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Emusic is a good place to buy DRM free music. It's 20-40% cheaper too!

http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/2013/04/fave-emusic-finds/

But emusic has no cloud backup. (I just back up my emusic stuff and ripped files to Amazon cloud player.

(I'm the original poster of the ASK SLASHDOT).

Gosh, does that mean I need to learn Urdu just to figure out where they think I ought to buy something? :) Or just to figure out which website is the official site and which is some fanboy's site for the same Pakistani popstar?

Seriously though, it can be time-consuming to go to sites for individual artists. A lot of them don't have good English translations. I tried buying something on a Russian site, and although I know a little Russian, i couldn't follow the instructions.

As a sidenote, I have noticed that a lot of musicians have abominable websites. Setting up a shopping cart for digital downloads might seem like a trivial task for a slashdot geek, but it's unrealistic to expect musicians to get it done. (I like bandcamp, which has simplified a lot of things-- but I doubt that much of the global music scene has discovered bandcamp).

Yesasia sells CDs, and it's a really slick site (I think it might be based in US though). But they don't sell digital -- only CD media...Indian sites have more digital stores, but frankly I have no idea which of them are legit.

And yes, I realize that "rewarding the artist" is a nebulous concept (especially when the artist may have signed the recording contract 30 years ago). But I think it's reasonable for it to be easy to tell which ecommerce sites are legit and which are not.

OT. I'm writing a book about music collecting for geeks. You can see my list of fave jamendo albums free for downloading here http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/special/11-incredible-musicians-you-can-download-for-free-best-of-jamendo/

• "The word 'virgin' in Arabic does not translate perfectly into English. A closer translation is 'pure being'. As with the word 'virgin', the use of the word 'hur' is not always sexual."
• "The hur may have a connotation of gender like the word "angel" in English but in general sense the hur can be male or female as does the word "angel" in English. The Arabic word "Hur", which occurs four times in the Qur'an, is plural of "Ahwar" for the masculine gender and "Huwra" (or houri) for the feminine. Thus, the huriyah may be male or female, either of which describes a person distinguished by "hawar", meaning "purity".[2][3]"

• In Syriac, the word hur is a feminine plural adjective meaning white, with the word "raisin" understood implicitly.

• "And [with them will be their] spouses, raised high: for, behold, We shall have brought them into being in a life renewed, having resurrected them as raisins"
• "We have created [their Companions] of special creation, and made them raisin-pure"
• "If he divorces you, his Lord will substitute other wives in your place who are better than you; submitters (Muslims), believers (Mu'mins), obedient, repentant, worshipers, pious, either previously married, or raisins."

I agree that in most circumstances donations don't work.

But I think the right kind of context and solicitation does make a difference. so does the content--how unique is it?

People are more inclined to tip an individual rather than a group or organization. They are more likely to tip creative content than commentary, more likely to tip people if they know all the money is going to the right person. Also, they're more likely to tip if they know that they are receiving a stream of content, not just a single 3 minute video.

Finally, most content creators still don't don't put tipjars on their website, so they just don't know if it works.

At the moment I'm working on a tip-based community site that I think will work--at least better than what we've seen before. Check back with me in 6 months; I might have success stories to brag about!

See my guide to Tipping: A Fast and Easy Guide (which I probably need to update).

That's what I first thought, but then I read some more. Guess what. It's basically correct.

See also:
http://www22.brinkster.com/paradio/pages/pre1972.h tm
http://www.legallanguage.com/lawarticles/Clarida00 7.html

It seems there are three points here:
1)before 1972, copyright laws were governed by state regulations, not
national regulations.
2)Merely because they are not covered by federal copyright laws
doesn't imply that they are still owned by someone. The owners may be
dead, or the original master unavailable. I don't understand the
implications here.
3)It's unclear to me whether you can use a later phonograph/CD of an
earlier recording to digitalize. For example, if I had a 1976
phonograph of a 1933 work, and then I decide to make an mp3 of it,
it's unclear to me when it will go into the public domain.

Interestingly, they have already resolved the reproduction issue in
the area of paintings and public domain in USA.

After doing web research, I wrote here
http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogra mmer/?p=83398276

Accurate photographs of visual artworks lack expressive content and
are automatically in the public domain once the painting's
copyright
has expired (which it has in the US if it was published before 1923).
All other copyright notices can safely be ignored.

I can't comment on precedent or how to implement this fairly, but it
seems to me that we need some sort of public domain reform that
removes protection of later digitally remastered copies when the term
on an earlier recording expires. As long as the later digitally
remastered copy is simply a faithful reproduction of the earlier work,
the later digitally remastered work does not imply some new copyright
protections.

As I said, this idea is currently unworkable and would be unfair to
companies which in the 1970s and 1980s produced and sold remastered
editions. However, at some point we need to ask ourselves why
Columbia Records deserves this windfall for simply reproducing an
artistic work. If Columbia Records, for example, owns the only
pristine copy of Jelly Roll Morton's 1926 jazz songs and releases a
remastered edition in 1985, it would be sad to think it won't go into
the public domain until 2080 (150 years after the song was first
recorded).

Please, somebody, point out some gap in my understanding or a
loophole. But otherwise it looks as if it's going to be really hard
for sound recordings to go into the public domain.

It seems likely that the Supreme Court will not overturn the lower Court's decision, and that is good for artists and consumers. Good riddance to the big labels, I say.

But the question of compensating artists has not been addressed. We need to create an environment where downloaders want to support musicians they love rather than simply downloading their stuff for free.

Musicians need to start setting up tipjars and consumers need to ask rigorous question about how much of anything they purchase goes to an intermediary.

I recently went to a concert of Kristin Hersh where she sold no CD's but encouraged people to support her by buying mp3's of demos off her website. I bought $20 of mp3's off her website, of which Hersh received a significant percentage. Is that the future?

Here are some other thoughts about how to reward musicians

No kidding, I bought an ebookwise a week ago, and have been loving it. I also read it in the bath .

(Actually if you must know, I was reading Lessig's book).

Reading in the bath is probably not a good idea to do all the time, but ebookwise devices are 100$, and I exercised proper caution.

My post on the subject .

My conclusions: My basic conclusions (after researching a few websites and user forums). USB 2 TV cards are pretty commonplace, although there are only one or two HDTV cards that are USB-based. Linux supports a lot of TV cards, although it's iffier for USB devices (and nonexistent for USB/HDTV devices). Even with a TV card, support can be iffy, so you better have access to good tech support (or buy it locally if you want to swap it out). Laptops can get HDTV, but it uses a lot of CPU and memory.

I want to upgrade, but I can't decide whether to do it to laptop or desktop. My main requirement is for it to accomodate video editing and that it be totally linux friendly. If it's theoretically possible to add a USB hard drive and a TV capture card, then the the main reason for staying with a laptop is no matter one of form factor but of required computing power.

The real question is whether I really need for my laptop/PC to have video capture/tuning capability. A computer is a computer, not a TV. It would be helpful to convert VHS to AVI's or to watch HDTV, but would it be worth the trouble to get everything configured? This is a case where merely because a laptop can receive HDTV signals doesn't imply that you should buy/make it.

good brief how to on dvd creation
http://desktopvideo.about.com/cs/vcddvdc reation/ht /vhsdvdcnvt.htm

http://tuxmobil.org/mobile_tv.html
small site about linux laptop tv solutions

http://www.tv-cards.com/reviews.php
reviews of TV cards (with OS support)

http://www.usbhdtv.com/specification_01.html
USB HDTV card (no linux support)

http://www.everythingusb.com/hardware/Graphics_a nd _Sound/USB_Video_Capture.htm
a selling site

Maybe I'm a fanatic about these things but...

What's wrong with mp3's/oggs? The premise on which iTunes is based (that here is a method that allows you to download legally) is wrong; in fact, lots of musicians are putting mp3's out there for free. Look at dmusic.com , IUMA, irate radio and netlabels . Some of the stuff is eclectic, experimental, not mass market, but it's not that far off.

I stopped listening to commercial music 6 months ago (although I still donate to artists with tipjar links). For "open content" listeners like me, all this talk of proprietary locked content only encourages musicians to put their content in locked formats. That is bad for everyone.

Share the Music day ; sharethemusic weblog

I still can't understand why people are thinking about big music sites when there are perfectly good small sites. dmusic This is the best free download music site I've seen. Irate Radio , a music discovery program. gods of music music review site . sharethemusicday.com My essay on more ways to share music legally. Don't forget to tip your favorite musicians! Musician's Guide to Online Tipping

p2p is a nifty solution, but there are intrinsic problems (with technological solutions).

1. There's no way to verify whether the copyright owner approves of it being distributed through these networks.

2. p2p lets you search for well-known things, but not obscure things (or names you don't know). P2p doesn't give you ideas about what to search for. (BTW, Audiogalaxy was particularly good at doing that when it was around).

3. p2p doesn't have a good way to store people's recommendations or correlative tastes (if you like X, you'll like Y) or related items.

4. p2p doesn't do a good job in letting the user know what versions is the definitive version (This may be a user issue).

An interesting solution by the way is iRATE radio (read my interview with the lead developer ). He chose a centralized model for legal reasons and versioning reasons.

5. At the moment, p2p clients don't have a way of tipping artists or linking to their website within the client (this will undoubtedly change over time). WWW is still the best way to learn more information about an artist.

Robert Nagle
www.sharethemusicday.com

I wrote an essay about what such a book database would look like.
Books, Ontologies and Shared Dictionaries

Interestingly, many of the book reviews from the major sites (nytimes, ny review of books) charge for access to archived articles. When writing my longish longish essay on Gao Xingjian's novel Soul Mountain , I had to go through hoops to figure out how to reach cached copies of these articles. Although dozens (if not hundreds) of people had reviewed this same book, only a handful were publicly accessible.

Unfortunately, this sort of project would be successful if the major book publications agree to open their content. i would argue that access to old movie reviews (like Roger Ebert, etc) on imdb hasn't hurt the respective publications. Perhaps if the project gains enough momentum, the major publications will see value in providing their content for free.

I hope this project succeeds (and more importantly finds funding), but I have to wonder what is so wrong with depending on newsgroups (easily accessible from google groups) to find reviews. It's free, easy and threaded, so conceivably people could reply to a thread on a specific book.

Robert Nagle

Sites that link to controversial Chinese sites. don't necessarily promote these idealogies; they are merely acknowledging their controversial nature. It reminds me a little of the Monty Python sketch about the world's funniest joke , and anyone who heard or viewed the joke would die of laughter. The premise of censorship is that offensive content contaminates the hearts and minds of people. But you can only have censorship if someone can judge content without himself being contaminated. This contradicts the premise of censorship, which alleges that these contaminating powers exist inherently in the offensive material. On the other hand, if a censor can censor without being contaminated, that implies that offensive content does not automatically contaminate the mind or heart of a person. In that case, you would be admitting that censorship is unnecessary. That is the contradiction of censorship.

Test China's Firewall

On the whole I agree with the comments of others that this idea will probably not succeed.

Indian traffic is probably too small to matter now, but the intent of the ISP's is to reduce competition in the future in support of local ebusinesses. Quite frankly, American ecommerce companies have an enormous advantage of being first to market in their respective fields.

India's trade groups are pretty strong at blocking out international competition. In this case, they could block strictly ecommerce sites from consumers, provided that they wasn't enormous demand from consumers already for those sites (there isn't).

Under this scheme, they could allow content sites, but block the big ecommerce sites. The problem is that the line between content and ecommerce sites is being blurred. Amazon, for example, has great commentaries on books and the literary world. And yahoo/microsoft, which provide free services, also features classified advertising. Making such a rule would tend to give an advantage to sites mixing both types of content.

But don't for a moment think that Indian ISP's (or other third world countries) would simply buckle to international pressure. Indian ISP's want to make money and if blocking the site is as easy as entering an address on a routing table, then kudos to them for trying.

Such a measure could work if the government somehow codified these fees should be and ISP's were ordered to comply. Such money could be used to support national infrastructure charges (in the best case scenario) or to line officials' pockets (in the worst case scenario).

But don't fault them for trying. Actually, I kind of wonder why American ISP's didn't get this idea first.

(BY the way, if American ISP's took retaliatory measures by blocking access to Indian sites, that might unblock those sites very quickly).

You have to remember how wierd it is to view the internet in a developing country. Not only is a lot of it in English, but they probably see advertisements for dozens of American/Western companies and very little from their own country.
It's a really easy target to choose.

PS. I write about India and cyberculture on my
Asiafirst weblog.

While waiting for the slashdotted article to be reprinted somewhere, here's something on the same subject

For what it's worth I wrote an article about
Web Communities and the Art of Making Money .

I analyze the same issues.

I have absolutely no problem with registration. Especially if the site is free. It's reasonable to give demographic information, geographic information and possibly what industry you are in, nothing more.

As I wrote in my article, Web Communities and the Art of Making Money gathering basic demographic information is vital for obtaining the highest possible advertising rates. For low to medium traffic sites, having a good handle on your reader demographics makes the difference whether your ad rates are high or low. To me, there are very good reasons for demanding a demographic survey right at the very start. Sure, it pisses off a few technologically illiterate readers, but the prospect of free content should be enticement enough.

The problem is that individuals want to keep their personal information private. Many will simply lie about personal information (and really, if a newpaper site is asking for your phone number, that is way too much).

The other problem is the tedious nature of those marketing surveys that some of these registration forms require. Plan to buy a car in the next year? Do you spend over $1000 a year on computer stuff? Do you go on cruises? That sort of crap, besides being irrelevant and none of these site's business, are extremely tedious to fill out. And sometimes it's easy to overlook a radio box you were supposed to uncheck about whether you want to receive regular emails about great new offers.

The next problem is protecting your email address. Only an idiot would give a real or a regularly used email address.

The final problem is linkability. For less web-savvy people, they are unwilling to pursue a link on your weblog if it references a registration-required site. I know for example, some of my international friends would never register for the New York Times site even if the article is great.

That's a problem, but if it gives these media sites a better margin for breaking even, so be it.

Robert Nagle, Austin, Texas