Jason Griffey

From kuro5hin, one especially venom filled post about bloggers (and MT in particular).

There’s a story on The Chronicle of Higher Education about the current state of P2P sharing on campuses. They spend a lot of time talking about the deal Penn State brokered with Napster 2.0 in order to allow their students to stream music from the service. I have so many problems with this…here’s a quick rundown.

“Under the terms of the deal, students pay nothing to listen to streaming audio of any of the 500,000 songs in the Napster library, or to download the songs to their computers for the duration of their subscriptions to the music service.”

Ummmm….correct me if I’m wrong here, but don’t the students pay the freaking fees that the University used to pay Napster? To claim that “students pay nothing” is just bad journalism. As well, note that they don’t ever own the music…they can stream it, or download it “for the duration” of the deal.

“They must pay 99 cents a song to put music on a compact disk or transfer it to a portable MP3 player. “

So, if they want to actually do anything useful with the music, they have to buy it at the same cost as everyone else. No free ride here.

“Some 17,000 students who have Windows computers at the university’s State College campus were eligible to join the service…”

Windows only…Mac and/or Linux users? No music for you!

And here’s the best part, for those copyright scholars out there…

“University officials worried that a frenzy of downloading activity could cripple the university’s computer network, but Mr. Vaught says the university used packet-shaping and mirror sites, which replicate the content of Napster servers, to control the impact of downloads and keep students who stream music from monopolizing the network.”

“….technology officers had to set up a server that could store a trove of commonly downloaded songs locally in order to keep the campus network from becoming overloaded..”

So, in effect, the University is mirroring the Napster servers, AND is serving the music locally? What in the heck allows this? I mean…I’m sure that there legalities that allow this (licensing via Napster) but I bet that the RIAA would take a hard look at random mirrors of tons of music content on University servers.

…the University of Washington in Seattle is going to be offering a class in Google.com via its Information School (formerly the School of Library and Information Science).

The Laszlo Soundblox seems like it might be an interesting toy for broadband bloggers…effectively just an embedded MP3 player, it allows people visiting your site to choose from things that you’ve uploaded and play them from a WinAmp or ITunes like system on your page. It’s also Open Source, using the Apache Open Source License.

Good example of the use for this thing over on John Perry Barlow’s blog, where you can listen to a couple of his talks on the Public Domain and Fair Use.

This weekend for me is the Carter Caves Crawlathon. I worked at Carter Caves in Olive Hill, KY, all the way through college as a summer job. The first year I was a busboy, mainly because the park manager was less than appreciative of hiring me (I played the political card, which in KY at the time was the only way to get a state job). The next 4 years, however, I worked as a cave guide/naturalist on the park, doing interpretive work both above and under the ground.

It was the best job ever. I got paid to do what people then paid to do. I spent 5-7 hours a day underground, leading tourists around and talking to them about the history of the area, the caves, the animals and even the rocks. It’s reminiscent of the reference desk…you’re the expert, and people come to you for the answers.

I’m nothing if not a sucker for a power trip. 🙂

According to this story from the AP.

And on that note: happy new year, everyone!