This is a post regarding the subject that has been discussed widely here in Sweden since the Pirate Bay Trial. We also recently got a new anti piracy law, IPRED (After the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive proposed by the European Union). IPRED made it easier to aquire persional information about users that are suspected pirates.

This law change was not popular. Weeks of debates helped the Swedish Pirate Party to get one of Sweden’s seats in the European Parliament. We also could se decreasing internet traffic and fewer pirates. People got scared and maybe didn’t want to take the risk.

“It’s obvious that those who are using file-sharing have been scared and moved somewhere else, like streaming music sites,” said Daniel Johansson, a researcher at KTH Institute of Technology in Stockholm. (source)

They recently have proposed similar laws in Great Britain. It will be very interesting to follow if the result will be the same there.

This is my opinion: Music … could … be free! But let the authors/artists or the music industry decide the details!

We have a society that is based on intellectual property like patents and copyright laws. We also have licence models like creative commons and GPL that make it possible for the creator to choose which license model the product should be released with. The Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil have released music under the Creative Commons license form.

Gil means that Creative Commons is good when you want to “democratizing the distribution of intellectual property rights”
(source).

Everyone cannot do like Gilberto Gil and give away their music but I think that with free distribution channels like Spotify, MySpace and Last.fm you have everything you need to release your own music as artist or listen to music free of charge as consumer. Don’t forget that music artists need to make a living as well. Since consumers are not willing to pay the price, maybe the future income will be more dependent on concerts and ad-supported radio and streaming solutions than before, but piracy is not generating any money itself, it is generating attention.

Is piracy really profitable for the record labels (and how to measure)?
I don’t think so. . .You don’t pay for the content. Attention is profitable and i think that software like Spotify or last.fm can be more attention-generating than piracy since they can use more social-network-connections (it is a white industry after all). Several years ago when Napster and Kazaa was spreading free music as never before we didn’t have any iTunes music store or free music services at all.. Downloading was more fast and convienient than the legal way of getting music. At that time I think that piracy was good for the music industry overall, since it was generating much attention to the artists and music industry. It also showed the way to the new market. I also think that the percentage of download-and-then-buy users was quite high.

It is our human right to be able to listen to music?
Today, when we have free legal music in every corner I cannot understand why you need to pirate any music…

It is more convenient to download music since i don’t need to bother about copy protection (DRM) and compatibility between mp3-players.
DRM has no future. iTunes has skipped their copy protection and music stores like amazon, 7digital and emusic already has pure mp3-files on their music-stores. iTunes music can be played in most of the mp3-players and phones on the market. Even RIAA says that DRM is dead.

The legal alternatives are not good enough…
Great, then you can make millions by creating it.. . Take a look at Spotify/iMeem/SimplifyMedia/iLike/Last.fm/Pandora…

What about the future?
The free-music-sharing race has already started. I expect that companies like Apple will release something similar quite soon. Gerd Leonhard has written a great post about what he calls Music 2.0 that is a music industry with less income in the distribution but more revenues based on the attention. I don’t think that artists will start to give away their music. . .why should they do that? Free streaming music is here to stay and that is pretty enough for most of us. . . For ownership or commercial-free alternatives you will need to pay…

What is mine is mine, what is yours is yours… In the real world that is perfectly clear. . .

Some services have changed their business models from completely free to “cheap”. Last.fm is one example. They changed to a freemium-model recently. I hope that they will survive. It’s a huge difference between free and “cheap”. Last.fm is competing between a big number of music services with free content (iMeem, iLike, Spotify…) and of course they are loosing visitors by charging them… Loosing visitors means loosing buzz.. .Less posts on twitter, blogs and so on…

We shall not forget that people are willing to share!
Compare the number of professional photographers with the number of amateurs with “good enough” cameras (or camera equipped mobile phones). The professional photographers wants to get paid for their images and the amateurs are sharing them for free on flickr… Who is getting the money? Yahoo (they own flickr).

But free is not quite as simple — or as stupid — as it sounds. Just because products are free doesn’t mean that someone, somewhere, isn’t making huge gobs of money – Chris Andersson, Wired

When it comes to newspaper industry, and the never ending discussion about blogging vs. newspapers, I stumbled upon this site discussing the “free meals” in news industry. Actually the industry have already lost a couple of battles agaist the free content on the webb. I agree with the article and think that they are far from loosing the war. Newspaper industry vs. blogging is almost like paid software vs. open source.

The Buzz, trends and Twittering is growing as never before and nobody knows where we are heading. It’s a goldmine for trend-searchers and it´s totally free.

I am a bit worried that the big giant companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft will buy a lot of companies during the financial crisis… I guess that time will tell… Maybe Google will start by buying Twitter tomorrow.

The free vs. non free discussion is exciting

If you have 5 minutes over, I recommend the following video:
About why $0.00 Is the Future of Business.

Chris Anderson has published the book, “Free, The Future of A Radical Price” that is very interesting. It is about this subject and can be downloaded for free (as audiobook or ebook) here

I have been reading a lot of comparisons between the new web-browsers but most of them have forgotten one player, Opera.

Tested: Chrome vs IE8 vs Firefox 3.1 vs Safari 4

Which Is The Best Browser: IE8, Chrome, Safari Or Firefox 3.1

Opera released its alpha for the upcoming version 10 a while ago and it had a few interesting features. Higher speed of course but also 100% score of the ACID3 test. Recently Opera also announced another interesting feature, the Turbo mode:

Demo of Opera 10 with Turbo mode

Basically opera turbo is a kind of compressed tunnel between your browser and an opera-server that makes the browsing much quicker, especially on a netbook with 3g modem or connections with lower bandwidth. Opera themselves recommend users below 100kbit/s to use turbo mode, but I can clearly feel the performance enhancement on my 3g connection that is around 200-400kbit/s. When I tested, my speed benefits with turbo are usually around 2-4x. Opera is one step ahead again.

As always with opera, all features you need are just there without installing a lot of memory consuming plugins: Ad blocking, mouse gestures, Bittorent, Full screen mode, Notes, Bookmark, Multiple browser synchronization and so on. All comes with a fast engine, low memory usage and some Opera-unique features such as Turbo and “Fit to width”.

So before you choose your favorite, try Opera.

/David

They need to make the application powerful but also easy to use. It should fit all needs and different types of users. My favourite example of this is Microsoft Office. Computer professionals, old people, students, children.. . Everyone uses it differently and few are happy with it… On the other hand are there few alternatives to the application and the alternatives (openoffice, staroffice) has almost copied the application design from MS Office. They simply want it to be easy for the user to switch.

The Web 2.0-trend (basically HTML and Javascript combined) has enabled web “applications” and now there are several “office suites” online. They are free, comes with online storage and . .. they are very simple to use! On web applications, siplicity comes with a lot less functionality.

If application developers have web-apps in mind when they develop the next generation of applications i think they would be easy to use and advanced. .. It can probably be the best of two worlds combined. Easy and powerful.

Instead of combining, do several apps…

/David

I have been thinking a lot about preparing a list like this. When i started to use a Linux based netbook i suddenlly realised that this kind of list does not exist.  Yes. .. .now…..

My main OS is MacOSX for private usage. I use Windows XP at work and have Linux Ubuntu installed in my Netbook. My goal is to give you a complete guide of applications for the all thre operating systems that has the same functionality and is needed for your daily computer usage.

I have all these programs installed in my computers and find them very helpful.

Cheers!
David

It’s time to wrap up the year 2008. It has been a year of change with Obama, Olympic games and fincancial crisis.

• It is also the year when Yahoo said no to Microsoft.
• iPhone really rocked it’s way into the market and changed the focus from Hardware design into Software. The application store now contains more than 10000 applications which is very unique and the os and ui is beautiful. The first iPhone competitors has been released from other vendors and they seems really cool.
• The commercial breakthrough for mobile internet. 3 Sweden has announced that they will gear up to 21mbit during Q2 2009.
• Small cheap $400-notebooks (so called netbooks) got really popular since Intel finally released it’s power effective atom CPU’s.
• The small and cheep netbooks (above) originally came with linux (or a linux-option). Linux had to step back in favor of old Windows XP (Microsoft’s joker-card).

Maybe 2008 was the year when Technology finally became trendy? It’s not about the phone, it’s about the possibilities and user experience. It’s not about having the internet in your computer, it’s about how!

So, finally, what about 2009?

• Cloud computing – Basically, the cloud is the internet-architecture itself. There is a lot of cpu-power left in all the servers out there and new technology makes it possible to share servers based on the needs. An entertaining guide is available here (youtube video) and here (article) The technological hype has started already but the commercial breakthrough will come in 2009. Cloud computing is being driven by providers including Amazon, Google, HP, IBM, Intel and Microsoft. The potential of the hype maybe will be clearer with the fact that Amazon price for one GB in the cloud is only $0.150 at this moment. The next amazing web services are in the Cloud. Already now, we have services like Dropbox (file synchronization) and Mozy (providing unlimited backup for only 5$ a month). More of your data will move out on the internet. Many people already have all their mails in their gmail inbox instead of in their harddrive. The same will probably happen with documents, images and music. It’s convenient, but watch out.. .who owns your data?
• PC OS fight again! – Apple will relase Snow-Leopard 10.6 in january, Microsoft will release Windows 7 in october. Both releases are polished versions of the previous releases. Linux won’t step back again . The latest versions of Ubuntu really give me a Wow-impression. This will be interesting.
• Mobile TV and Mobile Payment in Europe? I don’t really believe in this, but i want it Maybe.. . maybe…
• Video conference tech will make it already tough times tougher for the airlines that will lose business-travellers.
• Mobile internet will grow further and this year it will lead to Web 3.0 that will make internet look better on mobile phone screens. Mobile version of firefox will be released and the mobile phone vendors will start to compete with the small netbooks with more advanced and great looking smartphones.

Want to read more?

Time magazine has listed the best inventions of 2008

Happy new year!

/David

Do you have more than two computers? Maybe one at work and one at home.

If you answer yes on one/several of the questions above, then dropbox is definitely something for you. Dropbox gives you 2GB for free and creates a folder on locally on your computer. Everything you store in your local folder will be automatically uploaded to your dropbox storage on the internet.  If you have 2 computers, you will have the same content in your dropbox folders. All your content is also available everywhere through the dropbox website.

If you want to send a big file to someone, just copy the file to your “public” dropbox-folder and simply right click to get a web-link to the file. Send the link and you’re done!

There is an introduction-movie available at: Dropbox website

Oups. .i forgot to tell you … it’s free . . .and for windows/mac/linux!

You can read a interview with the founder of DropBox here: 7 Questions with the founder

Example of channels available:

• Al Jazeera
• BBC
• CNN
• MTV
• Discovery

It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux. I think it’s worth a try.

Did I say it was swedish?

Spotify is entering the group of listen-to-streaming-free-music. There is a lot of competing solutions as last.fm, pandora, web-radio, podcasts and so on. Great services, but all with one problem: You cannot choose the song yourself.

Spotify is basically an iTunes ripoff but with a huge music-library that you can use directly. You can create playlists, search for new music, listen to webradio etc. Everything is fast and seamless. It’s almost like all the music is on your local computer.

There are 3 different ways to subscribe to spotify. Free, 1-day and premium. Free is free, but with commercial between the songs. You can pay for one day or monthly to skip the commercial.

I only have 1 minus point. The most of the music is old, and no new album that i have checked has been added. Maybe this is something that will be changed now when the application is released as a public beta.

Give it a try at: www.spotify.com