Universal to offer their entire catalog for free download

Date: August 29, 2006
Time: at 2:54 pm
Posted in: in apple, microsoft, music
Comments: Comments (0)

That title is not false hope. It means exactly what it says. Vivendi Universal Music Group will be releasing their entire music catalog online for free download. (source)

Vivendi Universal, the world’s biggest music group, has signed a deal to make its music catalogue available on a free legal downloads service.

Under the agreement, Spiralfrog will offer Universal’s songs online in the US and Canada.

New York-based Spiralfrog will launch its service in December and make its money by carrying adverts on the site.

Needless to say, this is absolutly incredible news. I, and many many others, have long been saying that free music helps the industry in the long run. People who download music are more inclined to buy more of the artist’s albums, go to shows, support them through other merchandise, etc. I remember reading a statistic that was published awhile back that right after the RIAA started cracking down on p2p music sharing, record sales dropped 7%, 15% the next year.

Free music helps the industry. It always has. It most likely always will Period. I don’t care what the RIAA says.

What about royalty-free music?

Date: August 29, 2006
Time: at 12:47 pm
Posted in: in internet, music, open source
Comments: Comments (1)

I am a hobbiest photographer and videographer. And I enjoy putting any vacation trips that I’ve taken into one “be all” video which sums everything up. Video editing, basically. (Adobe Premiere FTW).

Needless to say, I add music to the background. For my own personal use videos, ie, only ones I myself keep hold of, I have always used regular old music out there. Anything I could find that I had in my CD library. But that practice got kind of sketchy when I wanted to give copies to some friends since, they too, were on said trip. So I got stuck with royalty fees.

Now, the royalty fees really aren’t that bad. But I sitll don’t want to have to pay them.

So this begs the question of you readers. Do you know of any free (as in beer) royalty-free music out there that I could download, preferably instrumental stuff? Anything under the Creative Commons licenses? I’ve found resources in the past, but I couldn’t find any really “good” stuff, if you know what I mean.

AboutUs.org - They broke my copyright

Date: August 28, 2006
Time: at 8:24 pm
Posted in: in copyright, internet, legal
Comments: Comments (7)

First of all, I want to thank Douglas Bell and Micheal Cottingham for leading me to this website and for informing me about what they’re doing.

AboutUs.org shoots out to be “a fully editable wiki, a type of Web site, that has been prepopulated with information about several million websites.” (source). Sounds harmless, right? But what they don’t tell you is they are harvesting WHOIS domain information about each and every website they catalog. Not only that, but they are using the address in that WHOIS information to put up a map pinpointing that location. So any old schmo can get to your house.

Think that’s not so good? It get’s worse. Not only are they redistributing WHOIS information, but they are reposting copyrighted material from the website in question. In my paticular case, their “bot” had gathered a portion of a blog post I wrote a little while back. Keywords: I wrote. That means I own full copyrights to said work and have full control of when and how and if it is used.

But what about the WHOIS information. Honestly, you can get that information by doing a simple lookup yourself. Anyone can. But here’s the catch: Virtually any domain name registrar (whether it be ENOM, GoDaddy, or RegisterFly), explicitly state on the page where you get the WHOIS information taht said information is not to be redistributed in any way, shape, or form. Let’s quote from RegisterFly’s agreement, since that’s who I use:

The data in this whois database is provided to you for information purposes only, that is, to assist you in obtaining information about or related to a domain name registration record. We make this information available as is, and do not guarantee its accuracy. By submitting a whois query, you agree that you will use this data only for lawful purposes and that, under no circumstances will you use this data to: (1) enable high volume, automated, electronic processes that stress or load this whois database system providing you this information; or (2) allow, enable, or otherwise support the transmission of mass unsolicited, commercial advertising or solicitations via direct mail, electronic mail, or by telephone. The compilation, repackaging, dissemination or other use of this data is expressly prohibited without prior written consent from us.

Keyphrase in bold. And that’s the point. Period.

Enough is enough. We need to stop AboutUs.org before they take it to the next level. Micheal Cottingham has assembled an excellent post on AboutUs.org, and also a tutorial on how to stop the AboutUs.org robot from archiving your site. On his blog, he details what you should do to your own page if you feel your copyrights have been broken.

Please digg this story by using the links below. This needs to be passed on.

The madness begins again

Date: August 28, 2006
Time: at 2:36 pm
Posted in: in general, phpbb
Comments: Comments (0)

I finally finished the new site. WELCOME! Though, I never reached the goal I set out to accomplish, which was to pretty much create my own custom CMS from scratch. Much to even my own surprise, I got it a bit more than halfway finished and it was shaping up pretty well.

But then Mr. Murphy decided to pay a few visits to me. My work schedule jumped from 20 hours per week to over 38. While this was in the summer and I wasn’t taking any classes, I still had the rest of my schedule filled up with activities. Needless to say, I had literally no free time on my hands anymore.

At this point, I’m back to a 20 hour/wk work schedule, but the fall semester has once again come back. I’m not taking a full term, so I do actually have free time, but for the time being, I just gave up on the project. It was consuming too much of my time and I wanted free time away from the computer for a change. And I wanted to actually get back to doing a good amount of phpBB support work.

So I have given up on that endeavor for the time being. I still have the source code and all of the documentation I wrote for it (mainly for myself since I tend to for get things 5 minutes after I code them). I learned a lot, got a ton more experience, and thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. But it just wasn’t practical.

That brings me to Drupal, which is the new CMS for the site. Honestly, the coding scheme and technique is a piece of crap and definately not my style, but it certainly gets the job done. And it’s relatively easy to customize once you figure your way around the code a bit, which proved to be a difficult task to say the least.

Regardless, I’ll definately be posting much more often. Hopefully at least 3-4 times per week. I have a lot more to say now than I ever did before.

It’ll be fun.

Oh, and update your RSS feeds to the new URL:
http://www.adamreyher.com/rss.xml