Internet is Freedom – a speech given by Lawrence Lessig at the Italian Parlament – via the Security4All blog:

PBS: Copyright Criminals – while the video is not online, you can watch the trailer and listen to some remixes inspired by it which are under a CC license.

And just as a bonus: a cynical video about filtering the Internet – via the IT Law in Ireland blog:

Update:

The History of Copyright Law – via the laughing squid:

TED Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion’s free culture

Update: it seems that I already posted the last video – admittedly I’m becoming senile with the advance of the years

And here is even more Prodigy music, curtesy of Grooveshark:

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I’ve written about Grooveshark in the past, however I want to mention them again for a couple of reasons:

First of all, they introduced a new user interface, which works great. More than that, you can now seek in the songs! This means that Grooveshark directly addresses three out of the five methods of music use which I’ve enumerated in my original post. There are some small quirks (I don’t really like the popup-type controls, where you first have to hover over it for the useful part to appear), but those are just a matter of personal taste. They’ve also made it available as a desktop application via Adobe Air (currently available only for VIP subscribers).

Which brings me nicely to my second point: I’ve subscribed to their VIP services. I thought that I’ve been using them for a month now and I’m satisfied, so I should give something back aka. “Vote with my money”. So, as of today, I’m a Grooveshark subscriber. A couple of things I didn’t like about the subscription process: there is an additional tax of 15% to the advertised 3 USD monthly price. Also, the subscription payment is set as recurring by default. You can deactivate it later, but even so, it made me feel a little uneasy. Still, I decided to give them some of my money. Hopefully I won’t regret it.

As of now, I can only recommend Grooveshark to everybody! If something happens, I will update this blogpost.

PS. I’ve also removed the last.fm widget from my blog. Currently Grooveshark seems to be a much better deal than last.fm for approximately the same amount of money.

Disclaimer: I don’t receive anything from Grooveshark, I’m just a happy subscriber.

Via Naked Capitalism

There are a couple of actions you can do with music you have on your computer:

• You can listen to an arbitrary song from your library
• You can jump in the song you are listening to
• You can share it with a friend
• You can convert it and listen using an alternative format (ie. on your MP3 player, on your phone, in your car, etc)
• You can edit it using a sound editor

Thus, any service which aims to replace your music library should provide as many of these options as possible. Recently I found out about Grooveshark which provides all but the last two of these actions for free! Additionally they have a very slick interface and you don’t even have to sign up to use the service!

Additionally they provide an “auto-play” feature which adds “similar” songs to your playlist and seems to work acceptably (is is no Pandora though). An other thing I appreciate is the clear revenue model: it is ad supported or you can become a premium member for as little as 3$ / month and see no ads. I don’t know if the numbers are right, but they seem much more plausible than the one of Jango. I don’t want to dish them, but their lack of business model (no premium accounts!?) always concerned me and recently they seem to experiment with a lot of things (like taking away the possibility of directly playing a song and rather linking to Rhapsody) which is both annoying and concerning. My only concern is the fact that I found this site via the now defunct Seeqpod, which used (intentionally or unintentionally) publicly available MP3 files to power their service. While Grooveshark seems to use their own servers, rather than arbitrary hosts on the Internet, the file name quality suggests that these files were arbitrarily downloaded from different sources (public folders? P2P? – who knows), a practice which might get them in hot water with the RIAA, especially given that they seem to be based in the USA.

In conclusion: Grooveshark is great for now. Hopefully it will last in its current (or better) form for a long time. Below you can see an example of the embedded player:

Update: check out the new Grooveshark interface! It is very nice. Also, I’m a VIP subscriber to Grooveshark now!

Picture taken from gonzalovalenzuela’s photostream with permission.

Disclaimer: I have no relation with the company, its owners or employees, other than being a user of their site. I receive no benefit (financial or otherwise) for writing this review.

After Last.fm went to their 3 EUR/month model, I started looking around for alternatives. Not that I’m too cheap to pay that modest sum, but at the moment I don’t have a PayPal account (I’m in the process of setting it up, but being in Romania it can take some time). Of course most of the sites were USA only :-(, but then I found Jango.

What I liked:

• It works outside of the USA (imagine that, people outside of the USA like music too – sarcasm off) and it is free
• You have access to a large selection of artists
• A very big plus: you can play almost any song at any time! There is some weird concept of “tuning into other people’s stations which are listening to the given song”, but I think that this is more to please the record companies than an actual fact (because if you leave your browser window open, you can click on the same link the next day and still listen to the song – it is improbable that someone is listening to the same song at all times). You don’t get access to all of the songs of a particular artist/band (only in very rare cases), but if they have many songs and you generally like the style of the band (otherwise why would you listen to it), you can play a few songs instantly. Compare this with Last.fm where you don’t have any assurance that you will hear a particular artist, even though you created a station based on the given artist.

What I disliked:

• Very basic “done by programmers” interface (I guess this is why they are looking for a front-end dev) which sometimes fails to work (for example at one moment adding a song from an other station to your stations didn’t do anything – it seems to be fixed now)
• Their algorithm for “similar artists” is quite weak. Then again this seems to be the case with Last.fm. The last algorithm for “similar artists” which impressed me was the one from Pandora, which unfortunately I can’t use
• They tend to push lesser known artists quite hard (I assume that this is an important part of their business model), but this combined with the previous point (weak similarity algorithm) makes it annoying
• They tend to include a lot of aggressive advertising (which may stop the playback until the ad ends playing). This seems to come in waves (ie. sometimes a week goes by without any adverts, and then every 2-3 song I get an ad), but in the end you get what you pay for (you can’t complain too much)
• They have some weird “social networking” features (like sending a “thanks” to somebody after you’ve listened to a song which they also listened to???), which seem completely superfluous and distracting
• There are no widgets which I could use to display my played song on my blog for example

In the end I might stick with it (unless it too starts imposing some hard limits), at which moment I hopefully will have my PayPal account and more options available (like Last.fm, the Zune store – even though I’m not sure that it works in Romania, etc)

And two great ones ones from Die Toten Hosen:

Comes the following video about Yahoo Mail:

I got started on Yahoo Mail back in the day and it always served me well. Thank you!

PS: Cat and dog saying Yahoo Mail