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Oh my god. I cannot wait for this to happen. Just watch how much fun this is going to be, and wait for it, I know he kinda tumbles from his topics but wait for the megastar! I mean, if you don't already own a Wii, this is the game to buy it for if Zelda wasn't. [youtube]xlFtjwSGy3w[/youtube] And here is some more, in case you weren't convinced. [youtube]CLkhGUEmhfg[/youtube] The creativity in games for the Wii is already awesome, but I have a feeling that this game will blow away any previous conceptions you have on video games.

Just last year I wrote a little bit about why YouTube works. Since then, two major things have happened: YouTube was bought by Google, and large copyright-holding corporations finally noticed it. The almost inevitable result? Billion-dollar lawsuits. I'll let The Daily Show explain the situation better than I can: [youtube]w9CRD1COCAY[/youtube] But really, who cares?  Two multi-billion dollar companies duking it out in court surely doesn't effect you or I.  But there are at least two reasons why it does matter. 1.  It's not about stealing TV shows, and it's not really about YouTube in particular.  It's about control and availability of information. Let me explain:  Viacom doesn't offer all of it's material online, but Comedy Central at least has it's "motherload" interface.  The clip I posted above - and apologies if it has already been deleted - is available there.  They even have a little "embed" link, to help you post the clip in your blog. Notice I didn't use that embed link, and instead have the same clip from YouTube.  No, I'm not trying to be ironic.  I tried using the Comedy Central clip but noticed something sort of odd.  It says "This video expires 04/22/2007." One of the main reasons the Web is so powerful, and so important, is that it makes publishing, storing, and retrieving information cheap, fast, and easy.  Not a little cheaper, a little faster, a little easier - we are talking orders of magnitude. In the past, there were reasons why information might disappear, or be difficult to find.  Books went out of print because someone had to actually print books.  But now, there is no longer any real excuse.  Videos don't naturally expire on a certain date, like bologna.  Keeping the video around for a while doesn't really cost Viacom that much, and bandwidth and storage prices are always going down. I'm sure lots of people use YouTube just to watch TV shows without paying for them, but that's not why YouTube is important - it is important because it makes video available for comment, by anyone, basically forever.  So when a senate candidate uses an delightfully unfamiliar racial slur, but no major news networks are around, the video still gets out. So why should we care that clips from a network that has puppets making crank phone calls are available too?  There's no way to cordon off the important video from the unimportant, because it's too subjective.  In fact, Comedy Central is the perfect example - it has actually been the source for some very, very important video over the past few years. Steven Colbert's explanation of the concept of truthiness was the most insightful commentary on the current administration and it's backers to be seen on any channel.  But I can't find it on Comedy Central's web site.  And any video site hosting it, even in the fair use context of commentary and scholarship, is likely to get a DMCA letter to take it down. If the Viacoms of the world get their way, we will lose something new and amazing - the democratization of commentary and reference in the world of video. 2.  If Viacom wins, in the long term Viacom loses.  Again, video clips are not bologna.  This Daily Show video expires because Viacom doesn't understand the Internet.  The Colbert truthiness video is not immediately available for commentary because Viacom doesn't understand the Internet.  Some stuffy old guy in a well-appointed office made this decision, and the thinking went something like this: "Hmm, this video clip thing is hot according to CEO Fad Magazine, but I don't fully understand how to monetize it."  I suppose he understands enough to put a billion-dollar price tag on the copyright infringement, but not enough to actually make a billion dollars by putting video clips online.  Will this cannibalize DVD sales?  Will people stop subscribing to cable altogether?  So many scary questions! Meanwhile, people like YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, sitting where ever they used to sit, were thinking more like this:  "Wow, we've done the math and the Internet has made an amazing thing possible that has never been possible before.  Let's do it." Now think back to all of the biographies you've read about inventors, founders of major companies, scientists and engineers.  Which mentality, do you think, has driven the American economy to create such amazing amounts of wealth?  How many companies stay successful by avoiding change, becoming confused and disoriented by new possibilities, and trying to fight new technologies with lawsuits? Viacom needs to get a clue and embrace the fact that video distribution and storage has suddenly become easier, faster and cheaper.  They don't have to do so by letting YouTube host videos, but ignoring the lessons that YouTube is teaching the rest of the world is not a good long-term strategy. This is important because there is a lot of money, and there are a lot of entrenched interests, on the clueless side.  These companies are sitting on top of a gold mine but more worried about putting up fences than actually digging up the gold. I don't really care if YouTube or Google Video or iFilm or whoever has clips of this show or that.  I'm not interested in whether they paid for them, if so how much, whatever.  If this was all just fighting over whether or not college kids can watch blurry little South Park clips for free in their dorms, we could all safely ignore it. But this is important, and hopefully you are paying attention.

Right now, you and I have access to more information than anyone else in the history of humanity. The richest man alive in the year 1800 could not get the amount and quality of information that a janitor with a $20/month DSL connection has at his fingertips today. This is all so amazing and wonderful that we mostly take it for granted. But it brings up new problems. No one can argue about the amount of information that's just a Google search away, but the quality of what comes up can be a big question mark. Luckily, we also have in place the most successful model of judging the quality of information in the history of man: the peer-reviewed academic journal. So we have an embarrassment of riches, and a great model to follow that has brought constant improvements in science and technology. So what's the problem? Actually performing academic research is horribly broken, and what's worse, there's no good reason. Read on to find out just how broken the system is. 1. There is absolutely no excuse for why I can't get immediate access to every journal article ever published. I'm serious. If I want to learn all about the misinformation effect, there's no doubt it will take me some time to read all the current research, let alone acquire the background in psychology needed to follow along. But even if I have the time, the motivation, and the background, I can't, not without spending a ton of money or being affiliated with a college or university (which translates to "spending a ton of money"). Unlike the web, with it's search engines, directories, and billions of pages hyperlinked to each other, academic research articles are not all available in one place to anyone who wants them. Why not? "Oh, digitizing those articles is such a huge job." "Oh, it will cost so much money." No it won't. No, it won't. The real problem is the tangled interests of various publishers like Elsevier. They are actively preventing access to information and convoluting the search and linking process. If everyone gave Google rights to digitize this stuff, they would do it in a second. If they gave it to the Internet Archive, or Project Gutenberg, or the Wikimedia Foundation, or created a new open-source project to work on it, it would get done. Virtually everything in the past 20 years was already typed up on a computer for submission or layout in the journal. A huge amount from earlier than that has already be digitized and sits in some database somewhere. And anything that hasn't been digitized yet can be taken care of with scanning, OCR, and a few dozed graduate assistantships (and those poor bastards get very little pay). 2. There is absolutely no excuse for requiring people to search this database for this, that database for that, ask their institution to purchase access to this other database to find some other thing, etc., etc. Twenty years ago, there were reasons for things to be in different databases, and for some things to not show up in any database at all. In fact, twenty or thirty years ago it was a nice bonus for anything to be available via a computer search. This has not been true for years. The web model, where everything is available if the search engine is smart enough to find it, is in every way better than the little-empire, walled-garden approach we have now with various publishers and organizations each having their own excusive, semi-overlapping, databases. Expecting searchers to know enough about a subject to come up with good keywords, evaluate how salient the results of a search are, and understand what they find is good. Expecting them to learn about the quirks and coverage of proprietary databases is dumb. Meta-search engines and multi-database searches are a poor solution. 3. There is no excuse for braking the web with your database interface. If you feel so strongly about your need to protect content, or mirror your ancient telnet interface, or whatever, that you break the back/forward buttons, you should quit your job now and let someone with a clue take over. There is no technical excuse for breaking the back/forward buttons. Don't get me wrong, there are genuine reasons to change behavior of a page depending on how the user gets to it. You don't want people to be able to skip the login screen through a bookmark. But searching for and viewing documents are not those kind of situations. Do me a favor. If the idea of flipping me out of a page because I haven't clicked on something within 15 minutes ever enters your head, I want you to stop, take a deep breath, and smack yourself in the face. You deserve it! If you ever ask your web developers if there's a way to disable right-clicking, you get two smacks. In the face. Also, to all my brothers and sisters out there, the programmers, the web developers, the designers, the database admins -- none of this is aimed at you. I know where you all are at, we've all been there. The fact of the matter is that we spend a lot of our careers implementing things we know are stupid, wrong-headed, or counter-productive. 4. The way that citations are done is archaic and simple-minded. Citations are the hyperlinks of academic research. So why are they so much crappier and more difficult than hyperlinks? Listen, I understand how difficult this must have been to figure out and get organized 100 years ago, when everything was bound in volumes. It is no longer the year 1907, so that is no longer a good excuse. Why are there:

• Lame, arcane rules specifying that this goes here, unless it's one of these, but not one of those, or if there's more than 2 but less than 6 authors, on every other Thursday... Here's a rule of thumb: as soon as you have more than two strict rules for a string of text, it probably shouldn't be a string of text.
• One thousand different citation formats, APA, MLA, CBE, Chicago, blah, blah, blah.
• No automatic way to click from one reference to the next to the next? Some databases implement this, and Google Scholar tries to do this, but why don't we have something crazy... like a URL or ISBN... that makes these things automatically easy?

Why is this important? This is not just a string of complaints from a grad student averse to the hard work of research. I like the hard work of research. I don't like spending time working around horrible interfaces and limitations imposed by copyright holders, who often have nothing to do with the actual production of knowledge. This craziness has come to the point where it is limiting progress, because right now your average know-nothing, head-in-the-sand flat earth creationist is more likely to show up in a Google search than real work by real scientists. Your average citizen is operating under no requirements on what sources they cite when they make decisions and many people, even graduate students, have a hard time evaluating sources. It's hard enough to get most people interested enough in a topic to do any kind of research, even politically hot items like stem cell research and climate change.  People are busy leading their lives.  But when someone does take interest, they have no chance of finding some of the best information out there unless they are already at a university.  This is broken.

Steve Jobs is right again. In a post on the Apple web site he reacts to calls for Apple to open their Fairplay DRM system to licensing with an interesting (and insightful) proposal:

"The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat."

This has gotten a lot of coverage today, from Business Week to the New York Times. Jobs' post was prompted by a number of European countries examining (and in some cases declaring illegal) the digital rights management (DRM) system that Apple uses with the iTunes music store and the iPod. The system is there to make sure that if you cough up $.99 for a song, you don't spread it around the internet for free. These countries say the effect is to lock customers in to iPods and iTunes so they can't buy another player without forfeiting their music. Jobs' response? He never wanted to have a DRM system in the first place. He would gladly dump the whole thing, and let you buy music anywhere you wanted and use any player you wanted - but it's not up to Apple. Although you might buy your Ben Folds from iTunes, Apple doesn't have any of the rights to that music - the vast majority of the time, the rights are owned by a major record label, with just four labels dominating the market. They require DRM. That said, why wouldn't Apple like the idea of DRM? A naive observer (or record company executive) would say it's good for Apple, too, since it means iPod buyers will use the iTunes store and vice-versa, and it forces people to buy songs instead of pirating them. This is why Steve Jobs has been so successful. He thinks more people will pay for free music than music tied up in the rules and inconvenience of DRM. And he's right. To understand why, you need a little history. Starting in the mid 90s but really picking up around 1997, MP3s started popping up here and there on web sites. At first it seemed like most MP3s were available from fan sites for particular bands or genres, but soon mass-popularity mp3 sites started popping up and getting a lot of traffic. Pretty soon most of them were filled with banner ads and made useless by spam. But no matter, because in 1999 Napster came out, allowing peer-to-peer sharing of music files. Millions of people used Napster to download songs. The record companies, represented by their organization the RIAA, took them to court. Napster, they said, was providing the means for the outright theft of millions of songs, and should be shut down. And it was, in 2001. But here's where Jobs (along with many other commentators who don't have billion-dollar companies behind them) saw something the record companies did not - people were downloading songs without paying, sure, but if you wanted to download music there was no way to pay for it. Clearly there was a demand, and where there is a demand, there is a market, but the labels were not interested in it at all. They said these millions of people were just theives, that no one would ever pay for a download. Nothing useful happened until 2003 when Apple opened the iTunes music store, and Jobs proved them wrong. I don't think it took a singular genius to do so, since a lot of people at the time were all saying the same thing: give us a way to pay for downloads, and we will. But he had the opportunity and the ability to convince record labels to try it out. And it worked. Downloads have not replaced CD sales, but they have been growing very, very quickly considering the labels said they would never work and they still compete with free downloads. Why haven't downloads replaced CD sales? They are different media, and in some ways will always be different - some people like the phsyical object, CDs make a better gift, etc. But a big part of the reason is that downloads are made artificially into an inferior good because of DRM restrictions. Here's an example of how DRM removes value. CDs are generally not restricted, but once in a while a label will try to restrict them in some way. On one of the very rare occasions we were listening to commercial radio, my wife and I heard a song by Kasabian that we liked. We went out and got the CD. The first thing we did after listening to it in the car was put it in my computer to rip the songs to MP3. I spend a lot of time at my desk so I listen to music at my computer more than anywhere else, so I generally rip all my CDs and listen to my large music library. The CD had some copy-protection scheme that caused the tracks to skip and become garbled. Like all DRM, there's a way around it, but the damage was done - I was too lazy to re-rip, and now I don't hear Kasabian tracks when working on projects or surfing the web and they have fallen off my list of bands to look for when buying music. Further, it felt to me personally like an attack on my computer. All my other CDs worked just fine, but this one didn't-taking something that works and making it not work is usually called "breaking it," and it seemed to me that the record label was trying to break my CD and my computer. I've never been one to take pride in having obscure tastes, but this no doubt contributed to my steady loss of interest in buying new mainstream music. Lately I've been sampling (often free) stuff from indies instead. The value of that CD was much, much less to me than others I had purchased because of DRM, and the DRM had the long-term effect of shrinking the music market, if only just a little bit (my personal spending). I spend much of my time as a programmer, and programmers tend to be logical, realistic people. We tend to think things like DRM are ultimately unworkable because we know there is no such thing as a perfectly secure solution. We also get annoyed when it is difficult to move data from one format to another, whether it's because the libraries are buggy or because of purposeful restrictions. We also don't take kindly to the ridiculousness surrounding the enforcement in the legal system - evidence that only works in court because judges don't understand the technology, penalties in the thousands of dollars per song, etc. So maybe I am biased against DRM. But if I could buy songs from iTunes (or wherever) without DRM, and play them on whatever device I want, I would. I don't think I'm the only one. And Jobs has been trying to make this point for a long time. In a Rolling Stone interview from 2003 (thanks to Guillaume Laurent’s tech blog for reminding me of the reference) he explains:

"When we first went to talk to these record companies -- you know, it was a while ago. It took us 18 months. And at first we said: None of this technology that you're talking about's gonna work. We have Ph.D.'s here, that know the stuff cold, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content. ... What's new is this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the Internet -- and no one's gonna shut down the Internet. And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. And the way we expressed it to them is: Pick one lock -- open every door. It only takes one person to pick a lock. Worst case: Somebody just takes the analog outputs of their CD player and rerecords it -- puts it on the Internet. You'll never stop that. So what you have to do is compete with it."

Some say this is just a ploy to deflect criticism from Apple to the music industry. It seems to me that if Jobs just wanted to deflect critism, he would just start licensing Fairplay. If he wanted to deflect criticism and maintain a competitive advantage, he would license Fairplay at a high engouh cost that, when coupled witht he demands of music publishers, would make competition with iTunes very difficult. He could decide to to it today and have to first licensee up and running in a week. But that's not the point - the point is expanding the market as a whole. And the best way to do that is to make the product more valuable to the consumer, and one very quick, very easy way to increase the value is to dump the DRM.

I recently found out that Mozilla is a non profit corporation. Thats right the same Mozilla that makes Firefox. Mozilla's mission is to improve the internet experience for the public benefit. I would say that they are doing a really good job of that because Firefox is used my millions of people and totally kicks IE's ass. Mozilla started as a small corporation but due to the overwhelming success of Firefox have turned into a multimillion dollar corporation. That corporation however, is totally owned by the non profit Mozilla foundation and revenue generated from Firefox is put back into funding Mozilla's mission. This is probably why Firefox is so much better than IE. Rather than giving CEO's and stockholders all of the profit and paying their programmers nothing, Mozilla reinvests into hiring the top programmers and staff to make sure their products attain levels of excellence. It is refreshing to see a company that views its profits as they good it is doing for the benefit of others rather than how much money it can rake in. Non profits are becoming more professionalized everyday are showing that they can be as competitive as for profit organizations without sacrificing their commitment to enriching other people's lives.