SoundExchange, the collections group in charge of collecting and distributing money to musicians from a variety of different services (radio, satellite, webcasting, etc.), is technically a “spinoff” of the RIAA, but as many people who have dealt with SoundExchange will tell you, it’s still tied at the hip with the RIAA. In fact, I was recently talking with someone who told the story of “negotiating” with SoundExchange, and was surprised to discover at the meeting that there was an RIAA representative who did all the talking. The SoundExchange guy stayed quiet.

Why the government has granted exclusive rights to this industry group to collect and distribute money to musicians is troubling enough. But it’s made worse by the fact that if SoundExchange “can’t find” musicians to give the money to, it gets to keep the money. Thus, for years there’s been a struggle over the fact that SoundExchange seems to have incredible trouble finding musicians — including some huge rock stars, and that means that SoundExchange, officially a non-profit, is holding on to a ton of cash (currently somewhere around $200 million). There are also questions about how SoundExchange has violated the law that created it, in order to lobby for even more rights to collect money from radio stations.

Based on all this, we’ve always had trouble taking SoundExchange seriously, so consider us skeptical now that the organization claims that it’s going to be much more open and communicative and has launched a new website to help be more open. Only problem? The big list of artists that SoundExchange can’t find has gone missing. In the link above to P2Pnet, entertainment lawyer Fred Wilhelms goes through a variety of questions that SoundExchange hasn’t answered, and he asks what happened to that list (while also noting how the list almost never seemed to change):

The new website is a lot cleaner and easier to use, but there’s one thing the old site had that the new site doesn’t; the unregistered artist list.

As of now, there’s no way for anyone outside the organization to assist in the effort to locate artists that SoundExchange has been unable to register since 2006. Despite your glowing reports on how many artists SoundExchange has been finding, you and I both know that, before the list disappeared, no names had been removed from the published list in over seven months, and only a couple dozen in the last 18 months. I’ll take your subsequent assertion that the full and updated list will appear on the website at face value. Is there any schedule for that? Please don’t tell me “soon.” That’s a devalued coin in the SoundExchange treasury.

Wilhelms also notes that for all of SoundExchange’s claims to be “open” it’s also conveniently not explaining how it determines who gets paid:

There’s another thing that is missing from the new website which was repeatedly promised to me by John Simson and Neeta Ragoowansi; an explanation of how SoundExchange uses samples to determine which artists get what share of the royalty revenue when complete census data is not available. I was told two years ago that this information would be provided on the website, but I find that, not only is sampling not mentioned, SoundExchange continues to say things like “Get Paid When You Get Played.” That’s the header on the Featured Registered Artist page.

I have clients who have gotten a lot of play, but haven’t gotten paid, and they’ve been told it was because their plays were not in the sample playlists provided by the webcasters who play them. Perhaps you can explain why SoundExchange has decided not to mention sampling on the website. I come back to related problems later on in this letter, but I would like to know if SoundExchange is ever going to explain how it samples, or even that it relies on sampling at all.

This is a big issue. As we’ve seen over and over again, many of these collections societies use sampling and counting methods that greatly overvalue big stars (who need the money less) at the expense of up-and-coming artists. It’s like the poor get to pay the rich.

From there, Wilhelm’s letter goes on in great detail responding to claims from SoundExchange and debunking them one by one. SoundExchange claims that they’re now going to be much more open and respond to these types of questions. We’ll be interested to see what they have to say.

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I'm a big fan of John Gruber's Markdown. When it comes to humane markup languages for the web, I don't think anyone's quite nailed it like Mr. Gruber. His philosophy was clear from the outset:

Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible.

Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters — including Setext, atx, Textile, reStructuredText, Grutatext, and EtText — the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

If you're an ASCII-head of any kind, you will feel immediately at home in Markdown. It was so obviously designed by someone who has done a lot of writing online, as it apes common plaintext conventions that we've collectively been using for decades now. It's certainly far more intuitive than the alternatives I've researched.

With a year and a half of real world Markdown experience under our belts on Stack Overflow, we've been quite happy. I'd say that Markdown is the worst form of markup except for all the other forms of markup that I've tried. Of course, tastes vary, and there are plenty of viable alternatives, but I'd promote Markdown without hesitation as one of the best — if not the best — humane markup options out there.

Not that Markdown is perfect, mind you. After exposing it to a large audience, both Stack Overflow and GitHub independently discovered that Markdown had three particular characteristics that confused a lot of users:

1. URLs are never hyperlinked without placing them in some kind of explicit markup.
2. The underscore [_] can be used to delimit bold and italic, but also works for intra-word emphasis. While a typical use like "_italic_" is clear, there are disturbing and unexpected side effects in phrases such as "some_file_name" and "file_one and file_two".
3. It is paragraph and not line oriented. Returns are not automatically converted to linebreaks. Instead, paragraphs are detected as one or more consecutive lines of text, separated by one or more blank lines.

Items #1 and #2 are so fundamental and universal that I think they deserve to be changed in the Markdown specification itself. There was so much confusion around unexpected intra-word emphasis and the failure to auto-hyperlink URLs that we changed these Markdown rules before we even came out of private beta. Item #3, the conversion of returns to linebreaks, is somewhat more debatable. I'm on the fence on that one, but I do believe it's significant enough to warrant an explicit choice either way. It should be a standard configurable option in every Markdown implementation that you can switch on or off depending on the intended audience.

Markdown was originally introduced in 2004, and since then it has gained quite a bit of traction on the web. I mean, it's no MediaWiki (thank God), but it's in active use on a bunch of websites, some of them quite popular. And for such a popular form of markup, it's a bit odd that the last official update to the specification and reference implementation was in late 2004.

Which leads me to the biggest problem with Markdown: John Gruber.

I don't mean this as a personal criticism. John's a fantastic writer and Markdown has a (mostly) solid specification, with a strong vision statement. But the fact that there has been no improvement whatsoever to the specification or reference implementation for five years is … kind of a problem.

There are some fairly severe bugs in that now-ancient 2004 Markdown 1.0.1 Perl implementation. Bugs that John has already fixed in eight 1.0.2 betas that have somehow never seen the light of day. Sure, if you know the right Google incantations you can dig up the unreleased 1.0.2b8 archive, surreptitiously posted May 2007, and start prying out the bugfixes by hand. That's what I've had to do to fix bugs in our open sourced C# Markdown implementation, which was naturally based on that fateful (and technically only) 1.0.1 release.

I'd also expect a reference implementation to come with some basic test suites or sample input/output files so I can tell if I've implemented it correctly. No such luck; the official archives from Gruber's site include the naked Perl file along with a readme and license. The word "test" does not appear in either. I had to do a ton more searching to finally dig up MDTest 1.1. I can't quite tell where the tests came from, but they seem to be maintained by Michel Fortin, the author of the primary PHP Markdown implementation.

But John Gruber created Markdown. He came up with the concept and the initial implementation. He is, in every sense of the word, the parent of Markdown. It's his baby.

As Markdown's "parent", John has a few key responsibilities in shepherding his baby to maturity. Namely, to lead. To set direction. Beyond that initial 2004 push, he's done precious little of either. John is running this particular open source project the way Steve Jobs runs Apple — by sheer force of individual ego. And that sucks.

Since then, all I can find is sporadic activity on obscure mailing lists and a bit of passive-aggressive interaction with the community.

On 15 Mar 2008, at 02:55, John Gruber wrote:

I despise what you've done with Text::Markdown, which is to more or less make it an alias for MultiMarkdown, almost every part of which I disagree with in terms of syntax additions.

Wow, that's pretty strong language. I'm glad I'm provoking strong opinions, and it's nice to see you actively contributing to Markdown's direction

Personally, I don't actually like (or use) the MultiMarkdown extensions. As noted several times on list, I do not consider what I've done to in any way be a good solution technically / internally in it's current form, and as such
Markdown.pl is still a better 'reference' implementation.

However I find it somewhat ironic that you can criticise an active effort to actually move Markdown forwards (who's current flaws have been publicly acknowledged), when it passes more of your test suite than your effort does, and when you haven't even been bothered to update your own website about the project since 2004, despite having updated the code which can be found on your site (if you dig) much more recently than this.

I despise copy-pasted code, and forks for no (real) reason – seeing another two dead copies of the same code on CPAN made me sad, and so I've done something to take the situation forwards. Maybe if you'd put the effort into maintaining a community and taking Markdown.pl forwards at any time within the last 4 years, you wouldn't be in a situation where people have taken 'your baby' and perverted it to a point that you despise. If starting with Markdown.pl and going forwards with that had been an option, then that would have been my preferred route – but I didn't see any value in producing what would have been a fifth perl Markdown implementation.

It's almost at the point where John Gruber, the very person who brought us Markdown, is the biggest obstacle preventing Markdown from moving forward and maturing. It saddens me greatly to see such negligent open source code parenting. Why work against the community when you can work with it? It doesn't have to be this way. And it shouldn't be.

I think the most fundamental problem with Markdown, in retrospect, is that the official home of the project is a static set of web pages on John's site. Gruber could have hosted the Markdown project in a way that's more amenable to open source collaboration than a bunch of static HTML. I'm pretty sure SourceForge was around in late 2004, and there are lots of options for proper open source project hosting today — GitHub, Google Code, CodePlex, and so forth. What's stopping him from setting up shop on any of those sites with Markdown, right now, today? Markdown is Gruber's baby, without a doubt, but it's also bigger than any one person. It's open source. It belongs to the community, too.

Right now we have the worst of both worlds. Lack of leadership from the top, and a bunch of fragmented, poorly coordinated community efforts to advance Markdown, none of which are officially canon. This isn't merely incovenient for anyone trying to find accurate information about Markdown; it's actually harming the project's future. Maybe it's true that you can't kill an open source project, but bad parenting is surely enough to cause it to grow up stunted and maybe even a little maladjusted.

I mean no disrespect. I wouldn't bring this up if I didn't care, if I didn't think the project and John Gruber were both eminently worthy. Markdown is a small but important part of the open source fabric of the web, and the project deserves better stewardship. While the community can do a lot with the (many) open source orphan code babies out there, they have a much, much brighter future when their parents take responsibility for them.

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It’s been pointed out before how much Microsoft has benefited from having its operating system and office suites “pirated,” in that it helped make Microsoft a de facto standard, that created lock-in and network effects, that helped make Microsoft into the massively successful company it is today. Even Bill Gates has famously said:

“And as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”

Except… of course, Microsoft has been pushing hard to “stop” that kind of “piracy” in China, and it may be having an unintended effect. Slashdot points us to the news that a group that had been offering pirated copies of Windows is now offering a copy of Ubuntu Linux, designed to look just like Windows XP. So, congrats, Microsoft, in “stopping” some piracy in China, you may just be driving users to Linux instead.

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Next week’s event could finally clear up questions over Google’s Android strategy, with expectations that it will use the occasion to launch the Nexus One phone.

Originally posted at Relevant Results

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Back in May, we wrote about the effort to get a Right to Repair bill passed for automobiles:

So far, thanks in part to lobbying by automakers, that bill hasn’t gone very far. Reader MR sends in this article exploring both the bill and how automakers have been abusing intellectual property law to force you to pay more. Basically, as cars become more sophisticated and computerized, automakers are locking up access to those computers, and claiming that access is protected by copyrights. Mechanics are told they can only access the necessary diagnostics if they pay huge sums — meaning that many mechanics simply can’t repair certain cars, and car owners are forced to go to dealers, who charge significantly higher fees.

There is no legitimate basis for this at all. It’s a clear misuse of intellectual property laws — which were never designed for this sort of thing — to prevent independent auto mechanics from repairing newer cars. But it’s the end result of the increasing creep of intellectual property rights, and the growing computerization of everything. It allows manufacturers to extend “IP” rights to physical goods, and create all sorts of new monopolies. In a perfect world, this wouldn’t need a separate law. It would be a clear violation of antitrust laws. But, we don’t live in a perfect world, and for the time being you’re probably paying a lot more money to repair your car because of it.

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T-Mobile is telling employees to prepare for the launch of a Google Android phone in early January that will be sold directly by Google, a report says.

Originally posted at Relevant Results

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I’ve never understood book price fixing laws in Europe, that require books to be sold at the same price. Economically challenged individuals claim that this helps independent booksellers who aren’t forced to undercut prices of other book chains. Except, of course, forcing higher prices on everyone actually leads to fewer books purchased, less innovation and less opportunity for those independent bookstores to offer something better. These laws have caused trouble for Amazon in the past. Over in France, Amazon’s famous free shipping promotions were deemed illegal for being an effective “price discount” on books. And now a bookseller is suing Amazon in Germany for supposedly violating fixed prices on books as well (found via Michael Scott). In this case, the bookseller is sick of people showing up with printouts from Amazon, and wants to force Amazon to offer higher prices, because apparently consumers must suffer.

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Via That Kevin Smith (who has had his own share of run ins with the MPAA over bizarre ratings) comes the story of how the MPAA decided the romantic comedy It’s Complicated deserved an “R” rating, because it has one scene that involves two characters (played by Steve Martin and Meryl Streep) who smoke marijuana… and then giggle. Specifically, the MPAA appears to be upset that there are “no negative consequences” to the two characters smoking pot.

Now, I’ve never smoked marijuana (or ingested it in other forms either), but I’m at a loss to see how this makes something deserving of an R rating. The NY Times article quotes someone from the Parents Television Council — the group famous for bombarding the FCC with bogus indecency complaints — who says “The last I checked, smoking pot was still illegal, illicit behavior.” Indeed. But, then again, so is blowing up Los Angeles, and “last I checked,” the movie 2012 got a PG-13 rating.

The larger point, of course, is just how incredibly out of touch the MPAA is beyond just its laughable ratings system. This is a group that’s still trying to break your TV because it can’t figure out how to release movies on TV in a reasonable amount of time without doing so (even though its own studios have figured it out). This is the same group that argues that blames tech companies for its own inability to recognize and embrace what technology allows. This is the same group that insists that piracy is “killing” the movie industry as the industry scores yet another box office record. This is the same group that insists that ACTA is necessary, but won’t share what its own lobbyists helped write.

The NY Times article admits that the decision to rate this particular movie “R” is more of a political move from an organization that doesn’t want to be attacked during the next elections — and even that should be troubling. This is an organization that will do amazingly dumb things just to stay in the good graces of our politicians, so that it can continue to push through protectionist laws. One simple rating may not seem like a huge deal (and, by itself, it is not), but it’s yet another sign in how out of touch the MPAA really is, and how its actions are entirely about protecting its political power and helping its members get favors from the government, rather than anything else.

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So you may recall that last week, the story spread about how Demi Moore’s lawyers flipped out and sent ridiculous (laughably so) legal threats to a few blogs that were discussing whether or not Moore’s photo on the cover of W magazine had been digitally retouched and, if so, how poor a job the retouching was. Most specifically, there was the point that her hip looked out of place. None of the conversation (which had mostly died out a month before Ms. Moore’s lawyers got involved) suggested anything even remotely negative about Ms. Moore herself — but about the potentially poor editing job on the photo itself.

Of course, once the story was pushed back into the news by Moore’s lawyers, a second look at the evidence suggested quite clearly that the image had, in fact, been retouched (not that there’s anything wrong with that). And, now, the story gets even more bizarre. Anthony Citrano, one of the bloggers being threatened by Moore’s lawyers — and who has (reasonably) demanded a complete retraction and apology from Moore’s lawyers — got in touch to let us know that the Korea edition of W magazine just happened to have fixed the hip problem on their cover version of the same photo.

As Citrano points out, this leads to one of two possibilities:

1. Citrano was correct all along that the version with the funky hip a bad image edit or…
2. By Moore’s own lawyer’s explanation, W in Korea had defamed Demi Moore by editing her image (which the lawyers insisted needed no editing)

Either way, at least one of those images was apparently edited, and Citrano’s still waiting for that apology and retraction…

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