form for each sample you use, even the tiniest bit. On 12 Sept 08, German Avantgarde musician Johannes Kreidler will —as a live performance event—register a short musical work that contains 70,200 quotations with GEMA using 70,200 forms.

The Linux Foundation has released a document called "How to Participate in the Linux Community". This gives a detailed picture of the practicalities of radically distributed development, its scale and the methods which evolved to handle that. See also this article on ZDNet.

1.2: WHAT THIS DOCUMENT IS ABOUT

The Linux kernel, at over 6 million lines of code and well over 1000 active contributors, is one of the largest and most active free software projects in existence. Since its humble beginning in 1991, this kernel has evolved into a best-of-breed operating system component which runs on pocket-sized digital music players, desktop PCs, the largest supercomputers in existence, and all types of systems in between. It is a robust, efficient, and scalable solution for almost any situation.

With the growth of Linux has come an increase in the number of developers (and companies) wishing to participate in its development. Hardware vendors want to ensure that Linux supports their products well, making those products attractive to Linux users. Embedded systems vendors, who use Linux as a component in an integrated product, want Linux to be as capable and well-suited to the task at hand as possible. Distributors and other software vendors who base their products on Linux have a clear interest in the capabilities, performance, and reliability of the Linux kernel. And end users, too, will often wish to change Linux to make it better suit their needs.

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This quotation (in many variants) is so ubiquitous as it is meaningless, but it is still interesting to find its source: Saul Bellow, The Distracted Public, 1990

Ars Technica writes about a recent federal appeals court ruling:

Here is my review of Clay Shirky's new book, which was originally published on the great metamute site.

Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody is reputed to be the best book ever written on Web 2.0. By why the strange silence on questions of copyright, privacy and ownership? Felix Stalder delves beneath the slick prose and upbeat message.

‘Communication tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.’ If a single sentence can represent the entire book, it must be this one. For one, it's great writing. Precise, condensed, clear. Shirky's book is full of it. It shifts attention to the right level, away from the tools and to what people do with them. It also contains the dilemma that the entire book grapples with: how to write about technology once that technology has become mundane? Lastly, it leaves a lot of things out. How do technologies become mundane? Which ones are legitimate and which ones are not? Why are some providers of ‘boring technologies’ worth billions (e.g. YouTube) while others subject to high-pressure litigation (e.g. ThePirateBay)? But Shirky doesn't want to go there, he prefers to keep the message safe and positive.

Referring to his unauthorized use of material for his major "Histoire(s) du cinema" Jean Luc Godard said in an interview in 1996: