I don't necessarily disagree that the remastering is not copyrightable, but see the link in my other comment - basically, this hasn't been tested in the courts yet, at least in the UK, and there are legal arguments both ways, perhaps depending on the amount of 'intervention' that's gone into the remastering process. While the major 'reputable' companies selling historical CDs work from the original discs or masters, some certainly seem to be happy just to rip a track from a competitor's CD if the original recording is out of copyright.
I would disagree that there's nothing creative about audio restoration - it takes a good musical ear and a lot of experience to make the (largely subjective) decisions required to make a decent transfer, and there's still vigorous debate about what level of intervention is acceptable. Remove all the hiss from a 78 and you risk killing the high frequencies of the music itself, but leave too much in and it'll distract the listener. Do you want the CD to reproduce the experience of listening to a shellac disc on a bakelite gramophone as closely as possible, or do you want to go beyond what the original technology allowed and process out noise that could not be removed at the time? There is no 'perfect job' here, and there are widely varying versions of some major historical recordings on CD (e.g. Schnabel's Beethoven piano sonatas) where the restorers have made quite different decisions about how best to deal with these problems. To my ears this guy does a pretty good job, by the way:
Things become a lot more clear cut if you have an excuse to do a remix, of course. The next digital iteration of the Beatles albums will probably sound quite a bit different to the current CDs, which should keep sales of the official versions healthy for another few years after the copyright on the current versions expires...
This is, unfortunately, pretty typical of the Trust's behaviour. Despite being charged with looking after the interests of the audience, they're always more than happy to bend over backwards (or just bend over) to appease the slightest hint of industry whining about 'unfair' competition ('market impact'), and are big fans of DRM.
Re:How to cut internet piracy by 80%
on
UK P2P Fight Brewing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
'So any Beethoven CD you can find in the shops today, or any Beethoven record your grandparents might have in the attack, is still subject to copyright, and that copyright will outlast you just as much as Beethoven's would, were he still alive.'
In the UK this isn't true about the records in the attic, unless you have young grandparents (see comment above). It _might_ also not be true about the CD if the original recording was made >50 years ago - see 'COPYRIGHT IN REMASTERED SOUND RECORDINGS' here:
Re:How to cut internet piracy by 80%
on
UK P2P Fight Brewing
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
'You're not free to take a performance of Beethoven's 5th by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and stick it up on bittorrent.'
You are if it was made before 1958, here in the UK (where copyright expires on audio recordings after 50 years). And there are plenty of excellent recordings from the 'mono era' that are well worth listening to. You get into a bit of a grey area if you've ripped the tracks from a modern CD rather than the original record, since the digital re-mastering may itself be subject to copyright. It'll come as no surprise that the audio industry wants this law changed, and there's already a proposal from the EU Commission to greatly extend the copyright term throughout Europe. Can't let those Beatles albums go free from 2013...
Ah, but this custom reflective system is not only hardened to resist breakage under combat conditions, but is also specially shaped to protect the likely deployment platform for these laser systems!:
'Johnathon Ive is the best person to replace Steve. Anyone who can spend months testing materials just so the click wheel on the ipod has the right feel is a good choice.'
Though it's kind of a pity he didn't spend a couple of hours testing other materials so that the back of the iPod wouldn't get scratched to hell just by looking at it...
There are guides to installing OSX86 from a regular MacOS retail DVD, though they tend to assume you have access to a working Mac to carry out some of the steps, e.g.:
'Essentially this means that anyone with a pay-in-front service agreement won't be able to access their email or use anything apart from basic HTTP, even though O2 are now selling and advertising the new Apple iPhone on PAYG and stating it will support "all the same features as contract customers"'
They aren't selling a PAYG iPhone yet, and are now only saying it will be available 'in time for Christmas':
The original public genome project (the 'reference genome you'll find on sites like UCSC's, NCBI's and EnsEMBL) used a mixed pool of DNA from several anonymous individuals for sequencing. The private (Celera) project was also a pool (of 5), though we now know most came from the project leader, Craig Venter. Since then, Venter's 'pure' genome has been published, as has that of (DNA structure co-discoverer) James Watson. There'll be many more genomes in the near future, generated using various 'next generation' sequencing technologies like the one you mention (one group is aiming eventually to do a complete genome 'in minutes for pennies'), and yes, there'll be major privacy issues. Random example - even a very small amount of genetic information derived from the Y-chromosome in a male DNA sample can allow you to make a reasonable guess about the donor's surname if you have a sufficiently large database:
so how private can even an 'anonymous' genome really be? In the longer term, personal privately-sequenced genomes intended for medical or even recreational purposes (genealogy, etc.) rather than publication are likely to become commonplace. Since even an uncompressed diploid genome will easily fit on an 8Gb USB stick or iPod Nano, it can only be a matter of time before someone leaves their entire genetic blueprint lying around on a train...
Well, since Slashdot is now getting its stories from blogs that seem to be finding their 'well sourced' information in UK lowest common denominator tabloid The Sun:
I guess the price/weight/performance sweet spot is different for different users and applications. Something like the Wind would be light enough for me to take on a trip without cursing the weight, but with enough storage to dump the contents of a few of my camera's 4-8Gb CF cards, and with enough power to do a bit of image editing before I come home. Before the eeepc, sub-notebooks tended to have mid-range specs and a 50-100% price premium over a comparable 'luggable' laptop. There were simply no budget alternatives except picking up an ageing Sony or Toshiba on ebay. Now we've got a range of options from the tiny but limited 701 to a respectably-specified MSI that's at the low end of the budget price range, but still perhaps a third of the weight of a cheap 'desktop replacement' laptop. Choice is good!
'I'm really surprised that we are actually seeing DRM free eBooks, I though this would take much longer to come about... I plan to buy a few to at least support the concept. I hope though the final title list presents some more interesting titles...'
I was happily supporting this concept up until a couple of years ago, when O'Reilly decided to abandon their excellent series of 'CD Bookshelf' titles, which had a series of 4-6 related titles on CD in DRM-free HTML format, bundled with a printed version of one of the books:
They were reasonably priced, included major mainstream titles like 'Programming Perl', and were nicely x-referenced with appropriate hyperlinks, pretty much an ideal format for reference material. Now the only way to get anything like this is to subscribe to Safari and 'rent' the books. I'd much rather have the HTML Bookshelves back in updated versions than a few PDFs about Facebook, Vista and the iPhone.
'I don't know anything about California, but it could be that the government is trying to protect people from possible harms of bad and unnecessary testing.'
The interesting thing is that this technology is evolving so rapidly that the type of testing California is cracking down on is going to look quaintly prehistoric in just a few years. Roche is expected to launch a commercial high resolution version of its 'sequence capture' platform in the next few months which, combined with a 'next generation' sequencing system (like Roche's own 454 machine), should allow complete human 'exomes' (all the well-defined mature gene transcript sequences in a sample) to be completely sequenced for a few thousand dollars. But this, of course, is just the first step. One or more of the future sequencing technologies currently in development is likely to bring entire human genome sequences into this price range:
with the eventual Holy Grail of a '$1000 genome' now seeming pretty much inevitable. But some of the teams competing for the genomics X-prize don't intend to stop there - e.g., Reveo claims to be aiming to produce a practical nanotechnology-based instrument 'in 5-10 years that will cost less than $1000 and sequence the whole genome and simultaneously the epigenome (methylation code) nearly error free in a minute for pennies per genome.'
So what happens if it's possible to buy an extreme throughput sequencer for the price of a laptop, and decode a genome as effortlessly as cracking CSS on a DVD? Is this particular genie really likely to stay in the bottle? And is it in any case defensible that knowledge of an individual's genome should ('for his own good') remain the province of an exclusive medical priesthood, rather than of the individual himself?
'I doubt it. I believe that in Steve's presentation yesterday, he said that the maximum price anywhere in the world would be $199... meaning that they aren't going to allow any unlocked iPhones.'
I don't think this price limit will apply in the UK, unless Steve knows something about future currency exchange rates he isn't telling us. O2 has already announced they'll be selling a pay-as-you-go 3G iPhone over here. There's no pricing yet, but informed speculation suggests it'll be similar to that of the original version (O2 won't want to subsidise an expensive phone down to the $200 level unless they can recoup their investment in call charges that PAYG customers may not incur, especially if unlocking is possible!). It'll also be interesting to see the pricing in some other European countries where handset purchase can't legally be tied to a specific contract.
Well, it's long been rumoured that the entire GNU project was a cover story concocted by the FSF to disguise their search for the editor lost in the depths of Emacs...
Slashdot Mirror
Smallpox only exists in captivity and Polio is definitely on the endangered list! Both are a bit less cuddly than Giant Pandas, however.
Good thing he didn't live in Scunthorpe.
I don't necessarily disagree that the remastering is not copyrightable, but see the link in my other comment - basically, this hasn't been tested in the courts yet, at least in the UK, and there are legal arguments both ways, perhaps depending on the amount of 'intervention' that's gone into the remastering process. While the major 'reputable' companies selling historical CDs work from the original discs or masters, some certainly seem to be happy just to rip a track from a competitor's CD if the original recording is out of copyright.
I would disagree that there's nothing creative about audio restoration - it takes a good musical ear and a lot of experience to make the (largely subjective) decisions required to make a decent transfer, and there's still vigorous debate about what level of intervention is acceptable. Remove all the hiss from a 78 and you risk killing the high frequencies of the music itself, but leave too much in and it'll distract the listener. Do you want the CD to reproduce the experience of listening to a shellac disc on a bakelite gramophone as closely as possible, or do you want to go beyond what the original technology allowed and process out noise that could not be removed at the time? There is no 'perfect job' here, and there are widely varying versions of some major historical recordings on CD (e.g. Schnabel's Beethoven piano sonatas) where the restorers have made quite different decisions about how best to deal with these problems. To my ears this guy does a pretty good job, by the way:
http://www.naxos.com/historical/engineer_thorn.htm
Things become a lot more clear cut if you have an excuse to do a remix, of course. The next digital iteration of the Beatles albums will probably sound quite a bit different to the current CDs, which should keep sales of the official versions healthy for another few years after the copyright on the current versions expires...
A while back the BBC experimented in distributing free mp3s of all the Beethoven symphonies, and attracted over 600,000 downloads:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2005/06_june/16/beethoven.shtml
However, the clueless 'BBC Trust' has now explicitly excluded classical music from any further DRM-free audio downloads:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/news/press_releases/30_04_2007.html
This is, unfortunately, pretty typical of the Trust's behaviour. Despite being charged with looking after the interests of the audience, they're always more than happy to bend over backwards (or just bend over) to appease the slightest hint of industry whining about 'unfair' competition ('market impact'), and are big fans of DRM.
'So any Beethoven CD you can find in the shops today, or any Beethoven record your grandparents might have in the attack, is still subject to copyright, and that copyright will outlast you just as much as Beethoven's would, were he still alive.'
In the UK this isn't true about the records in the attic, unless you have young grandparents (see comment above). It _might_ also not be true about the CD if the original recording was made >50 years ago - see 'COPYRIGHT IN REMASTERED SOUND RECORDINGS' here:
http://www.copyright.mediarights.co.uk/
'You're not free to take a performance of Beethoven's 5th by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and stick it up on bittorrent.'
You are if it was made before 1958, here in the UK (where copyright expires on audio recordings after 50 years). And there are plenty of excellent recordings from the 'mono era' that are well worth listening to. You get into a bit of a grey area if you've ripped the tracks from a modern CD rather than the original record, since the digital re-mastering may itself be subject to copyright. It'll come as no surprise that the audio industry wants this law changed, and there's already a proposal from the EU Commission to greatly extend the copyright term throughout Europe. Can't let those Beatles albums go free from 2013...
Ah, but this custom reflective system is not only hardened to resist breakage under combat conditions, but is also specially shaped to protect the likely deployment platform for these laser systems!:
http://www.crazy4bargain.co.uk/product_info.php?products_id=1041
- Seventhly, it's not 'England', it's the UK! It's high time for the Welsh contribution to ridiculous emergency calls to be fully recognised!:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/7489457.stm
(just as well they didn't call out Torchwood for that one).
One shortcut might be to learn from the hideous mistakes of others:
http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~xmath/mirror/www.iarchitect.com/mshame.htm
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA100898951033.aspx
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZegWedG-jk4
http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/LCSR-Computing/some-docs/emacs-chart.html
'Johnathon Ive is the best person to replace Steve. Anyone who can spend months testing materials just so the click wheel on the ipod has the right feel is a good choice.'
Though it's kind of a pity he didn't spend a couple of hours testing other materials so that the back of the iPod wouldn't get scratched to hell just by looking at it...
There are guides to installing OSX86 from a regular MacOS retail DVD, though they tend to assume you have access to a working Mac to carry out some of the steps, e.g.:
http://www.jasonmadigan.com/2007/11/building-installing-your-own-osx86-leopard-installation/
No dodgy torrents, just 14Mb of patches and tools.
Scrabulous is a perfectly cromulent word!
'Essentially this means that anyone with a pay-in-front service agreement won't be able to access their email or use anything apart from basic HTTP, even though O2 are now selling and advertising the new Apple iPhone on PAYG and stating it will support "all the same features as contract customers"'
They aren't selling a PAYG iPhone yet, and are now only saying it will be available 'in time for Christmas':
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/07/07/cw_payg_iphone_launch
'I wrote a JE a while back, asking people to vote third or fourth party, even if they could "make do" with one of the "main" parties.'
Yes, but then the wrong lizard might get in!:
http://wso.williams.edu/~rcarson/lizards.html
The original public genome project (the 'reference genome you'll find on sites like UCSC's, NCBI's and EnsEMBL) used a mixed pool of DNA from several anonymous individuals for sequencing. The private (Celera) project was also a pool (of 5), though we now know most came from the project leader, Craig Venter. Since then, Venter's 'pure' genome has been published, as has that of (DNA structure co-discoverer) James Watson. There'll be many more genomes in the near future, generated using various 'next generation' sequencing technologies like the one you mention (one group is aiming eventually to do a complete genome 'in minutes for pennies'), and yes, there'll be major privacy issues. Random example - even a very small amount of genetic information derived from the Y-chromosome in a male DNA sample can allow you to make a reasonable guess about the donor's surname if you have a sufficiently large database:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4736984.stm
so how private can even an 'anonymous' genome really be? In the longer term, personal privately-sequenced genomes intended for medical or even recreational purposes (genealogy, etc.) rather than publication are likely to become commonplace. Since even an uncompressed diploid genome will easily fit on an 8Gb USB stick or iPod Nano, it can only be a matter of time before someone leaves their entire genetic blueprint lying around on a train...
Well, since Slashdot is now getting its stories from blogs that seem to be finding their 'well sourced' information in UK lowest common denominator tabloid The Sun:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/motors/phil_lanning/article1314732.ece
we might as well link to their story about Jet Packs!:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article744857.ece
I love how the prototype version in the link gives a 98% match between George Orwell's '1984' and the text of the USA Patriot Act!
Kim Newman gets a lot of mileage out of this joke in a (rather good) short story (warnings: link contains spoilers):
http://blaklion.best.vwh.net/ubermensch.html
Yes, that's it. The article abstract is a lot more intelligible than the press release:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18587387
They're using Zinc Finger Nucleases:
http://www.zincfingers.org/scientific-background.htm
to target and disrupt the CCR5 gene.
I guess the price/weight/performance sweet spot is different for different users and applications. Something like the Wind would be light enough for me to take on a trip without cursing the weight, but with enough storage to dump the contents of a few of my camera's 4-8Gb CF cards, and with enough power to do a bit of image editing before I come home. Before the eeepc, sub-notebooks tended to have mid-range specs and a 50-100% price premium over a comparable 'luggable' laptop. There were simply no budget alternatives except picking up an ageing Sony or Toshiba on ebay. Now we've got a range of options from the tiny but limited 701 to a respectably-specified MSI that's at the low end of the budget price range, but still perhaps a third of the weight of a cheap 'desktop replacement' laptop. Choice is good!
Android phone? They're probably just waiting for a compatible headset:
http://www.henriksonline.co.uk/pods.htm
http://www.cybusindustries.net/earpod.htm
'I'm really surprised that we are actually seeing DRM free eBooks, I though this would take much longer to come about... I plan to buy a few to at least support the concept. I hope though the final title list presents some more interesting titles...'
I was happily supporting this concept up until a couple of years ago, when O'Reilly decided to abandon their excellent series of 'CD Bookshelf' titles, which had a series of 4-6 related titles on CD in DRM-free HTML format, bundled with a printed version of one of the books:
http://web.archive.org/web/20050113090049/http://cdbookshelves.oreilly.com/
They were reasonably priced, included major mainstream titles like 'Programming Perl', and were nicely x-referenced with appropriate hyperlinks, pretty much an ideal format for reference material. Now the only way to get anything like this is to subscribe to Safari and 'rent' the books. I'd much rather have the HTML Bookshelves back in updated versions than a few PDFs about Facebook, Vista and the iPhone.
'I don't know anything about California, but it could be that the government is trying to protect people from possible harms of bad and unnecessary testing.'
The interesting thing is that this technology is evolving so rapidly that the type of testing California is cracking down on is going to look quaintly prehistoric in just a few years. Roche is expected to launch a commercial high resolution version of its 'sequence capture' platform in the next few months which, combined with a 'next generation' sequencing system (like Roche's own 454 machine), should allow complete human 'exomes' (all the well-defined mature gene transcript sequences in a sample) to be completely sequenced for a few thousand dollars. But this, of course, is just the first step. One or more of the future sequencing technologies currently in development is likely to bring entire human genome sequences into this price range:
http://genomics.xprize.org/
with the eventual Holy Grail of a '$1000 genome' now seeming pretty much inevitable. But some of the teams competing for the genomics X-prize don't intend to stop there - e.g., Reveo claims to be aiming to produce a practical nanotechnology-based instrument 'in 5-10 years that will cost less than $1000 and sequence the whole genome and simultaneously the epigenome (methylation code) nearly error free in a minute for pennies per genome.'
So what happens if it's possible to buy an extreme throughput sequencer for the price of a laptop, and decode a genome as effortlessly as cracking CSS on a DVD? Is this particular genie really likely to stay in the bottle? And is it in any case defensible that knowledge of an individual's genome should ('for his own good') remain the province of an exclusive medical priesthood, rather than of the individual himself?
'I doubt it. I believe that in Steve's presentation yesterday, he said that the maximum price anywhere in the world would be $199... meaning that they aren't going to allow any unlocked iPhones.'
I don't think this price limit will apply in the UK, unless Steve knows something about future currency exchange rates he isn't telling us. O2 has already announced they'll be selling a pay-as-you-go 3G iPhone over here. There's no pricing yet, but informed speculation suggests it'll be similar to that of the original version (O2 won't want to subsidise an expensive phone down to the $200 level unless they can recoup their investment in call charges that PAYG customers may not incur, especially if unlocking is possible!). It'll also be interesting to see the pricing in some other European countries where handset purchase can't legally be tied to a specific contract.
Well, it's long been rumoured that the entire GNU project was a cover story concocted by the FSF to disguise their search for the editor lost in the depths of Emacs...