One of my favourite sites these days is the Internet Archive, which contains a vast amount of video (films too) which is free to use and to share. Here is one example, “RetroVision Theater Presents The Frank Sinatra Show”

I watched the film Mamma Mia a couple of days ago with my 12-year-old sister. it was only then that I discovered this song, which dates back to older days — prior to my birth.

So, the song now reminds me of my little sister. I too will have children when I grow older, but the lyrics can be generalised to other family relationships.

RM is fortunately going away, at least as far as audio is concerned. With DRM, everyone is considered a so-called ‘pirate’ until proven otherwise, and even then (when proven innocent) the customer is mistreated while pirates enjoy DRM-free media, which is easy to obtain because DRM is flawed by design. At the end of the day, pirates enjoy media more than paying consumers, which is ironic.

Corollary: That’s why DRM is never the solution. It only introduces new problems.

DRM is broken. It needs to be shunned.

UTHORITIES seem to be cracking down quite blindly on P2P and bittorrent activities. This is fairly recent news. I use neither torrents nor P2P, but it’s worrisome nonetheless. While it may be true that copyright infringement thrives in such networks, shutting them down immediately (or throttling, aka “network shaping”, aka packet discrimination and tiered Web) is a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. There is a lot of legitimate and crucial data on those networks, such as Free software (e.g. GNU/Linux distributions).

There ought to be a better way to disseminate the vast amounts of art (music and video, for startes) that can be legally distributed. Consider various lenient licenses, public domain, Creative Commons, etc. Why not create a limited but huge catalog of music which can be shared legally and then only permit peers in the nwteork to exchange this trusted catalog? This would be perfectly legitimate. No need to hide anything, no need for warning letters from the RIAA, and so forth. Such a service/product would be the worst nightmare to a predatory media industry because no longer will people be required to buy new music the ol’ fashion way.

Many of us are willing to reuse and revive public domain material. We can listen to music that is no longer copyrighted. Why not share gigabytes of data that is perfectly legitimate music? At the moment it’s spreads in all sorts of places. It takes time to find it. But it’s there! There’s no point of centralisation and no peer exchange though, so the utility of the network’s potential remains low. It’s expansive to maintain from a single point. There’s not much choice or searching facilities, either. A service that is built as described here would be very valuable.

Where else would you find some invaluable videos that are otherwise difficult to get hold of?

Just ignore the disgraceful adverts at the start.

saw ‘Baby Spice’ returning to the limelight the other night. Maybe she ran out of her Spice Girls money or maybe she just craves fame, attention, and status. Fair enough, I thought. However, her video is a remake/rendition of Downtown. No element was new, the video revolved around her appearance and, to make matters worse, her voice/singing was very unprofessional. I only mention this as an example. It symbolises a growing trend in showbiz.