Tony C Smith says:

StarShipSofa is a weekly podcast that has started to put out Hugo Winning audio stories for free. Last week we put up David Brin's 1985 Hugo winning story "The Crystal Spheres." This week we put up Bruce Sterling's 1989 story "We See Things Differently." Other narrated stories include 2007 Hugo nominee Peter Watts and Michael Moorcock.

A host of SF writers have offered to let the StarShipSofa narrate their works. Writers who have already donated their work include Ian Watson, Pat Cadigan, Harry Harrison, Joe Haldeman, Joan D Vinge, Norman Spinrad, Ian MacDonald, J D Nordley, Gweneth Jones, Alastair Reynolds, Jerry Pournelle, Landon Jones, John Varley, Pat Murphy, John Kessel, Laurel Winter, Jeff Vandermeer, Kevin J Anderson, Bradley Denton and Matthew Hughes.

Link

Amazon's just bought audiobook provider Audible, the exclusive provider of audiobooks to iTunes, Amazon's rival for audio downloads. Even though Apple says it prefers that its suppliers deliver non-DRM media (and even though Audible's DRM does nothing to prevent piracy), Audible has a mandatory DRM policy for the books it sells. That is to say, even if they author doesn't want DRM on his or her books, Audible will only deliver those books with DRM on them. As part of the deal, an Amazon spokesman said:

Audible's audio books are wrapped in a layer of DRM, which Amazon does not plan to remove unless customers start to complain.

Mike adds, "Audible audio books are the last source of media I purchase that includes DRM I can't easily bypass. Books, of all things, should be open and protected. I shouldn't have to wear special glasses to read a particular novel - nor should I need a special player to listen to a particular novel. What do people recommend we do to show Amazon the advantage of releasing audiobooks without DRM?"

It's a good question. I'm an audiobook junkie -- I've spent thousands of dollars on Audible books over the years, hoping that the problem of DRM would never bite me in the ass. Of course, it did -- when I switched away from iTunes, I had to spend a solid month, running two Powerbooks, full time, to get the DRM off my Audible audiobooks by playing them back in realtime while capturing the audio with Audio Hijack Pro. Since then, I've learned my lesson: I order my audiobooks on CD and rip them manually, which is a huge pain in the ass, but way more future-proof than Audible's products.

Let's hope that Amazon does the right thing here, following the DRM-free ethos in its music store -- and the DRM-free ethos in the CD audiobooks it sells (I've diverted all the money I used to spent on Audible audiobooks to buying audiobooks on CD from Amazon anyway). Link (Thanks, Mike!)

Debra Jean Dean, who previously released a Creative Commons licensed recording of the US Constitution, has just released a recording of her reading the Declaration of Independence. Both readings are Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike: rip, mix and burn! Link, MP3 Link

See also: Reading of the US Constitution

(Image: Independence Day, a Creative Commons Attribution licensed photo from DrewMyers's Flickr stream)

Pam Samuelson, one of the world's foremost copyright scholars, is podcasting the lectures from her UC Berkeley Information Law and Policy course. Samuelson was one of the first people to criticize the DMCA, serves on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and has the respect of people from all sides of the copyright debate. I've learned something every time I've spoken to Pam. There's an RSS feed for the audio, too. Link (Thanks, Mike!)

See also: Proposal to reboot and de-cruft US Copyright Law

Last week, I blogged about Chris's TalkShoe interview with Phil and Kaja Foglio, now he reports, "it went very well, was an hour and a half long, and is available in two mp3s of about 45 minutes each. If BoingBoing readers would like to suggest other guests for me to interview, I'd be delighted to have your suggestions and will try my best to get them on the show." Link (Thanks, Chris!)

Amazon's just announced that its DRM-free MP3 store will go global this year, selling tracks outside of the US. This is majorly good news -- as was the creation and expansion of the store. I still hate the terms of service (I'd be much happier with a ToS that said, "Do not violate copyright law," as opposed to one that said, "We've made up a bunch of additional copyright laws, like the one that says you're not allowed to loan this or give it away, and you have to obey those too"), but there are some major chinks in the record industry armor appearing here as the industry execs get scared into rationality by the twin spectres of P2P and a single-vendor-dominated music market.

Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced that in 2008 the company will begin an international rollout of Amazon MP3, Amazon's DRM-free MP3 digital music store where every song is playable on virtually any digital music-capable device, including the PC, Mac(R), iPod(R), Zune(R), Zen(R), iPhone(TM), RAZR(TM), and BlackBerry(R). Amazon MP3 is the only retailer to offer customers DRM-free MP3s from all four major music labels as well as over 33,000 independent labels.

Link

The RPM Challenge begins on February 1 -- just a few days off -- and all over the web, musicians will work to produce an entire album in just one month. This is the music version of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and inpsires the same passion and creativity. I've had numerous writing students who participated in NaNoWriMo and used it as a way to surgically burn away their self-doubt, destructive reliance on "inspiration," and cherished illusions about the process of writing, acquiring in a mere month the kind of discipline that often takes writers many hard years to arrive at.

The rules of RPM Challenge are simple: write and record 10 songs, or 35 minutes' worth of material, in the 29 days of February, using anything and anyone you can shanghai into your project. Last year, over 850 records emerged from the competition. The RPM site will connect you with other challengers and let you offer support to one another as you go.

This is the challenge: record an album in 29 days, just because you can.

That’s 10 songs or 35 minutes of original material recorded during the month of February. Go ahead… put it to tape.

Don't wait for inspiration - taking action puts you in a position to get inspired. You'll stumble across ideas you would have never come up with otherwise, and maybe only because you were trying to meet a day’s quota of (song)writing. Show up and get something done, and invest in yourself and each other.

Anyone can come up with an excuse to say “no,” so don’t.

Link (via /.)

HarperCollins has released a free MP3 of Neil Gaiman reading his Hugo- and Locus-winning story "A Study in Emerald," which mashes up Sherlock Holmes and Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos -- a story that transcends mere gimmick and is poignant, and engrossing. I first heard Gaiman's reading of the story in the audiobook edition of Gaiman's excellent collection Fragile Things and had to pull over to give it my full concentration. Gaiman's a great reader and an even better writer. Link, MP3 Link (Thanks, Chris!)

So-called "Austin Mayor" sez,

Chicago Public Radio's Worldview program dedicated a full hour to the US's slide towards Orwellian "Total Surveillance."

Host Jerome McDonnell interviewed Lawrence Wright -- Author, The Looming Tower and Staff Writer for 'The New Yorker' -- about the Director of National Intelligence's proposal to expand government surveillance Americans' use of the internet.

McDonnel also discussed Cyber-Privacy vs. Electronic Security with Marc Rotenberg, the Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center

And McDonnel reviewed the New FISA Bill with Helen Fessenden, the editor for the beltway newspaper, 'The Hill,' and author of the article, 'DoJ, ACLU Cool to Specter's FISA Deal.'

It's a comprehensive overview of the state of Big Brother today.

Link, MP3 Link (Thanks, So-Called Austin Mayor)

(Image: Close up of surveillance, a Creative Commons Attribution licensed photo from Smith's Flickr stream)

Yesterday, I blogged about an Amazon service rep who told a customer who was having problems working with Amazon MP3 files that "we are unable to release any information on how we run our ID3 tagging as it's proprietary."

Shortly thereafter, a Boing Boing reader who worked on the Amazon MP3 program said, "we don't use 'proprietary' anything," and vowed to get to the bottom of it

Now the mystery is solved!

It turns out that the user had a file-permissions problem with his Amazon MP3s -- and that there's nothing proprietary on Amazon MP3s after all:

Thanks to some help from an Amazon employee in the Boing Boing comments, we figured the initial customer service rep who told me "it's proprietary" was misinformed. This led me back to poking around on my system, at which point I discovered the mp3 files only had read permissions for my user account, when I made them readable for other users, both mpd and mt-daapd were able to find them.

This is totally awesome -- thanks to all the BB readers (and especially "AmazonMP3") for getting to the bottom of this!

Chris from Biblio File sez,

This Sunday, I'll be hosting a live interview with Phil & Kaja Foglio as part of my podcast The Biblio File. Not only will the guests be live, but the audience can participate live as well, via phone, VOIP, or text chat. (A guide to how to connect is in my linkback URL.) It will be downloadable or syndicable as an MP3 afterward, per podcast usual.

The main interview topic will be a discussion of why they stopped publishing individual issues of their comic book Girl Genius and instead started giving it away free on-line, and the effect this has had on their popularity and the sales of their trade paperbacks.

However, after I finish that topic, I'll be taking questions from the live audience about anything they'd like to know, for as long as the Foglios have time to answer. (Or people can post questions here if they know they can't make it; I'll pick the most interesting ones.)

I always loved the Foglios' What's New? comics in Dragon magazine when I was a kid. Just this week, I tried my hand at painting D&D miniatures again for the first time in nearly two decades, so it's only fitting that Phil and Kaja should come back into my life. Link (Thanks, Chris!)

Update: A reader writes, Though Dragon Magazine is no longer published (it's a paysite now), gamers have done a DIY publishing project called Kobold Quarterly. It's pretty sleek, with contributions from all the D&D heavyweights. They just hit subscriber #1000 a couple days ago.

A recent episode of Public Radio International's To the Best of Our Knowledge dealt with remix, reuse, and plagiarism, talking to some of my favorite people on the subject:

Author Jonathan Lethem talks to Jim Fleming about his "Harper's" Magazine essay, "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism." As the subtitle indicates, Jonathan Lethem appropriated the words of many authors to cover the subject of plagiarism, although he provides full attribution of his sources at the end of the essay. Also, Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid) talks to Anne Strainchamps about his book, "Rhythm Science," and how the art of music sampling relates to plagiarism. We also hear a DJ Spooky/TTBOOK interview mashup.

MP3 Link (Thanks, Brett!)

Be sure to read the updates below for the solution to the mystery!

Pete sez,

As an experiment, I recently purchased a couple of albums via Amazon's MP3 Downloads store. I figured since they've gone DRM-free and all the majors are on board, I ought to at least give them a try.

Aside from the fact that full-album purchases *require* use of their pointless MP3 Downloader software (no Linux version, of course, so I had to fire up XP in a virtual machine), the experience wasn't so bad.

However, I use mpd (http://www.musicpd.org/) and mt-daapd (http://www.fireflymediaserver.org/) to share out my music on my local network, and both rely on background scans of ID3 tags. Unfortunately, neither service was able to pick up the ID3 tags on the mp3's I got from Amazon, even after I manually re-tagged all the tracks.

I contacted Amazon customer support, and got the following response:

"Indeed this is a little more of an abstract question. Unfortunately we are unable to release any information on how we run our ID3 tagging as it's proprietary. The only thing I can think to do is manually re-tag each Album/Track.

I hope you find this information helpful. Thanks for buying MP3 Music Downloads on Amazon.com."

Proprietary ID3 tagging? Seriously?

I've continued to fiddle with these tracks, so far to no avail. The weird thing is, local clients like Rhythmbox and Amarok (as well as my ID3 tag editor) have no problem seeing the tags.

So, who knows how this works? Can someone please reverse-engineer the Amazon tagging scheme and add notes to the comments? Let's get this figured out, folks. (Thanks, Pete!)

Update: In the comments, Amazon MP3 sez,

I apologize in advance for the response from Amazon customer service. Don't know exactly where their info came from (they're usually totally on top of things), but we don't use "proprietary" anything. "Crazy-ass" sometimes, but not proprietary.

We worked very hard to make sure the tag info we place in the MP3 files works everywhere (don't get me started on how different programs choose to interpret the "Ensemble" tag). Up till today we were doing pretty well; no complaints at all.

Obviously we've optimized the tags to work best with iTunes and, ahem, WMP, but they should work everywhere. If you've got any more detail around what might be confusing mpd and mt-daapd, post away. In the meantime, I'll look into it.

Update #2: Mystery solved! It was a file permissions bug:

Thanks to some help from an Amazon employee in the BoingBoing comments, we figured the initial customer service rep who told me "it's proprietary" was misinformed. This led me back to poking around on my system, at which point I discovered the mp3 files only had read permissions for my user account, when I made them readable for other users, both mpd and mt-daapd were able to find them.

The first-ever Creative Commons-licensed electronica album that is backed by a collecting society has just been released. This means that the artist will get paid for radio-play and live performance (which the collecting societies get money for), a major breakthrough since many collecting societies have been hostile to CC, telling members that if they adopt CC licenses, they can kiss their radio-play money goodbye.

Henrik sez, "I am really excited about this release - it's a FABULOUS album (the best CC licensed music I have ever heard) and finally a break for serious musicians trying to make a living off their art - collecting societies still play a large role around here, and no sane musician would pass on their checks."

Today marks the release of Small Arm of Sea, the debut album by female indietronica singer, songwriter and producer Tone (Sofie Nielsen). While the album itself is unique in its style and substance, seamlessly combining abstract electronic composition techniques with a clear pop sensibility, it is equally as intriguing in terms of distribution. Small Arm of Sea is available both in stores (on both combined CD/DVD w/ visuals or vinyl) and online (for free, non-DRM download), with physical copies containing the text “Copy this album for your friends, please!”.

The most interesting aspect of the album’s distribution is that Small Arm of Sea is both CC-licensed (BY-NC-ND) and backed commercially by KODA, Denmark’s music collection society. This means that not only is Small Arm of Sea available for free and open sharing, but also operating within in the traditional Danish commercial structure, in which KODA collects royalties for commercial uses. This is the first album of its kind to be released in such a way, and label Urlyd, who are releasing the album, are understandably ecstatic.

Link (Thanks, Henrik!)

Old-school bOING bOING pal Jim Leftwich writes, "Today on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, nothing can really describe Dr. King's life and work better than his own words. Here's a SeeqPod playlist of a number of his speeches and sermons, gathered from across the net." Thanks for this amazing link of links, Jim.
Link

In the Christmas episode of sf writer Spider Robinson's delightfully eclectic podcast (I'm running a little behind in my podcasts right now), Spider introduced the work of American bluesman Paul Pena, playing a couple of his tracks. I was blown away.

Pena, a blind musician, was captivated by the sounds of Tuvan throat-singing, which he encountered for the first time on a late-night shortwave transmission. He taught himself to throat-sing, and met with and befriended Kongar-ol Ondar, forming the band Genghis Blues, which merged throat-singing with Delta blues in a marvellous and haunting way.

Pena died tragically after a misdiagnosis of pancreatic cancer led to his being addicted to -- and then brutally denied -- heavy painkillers, and subsequently died from pancreatitis and complications from diabetes. (Set sez, "He was never brutally denied painkillers -- after he found out that the first Dr. made a mistake in diagnosis, he finally found a competent and good Dr. who helped him manage his pain, quite compassionately, up until the end. ")

His music is a rich legacy, though. The combination of Tuvan throat-singing and the blues is not to be believed -- or missed. MP3 link to Spider's podcast (Pena segment starts about 5:20), Genghis Blues DVD, Genghis Blues CD

Information on Genghis Blues, Paul Pena homepage, Paul Pena on Wikipedia,

Spider Robinson podcast

Debra Jean Dean has done a wonderful, expertly engineered reading of the US Constitution, one of the most inspiring documents ever penned. The reading is released under a Creative Commons license. Link (Thanks, We The People...!)

(Image: Article II, Section 4, United States Constitution v. SCOTUS Police, Outside the Third Guantanamo Hearing (Washington, DC), a Creative Commons Attribution licensed photo from Takomabibelot's Flickr stream)

Last week, Michael Pollan (author of the acclaimed The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals) did an interview with NPR's Science Friday in order to discuss his new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, whose contents can be summed up as, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Hidden in those seven words is an indictment of "Nutritionism," the philosophy that says that food must be approached as a scientific challenge, valued for its nutrients, which can be delivered in purer, industrialized (and highly profitable) forms in packaged, prepared dishes and ingredients.

Pollan makes a convincing case -- citing credible research -- that the science behind nutritionism is, at best, "promising" but not ready for primetime (he likens it to sixteenth century surgery: fascinating but not the kind of thing you want to be on the receiving end of). He explains how nutritionism has captured politics, so that the FDA isn't allowed to say, "Eat less red meat," but is backed into saying, "Make eating choices that are lower in saturated fats," prompting an industry to spring up around further industrialization of food to remove saturated fats. Nevermind that the science says, "Eat less red meat" -- by demonizing a nutrient, a blow to the cattle-ranchers is turned into an opportunity to create even greater markups on their product by charging a premium for engineered, "low in saturated fats" beef.

Pollan has a set of simple rules for eating that really resonate: "Shop the edges of the grocery store, not the middle," "Eat things your great grandmother might have eaten," "Eat nothing that bears a health or nutritional claim," and so on.

It's a delightful interview and it's led me to ordering the audiobook to listen to on my morning walks. Link, Link to In Defense of Food

Since last June, I've been podcasting a weekly reading from Bruce Sterling's 1992 classic journalistic history of the founding of the online civil liberties movement, The Hacker Crackdown, which chronicles the events that led to the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer. Hacker Crackdown was the first book I ever read electronically, the first piece of "literary freeware" I ever met. It's a fantastic book and it was a fantastic read.

Yes, I'm done. It took 28 installments, and included some of the strangest stuff I ever read aloud (for example, a mind-bogglingly bureaucratic phone company document around which a great deal of controversy once swirled). Now that I've finished it, I've put together an XML feed for all 28 parts, as well as direct MP3 and Ogg download links -- it's all under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. I hope someone'll download all the parts, normalize 'em, trim out the intros, and piece them together into a single file.

I need to thank Bruce Sterling here for his gracious permission in allowing me to read this aloud. Reading Hacker Crackdown back in 1992 -- actually, 1991, since I got hold of an advance copy through Bakka, the bookstore I worked at in Toronto -- absolutely and permanently transformed my life. Reading it again has made me revisit more than a decade's worth of striving, writing, imaginging, working and agitating. This book's an education and a half.

Thanks, Bruce.

MP3s: Part 01, Part 02, Part 03, Part 04, Part 05, Part 06, Part 07, Part 08, Part 09, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23, Part 24, Part 25, Part 26, Part 27, Part 28,

Ogg: Part 01, Part 02, Part 03, Part 04, Part 05, Part 06, Part 07, Part 08, Part 09, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23, Part 24, Part 25, Part 26 Part 27 Part 28

Podcast feed of the whole book

My podcast feed

Last week on CBC Radio's national science program, Quirks and Quarks, they broadcast a recording of a fascinating panel discussion on "The Physics of Information: What the Universe Doesn't Want You to Know," held at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. In this wide-ranging discussion a panel of distinguished and likable physicists run down such subjects as the universe as a computer, quantum teleportation, the fundamentals of information science, The panelists were in a state of near-hilarity through much of the the event, and that only made the subject better. Included on the panel were: Dr. Leonard Susskind (Stanford), Dr. Seth Lloyd (MIT), Dr. Christopher Fuchs (UNM), Sir Anthony Leggett (Urbana-Champaign), and the moderator, Bob McDonald, host of Quirks and Quarks.

The Physics of Information was the topic of a recent public forum, sponsored by Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, and moderated by Bob McDonald. And Quirks was there to record the event. Do ideas about information and reality inspire fruitful new approaches to the hardest problems of modern physics? What can we learn about the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, the beginning of the universe and our understanding of black holes, by thinking about the very essence of information? Those are some of the questions our panel tackled.

Link, Link to MP3, Link to podcast feed

Yesterday, I picked up "The Dirty Canon," Marseille Figs's first album on the advice of a friend. I've barely listened to anything since. My pal called them a "three piece big band" who trade instruments around a lot and change up on every track. That's a great explanation -- they sound like a cross between Violent Femmes and Tom Waits, with some Squirrel Nut Zippers and even a little Louis Jordan tossed in for good measure, a rich stew of every music style overlaid with funny and soulful lyrics. Mostly uptempo, it put me in an instant good mood. What's more, it's just plain lovely -- there's a current of something delicate and wistful swirling through all twelve tracks. Check out the free downloads on the site and see what you think. Link to Marseille Figs's site, Link to The Dirty Canon on Amazon UK (Thanks, Stef!)

Gabrielle sez, "This is a youtube of an orchestra entirely comprised of modified vegetables. There's a trumpet made from a carrot and a pepper, a carrot flute, and amazing percussion." Catchy tune, too -- delicious! Link to video, Link to Vienna Vegetable Orchestra site (Thanks, Gabrielle!)

See also: Web Zen: Food Art Zen

In this little youtube (posted by Beatlepuzzle), the instrumental and vocal tracks off the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band are each played individually, having been carefully extracted and polished for your remixing pleasure. The tracks are so well-isolated that I thought it might be a fake, but it's a damned good one if so -- there are little spots where you can barely hear the nearly silent other instruments and so on. Link

The Rise and Fall of Thuggy Stardust and the Hustlers from Mars is MAN-CAT's mashup album in which all the tracks from David Bowie's classic Ziggy Stardust album are mixed with a wide-ranging variety of gangsta rap. None of these tracks floored me, but they all raised a smile and some of them were positively bumptious. Link (Thanks, Opitz!)

SomethingAwful's Bob "BobServo" Mackey has created this fantastic (and eerily believable) set of RIAA liner notes for this year's CDs. Link (Thanks, Adam C!)

DJ Earworm has produced a mashup of Billboard's top 25 tracks for the US for all of 2007. The raw material is pretty poor quality (Top 40 has never been brilliant, but it's at a real low this year) but Earworm spins some gold out of the straw. Link (Thanks, Widgett!)