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In recent weeks, I have come to slowly to the obvious realisation that not every human endeavour should be sold and wrung out for the highest profits - something exemplified in a quote from Slashdot in this post.

Now I hear (via ArsTechnica) that the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) has kicked up a fuss about Google scanning in works from some famous book collections and making the contents searchable (but not always browseable) online. Google has been fairly thorough in working with copyright holders to ensure that they keep the amount of text offered to the user within comfortable limits. Nevertheless, the AAUP is being ultra-conservative on this front, presumably seeing the thin end of the wedge flying towards its face at Mach 2.

Now, people will quibble about fair use and copyright law and so on, but what really riles me about this is that the AAUP, and other media gatekeepers such as the RIAA and MPAA, are completely sucking the joy out of human creativity. By being such all-or-nothing pricks about making money out of dead people’s art, they are failing to miss the incredible opportunity that the Internet presents: to place digital renderings of the entirety of human endeavour at the fingertips of a rapidly increasing number of the world’s citizens.

I’m getting really tired of seeing that in every situation where money and happiness are at loggerheads, money wins.

On a related note, I decided the other day to find out what Fascism is:

… fascism evolved into a new political and economic system that combined corporatism, totalitarianism, nationalism, and anti-Communism in a state designed to bind all classes together under a capitalist system. This was a new capitalist system, however, one in which the state seized control of the organization of vital industries. Under the banners of nationalism and state power, Fascism seemed to synthesize the glorious Roman past with a futuristic utopia.

Despite the themes of social and economic reform in the initial Fascist manifesto of June 1919, the movement came to be supported by sections of the middle class fearful of socialism and communism. Industrialists and landowners supported the movement as a defence against labour militancy. Under threat of a fascist March on Rome, in October 1922, Mussolini assumed the premiership of a right-wing coalition Cabinet initially including members of the pro-church Partito Popolare (People’s Party).

Hmm… State-supervised Capitalism; blurring of church, state and corporations (cf. Halliburton); a fearful middle-class; supression of unionism and blanket corporatisation as a means of oppressing the lower classes; Nationalism and Imperialism as a means of capturing the will of the people. All this evolved, under the same name, from the original Fascist philosophies of democracy, separation of church and state, and support for the working class.

So - are you really living in a democracy, or something altogether different with the same name?

Or, to be more blunt, is the United States of America a Fascist state?

In a move sure to disturb more than one media industry lawyer, Bram Cohen has released the official BitTorrent search engine. It’s a very slick, Google-like experience, and it’s also extremely fast. Unfortunately, five minutes after I started using it, it crashed. No doubt they will have some tuning to do to handle the expected load.

One very cool feature that they have is the ability to rate each torrent file.

One thing that it’s missing that I would really like is some kind of browseable directory, like the OPML podcast directory, which is maintained in a distributed fashion. This would help eliminate (or marginalise) those who are using the system to violate copyrights, while highlighting the legitimate benefits of this extraordinarily efficient media distribution system.

The potential uses of this system are extraordinary - IndyMedia should jump on this right away, as should the podcasting folks and anyone who’s in a band or makes short films. Imagine the rich community that could spring up around an essentially free global communications medium that puts more broadcasting power in the hands of a single individual than the largest television transmitter on Earth!

Over the last couple years, Microsoft has burnt boatloads of cash to become “Google with a different colour scheme”, by following Google’s lead and releasing copycat products a few months after the Google versions (simplified search engine, desktop search). Now they’re about to do it again with MSN Virtual Earth, a mapping service with many conspicuous Google-Maps-esque features such as overlaying popups on the map and dynamic zooming.

Online mapping services are not a new idea, but Google was the first to make a compelling map browsing engine that runs in any modern browser with no plugins required.

In related news, Keyhole is to be renamed “Google Earth”. Let the conspiracy theories begin!

After much unproductive mucking around, my home page is finally valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has published a press release (.doc file) which singles out BitTorrent as the primary enabler of the piracy (a few hours in advance of its release) of the latest Star Wars film, Revenge of the Sith. The title of the press-release is “BitTorrent Facilitating Illegal File Swapping of Star Wars On Day of Opening”, which is akin to the police releasing a statement titled “Shoes Facilitate Mugger’s Get-Away”, or “Car Facilitates Kidnapping”.

As Slyck.com points out, this completely ignores the fact that BitTorrent has many legitimate uses, including distributing the Linux operating system. The press release also avoids mention of the fact that, unlike other P2P systems, BitTorrent requires the publisher to offer their file as a specific download on an open website, severely limiting its appeal as a mechanism to aid in copyright violations (essentially, it’s a huge red arrow pointing right at your house).

The deeper motivation for singling out BitTorrent would appear to be its role as the most viable enabler for the next generation of user-generated content distribution, a force which threatens to undermine the current Big Media business model. Already utilitized by PodCasters around the world to ease the load on their servers, BitTorrent changes the economics of digital content distribution so that having a popular show doesn’t put the broadcaster out of business with bandwidth costs.

In the same way that Open Source software has forever changed the computing landscape, BitTorrent and other protocols like it will change media distribution - unless the MPAA and others manage to legislate it out of existence. This press-release would appear to be a push in that direction.

And as a final thought, why don’t they mention how the movie was acquired in advance of its release? Surely the greater issue here is how someone gained access to a physical, celluloid copy of the file to digitise, than how they then chose to distribute the digital copy.