With more and more internet adoption worldwide, collaboration and sharing as a genesis for creativity is becoming the norm. The marquis example is Wikipedia, of course, although we've noted a general theory that great ideas can spring from sharing and collaboration, often leading to unexpected (but fun) results. That's one of the reasons it's so fun to see things like the following emerge (completely NSFW, unless you're employed by Dark Helmet Inc.):

Yes, that's the trailer for a new video game to be released shortly, and it was inspired almost entirely by an online group and the resulting internet meme the group produced. Included amongst this list of video games resulting from internet memes, the entire premise of the game began with what was essentially a bitch-session online over how awful shooter game sequels are.

It all started with a joke on a forum. One NeoGAF forum user, annoyed with how lazy shooters had become, complained that he was tired of games like 'Dudebro 2: It's Straight-Up Dawg Time.' It grew from there.

The phrase became a byline for tired, me-too games, but it was so absurd that it got people thinking. Soon, it had mock cover art and a storyline. Before long, a team of fans were working on an entire game, a 2D platformer, and it's on the way soon. It even stars Jon St. John, the actor famous for voicing Duke Nukem.

Apparently, somehow, the entire premise for what looks like a hysterical game was generated spontaneously online in a collaborative format, as was the trailer, cover art, and storyline. Now, it may quickly be pointed out by some that the end product of this creativity is subject to copyright by default, but that misses the point entirely. This is simply another example of how creation occurs and how sharing and exchanging ideas freely can produce an interesting project as well as a great deal of fun. As collaboration of this nature expands due to the ability of people to connect on the internet, the overall need to lock up ideas relative to creative output is going to weaken. There may still be some "artists" who create simply for monetary gain, but their ranks are lessening.

Computers help people communicate all the time, but they can be really helpful for people who have no voice at all (eg. Stephen Hawking). Synthetic speech technologies are getting better -- with better algorithms to generate more human-like speech and cloud-based systems that allow processor-intensive software to run on handheld devices. Here are just a few examples of some computer-created voices.

• Most people usually think of synthetic speech software sounding like a HAL9000 or Gene Roddenberry's wife, so there's been a notable dearth of synthetic kid's voices. Until now. Meet Harry and Rosie -- a couple text-to-speech voices that sound like British children. [url]
• The Blizzard Challenge is an annual competition for taking a limited speech database and building a synthetic voice from it in order to learn more about how algorithms can be improved for speech synthesis. Someday, these results will actually make some Mission Impossible tricks seem plausible. [url]
• A new smartphone app can translate spoken words in real time from Japanese to English (or Mandarin or Korean) and vice versa. This app doesn't do much for grammar, but it can get across some meaning even though it's not perfect. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

In 2009, I attended Midem for the first time. It's an event that the music industry has put on for decades. Over the past few years, they've really embraced the idea that the music industry needs to adapt and modernize and have continuously brought in a stream of speakers and participants showing that there are ways for the industry to thrive. In 2009, they invited me to present a case study on Trent Reznor, which remains one of the most popular presentations I've ever given. Four years later I still get at least an email a week about it, and sometimes more. The next year I went back to Midem and ran a workshop (not videotaped, unfortunately!) which was a lot of fun. We helped a bunch of industry folks think through ways to take existing acts and rethink business models and how they could better connect with fans. It was a blast. Last year, I was back on the main stage giving a presentation on how the state of the entertainment industry, and how it's actually going much better than some would believe. That was the launch of our Sky is Rising report, and also talked about how being more open, human and awesome was a tremendous way to stand out from others in the entertainment industry.

Unfortunately, due to some other commitments, I can't make it to the next Midem coming up at the end of January, but the organizers are trying something different this year. Rather than handpicking all of the speakers like they normally do, they'd like to try out some "new blood," and have opened up a Speak at Midem Competition, letting anyone under the age of 30 pitch the Midem organizers as to why you should get to give your presentation on the Midem stage. For anyone looking to take part, the initial form is here, but I can say that presenting at Midem has been tremendously helpful to me over the years. So, if you have something unique to say about the industry, and want a giant stage to present it on (and you're under 30...), why not toss in a submission?

Quite a week for random governmental retractions. Back in February, when we first warned about the upcoming "World Conference on International Telecommunications" (WCIT) meeting of the UN's International Telecommunications Union (ITU), we noted that the thing to be most afraid of was countries like Russia and China using the process to take over control of aspects of the internet, in part to allow greater control for the sake of censorship, but also to set up questionable "tariffs" on internet traffic, designed to basically divert money to state owned or "closely associated" telcos. While much of the focus over the past few months was on the EU telcos proposal, you had to know that even worse was coming.

Last week, the Russians released their proposal, first in Russian and a few days later with an English translation to the ITU -- and both versions quickly leaked. You can download it from the Internet Archive or view the embed below. It is a pretty blatantly bad document. Larry Downes, over at News.com, has a pretty thorough analysis of the document and why it's troubling. Here's a snippet:

The leaked proposal would strongly endorse national control over those parts of the Internet that reside within a country's borders, including ISPs, traffic, and engineering. One suggested change to the treaty, for example, declares that "Member States shall have the sovereign right to manage the Internet within their national territory, as well as to manage national Internet domain names."

Russia is also calling for a major revision to the multi-stakeholder governance process that has long-presided over domain names and Internet addressing, which it calls a "critical transnational resource." Under a proposed revision, the treaty would be amended to make clear that "Member States shall have equal rights in the international allocation of Internet addressing and identification resources."

Today, oversight of domain names and IP addresses is delegated to ICANN, a nongovernmental organization, which manages key Internet resources through a complex mechanism. According to ICANN, its model is "bottom up" and includes "registries, registrars, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), intellectual property advocates, commercial and business interests, noncommercial and nonprofit interests, representation from more than 100 governments, and a global array of individual Internet users."

The ITU, by contrast, allows only its member nations to vote. Private organizations can participate in its proceedings by paying a large annual fee but cannot propose amendments or vote.

This isn't a surprise... but it is a clear problem:

Curbing the Internet is a priority for these countries that goes well beyond the WCIT process. China, for example, recently hosted its first annual "Internet Roundtable for Emerging Countries," attended by Russia, Brazil, India, and South Africa. According to observers of the meeting, the participants agreed that "The Internet must be managed by governments, with a particular focus on the influence of social networks on society."

The Russian proposal, however, is the most audacious power grab to date. And it comes as little surprise to observers of the ITU, which has deepened ties to Russia in a bid to demonstrate its relevance in cybersecurity. Last year, during a meeting between Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure, Putin bluntly told Toure that Russia was keen on the idea of "establishing international control over the Internet using the monitoring and supervisory capability of the International Telecommunications Union."

Of course, a funny thing happened over the weekend... In talking to people familiar with the matter, we found out that days after the Russian proposal went live, they pulled it and submitted a "revised" version. Right now it's Russian only, so people are waiting for the ITU's translators to dig in, but we're hearing from people who understand Russian that the new version is slightly better than the original, but still has significant problems.

Meanwhile, Downes piece also has two ridiculous tidbits about just how out of touch and clueless the ITU is. Earlier this month, we wrote about an editorial in Wired by ITU boss Hamadoun Toure in which he explained why the UN should regulate the internet. Downes points out that the title of that article was changed from "UN Must Regulate the Internet" to "UN: We Seek to Bring Internet to All." Quite different, though it's unclear who came up with the headline. The bigger issue, however, is that part of Toure's insistence that the ITU process is an "open" one relies on the existence of the WCIT Public Views and Opinions page, where people could submit their opinions -- and he encouraged people to do so. Only problem? At the time Toure's piece was published, the ITU had already turned off the ability to add new comments.

A link directed readers to the WCIT 12 "Public Views and Opinions" page, which, since it was created in July, has received only 15 posts.

But perhaps that's because the ITU required commenters to first register, provide extensive identifying information, and agree to a lengthy terms of service agreement before they could "express their views" on the contents of a single, and highly redacted, early draft of the proposals the ITU decided to release. (The complete document, as well as many more recent versions, are available on WCITLeaks.)

Or perhaps that's because, as one of Wired's reader's pointed out, the "Public Views and Opinions" page had actually been shut down before Toure's editorial was even published.

Weeks ahead of the conference, and just as some of the worst proposals are leaking out of the ITU's information fortress, the public comment page now reads solemnly: "We inform you that the WCIT-12 Open Consultation process is now closed."

That statement captures, in a nutshell, everything that's wrong with the WCIT, and the ITU's pathetic effort to spin it.

Why is it even a discussion for the ITU to try to take more control over the internet when they clearly have no clue?

Today, the always innovative Humble Bundle launched yet another great new project. This time they've teamed up with Tim Schafer, whom some may remember as the founder of Double Fine and the creator of their insanely successful Kickstarter campaign (and others may remember him as the creator of several classic adventure games). The project is a twist on the standard Humble Bundle system: instead of paying what you want for a collection of existing games, contributors get to vote on various game ideas from the Double Fine team to decide which ones get prototyped. The whole development process will then be live-streamed, and contributors will be able to download the prototypes at the end. The ideas themselves come from a feverous internal brainstorming process called the Amnesia Fortnight, the secrets of which are being revealed to the public, as best (and most entertainingly) explained in the video:

It's rare, maybe unprecedented, to see gamers brought into the development process on such a wide scale and at such an intimate level. Though participation takes the form of an single vote, you can bet that people who get involved will have lots of feedback and questions, and probably a few demands, as the process continues — which, in addition to forging a strong connection with fans, could actually be kind of scary. Today I spoke briefly with Tim Schafer to ask more about the thinking behind the project and his expectations for where it might go. For him, the key revelation from the Kickstarter campaign was less about identifying demand for a new adventure game, and more about discovering that a more transparent development process can be a really positive experience:

We're building off of one of the things we learned from that project, which is that it's okay to open the doors. We've had this Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory thing for many years, and the Kickstarter changed all that.

...

We let people see the making of the game and realized it's okay. You think people will laugh at us or they'll judge us for the work or they'll get mad when we cut something from the game. ... We realized that the players are smarter than people are giving them credit for.

He expressed some slight anxiety at the idea of handing the choice of games over to the public, but it was far outweighed by curiosity:

It's really interesting. Usually I pick, usually I deal with the deciding. I think I just wanted to try a different way to see. I like getting my way some of the time, but not all of the time. If you don't have any sort of agent of chaos or wild card then you never have any sort of evolution of ideas, and fresh blood. ... I really want to see what the people at large have to say, to see if it's different.

Similarly, he noted that live-streaming the development process would be a real dose of reality for some gamers, and he's interested to see how they react. While there's plenty of fun stuff to show, like the Art Jams where they flesh out a game's visuals, there's also the painful side, like the budget meetings where exciting ideas get reluctantly cut. But such things are necessary, and as he notes, displaying them helps to humanize the process — which is something we talk about a lot when it comes to connecting with fans and being open, human and awesome.

It's going to be great to see the results of this team-up. Schafer started his career at Lucasfilm Games when secrecy and control were the orders of the day, and developers tried all sorts of wacky schemes to prevent piracy — that's what he was used to, and he credits the Humble Bundle with helping to inspire a different outlook:

Besides the fact that they bring a lot of smaller, lesser known games to light, a lot of what's inspiring is the business model.

Keeping things secret, hoarding information, protecting your copyright. That's just what I was used to, and Humble Bundle says let it go, open it up, let people have it for a penny or a dollar, let people pay what they want and give all the money to charity if they want.

...

You can't have this 100% watertight, airtight grip on that stuff. You have to make other people not want to pirate, make it easy for them, and respect them enough to let them choose. People respond to not being treated like criminals.

If you want to get in on the project and cast your vote for which games get developed, you can do so over at the Humble Bundle site — there are also two existing prototypes of other games for contributors to download right away.

Back in October, we noted that in the latest triennial DMCA exemption review, the Copyright Office/Librarian of Congress refused to say it was legal for you to rip your own legally purchased DVDs so that you could watch them on a computer or tablet. That seems fairly ridiculous, especially given that similarly ripping your CDs is recognized as legal. Rep. Darrell Issa has apparently recognized how silly this and is planning a bill to fix the Copyright Office's mistake.

"We think we can write at least some clarifying language that would instruct the Copyright Office to more accurately define what is, in fact, fair use," Issa said in an interview [with Roll Call]. "People who make copies on their iPod for jogging are not the problem."

We won't see anything until the next session, but given that at least some of Issa's colleagues appear to agree that it's time to broaden fair use in copyright law, hopefully we can finally see some movement in Congress on bills that actually will allow greater creativity to flourish while also not making most of the nation lawbreakers for simply wanting to watch legally purchased DVDs without having to carry around the plastic discs.

I've always had a bit of a soft spot for DRM in my heart, mostly because it makes me laugh. If you think about it, it's generally rather funny in its uselessness. Pirates don't care about it as they simply route around any DRM. Customers can certainly be annoyed, but they always end up with the same tools the pirates use to break the DRM on their purchased products. There's a question of legality in doing so, obviously, but generally nobody really seems to care all that much and software developers just end up in a DRM arms race against nobody, which is inherently funny. All the while, we get wonderful gems like Ubisoft's vuvuzela DRM, which was hysterical. Now, don't get me wrong, DRM sucks, but upon reading stories about its effects my range of emotions tends to be anywhere between annoyance and raucous laughter.

However, as content producers begin to wake up to the fail that is DRM, we've been discussing how using your fanbase and social constructs to shame pirates and reward customers is a better approach. And it is, but unlike DRM you better get it right, because if you screw it up the results are far beyond mild annoyance. Reader AdamR writes in about one such developer that screwed things up so badly that they ended up hijacking the Twitter accounts of some paying customers to post a "piracy confession" on their behalf.

If you search Twitter for the hashtag #softwarepirateconfession you'll find a stream of tweets stating, "How about we all stop using pirated iOS apps? I promise to stop. I really will. #softwarepirateconfession." There are many dozens of these tweets in the past day alone, all identical. So what's happening? It turns out that Enfour, the maker of a variety of dictionary apps, is auto-posting tweets to users' accounts to shame them for being pirates. But the auto-tweeting seems to be affecting a huge portion of its paid user base, not just those who actually stole the apps.

How could this happen, you wonder? Well, funny story. One proposed explanation is that there's a common tool used by people who jailbreak their iPhones and still want apps from Apple's app store, called Installous, that Enfour's apps were detecting and then, upon using the app and gaining permission to access a user's Twitter account it posted the "apology". However, others are saying that it's occurring on phones that are in fact not jailbroken. Either way, these are people that paid for the app, not pirates as their own hijacked Twitter accounts purport them to be. As one customer, Sean O'Brien, noted:

"Apparently, even though I paid nearly $25.00 for it, something in the code of this app identified me a owning a pirated copy. It then asked for access to my Twitter account through my iPhone. I gave it access because, it's the American Heritage Dictionary! If any app can be trusted with my Twitter account, it ought to be my expensive dictionary app. But no, it tweeted the following message:

"How about we all stop using pirated iOS apps? I promise to stop. I really will. #softwarepirateconfession"

As you can imagine, the paying customers are pissed. Enfour has since released an apologetic statement, first in Japanese (ostensibly folks trying to use their Enfour dictionaries to translate the apology were called pirates again), and then in English on Twitter. They also have rushed out an updated version of the app they claim fixes the "bug", but the complaints are still coming in.

Here's a piece of advice for all you developers out there. Yes, social shaming can work far better than lawsuits and DRM, but you had damned well better get it right. Hijacking the Twitter feeds of your customers, or anyone actually, is taking things in the wrong direction.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who has been one of the few leaders in Congress when it comes to pushing for real copyright reform and pushing back against the bad proposals of Hollywood, is apparently looking to use Reddit to crowdsource a new bill concerning internet freedom. Earlier this year, we noted that Lofgren had introduced two good bills -- one on ECPA reform (pushing for more privacy for your communications) and one called the Global Internet Freedom Act to create a task force designed to ensure internet freedom. It will be interesting to see how well this works.

Of course, post-SOPA, some on Reddit sought to crowdsource a bill on internet freedom themselves, and the process went a bit off the rails. I don't know that crowdsourcing is the best way to create a bill. I could see how it would be very handy in critiquing and improving an existing bill -- or maybe just generating ideas for a bill -- but if it's just starting from scratch, quality control could be an issue. Either way, this seems like an interesting experiment that will be worth watching.

A few years ago, people always referred to the Beatles as the biggest holdouts in terms of releasing their music for sale as MP3s online (mainly iTunes). However, the Beatles finally came around in November of 2010. After that, people started putting together lists of who was left and AC/DC and Kid Rock seemed to top most of those lists. So it seems noteworthy that both have just caved. Kid Rock's new album is available on iTunes, with someone saying that he finally realized that he could "no longer ignore how much money he was leaving on the table." And, the latest is that AC/DC has come around as well. Of course, AC/DC wasn't just not selling downloadable tracks, but they seemed philosophically opposed to the whole concept based on some of their quotes:

"I know the Beatles have changed but we're going to carry on like that," guitarist Angus Young told Sky News in May 2011, after the Beatles had ended their own iTunes holdout. "For us it's the best way. We are a band who started off with albums and that's how we've always been."

Back in October 2008, the band were even more hardline. "Maybe I'm just being old-fashioned, but this iTunes, God bless 'em, it's going to kill music if they're not careful," singer Brian Johnson told Reuters.

"It's a...monster, this thing. It just worries me. And I'm sure they're just doing it all in the interest of making as much...cash as possible. Let's put it this way, it's certainly not for the... love, let's get that out of the way, right away."

Yup. But apparently they're finally realizing that maybe it helps to go where your fans are. A bit late.

Of course, looking at those quotes, they sound mighty familiar to what we're hearing these days about other services like Pandora and Spotify. Why is it that there's always a contingent of musicians who so want to hate the services that actually deliver a legal product to fans?

While there's been plenty of attention paid over the weekend to the fact that the Republican Study Committee (RSC), the conservative caucus of House Republicans, pulled its report on copyright reform after some entertainment industry lobbyists hit the phones/emails late Friday/early Saturday (and, no, it wasn't directly to RSC, for the most part, but to "friendly" members asking them to express their "displeasure" with the report to the RSC leadership). But we shouldn't let that distract from the simple fact that the report was brilliant -- perhaps the most insightful and thoughtful piece of scholarship on copyright to come out of a government body in decades. You can still read the whole thing as uploaded to Archive.org.

Some people have set up a petition at Change.org asking the RSC to republish and stand behind the policy brief. Others are saying you should contact your own Representatives directly and ask them to support the report. For example, Dave Weinberger wrote a wonderful letter to his own Representative, telling him that he should take a look at the report, and that he should use it as a starting point "for a conversation this country very much needs."

It seems unlikely that the RSC will bring it back, despite the quality of the report. But one hopes that the massive outpouring of support (seriously, just check Twitter) will lead politicians from both parties to recognize that sensible and smart copyright reform is a topic that gets people excited -- and one thing they're sick of is decades of both parties simply falling all over themselves to distort copyright to favor a few dominant Hollywood players.

Because the GOP has chickened out, we're going to try to do a series of posts analyzing the various aspects of the report, starting with the three myths about copyright it debunks, followed by four policy recommendations, to see if we can further the discussion. Look for those posts in the coming days and weeks.

A year and a half ago, we wrote about a lawsuit from a lawyer in Texas, John Gibson, who is an expert in workers' comp issues in the state. He -- quite reasonably -- set up a blog at the URL TexasWorkersCompLaw.com. Shouldn't be a big deal, right? Wrong. It seems that Texas has a law that you can't use the words "Texas" and "Workers' Comp" together. Seriously. The law explicitly says that anyone advertising Texas Workers' Comp law help "may not knowingly use or cause to be used... any term using both 'Texas' and 'Workers' Compensation' or any term using both 'Texas' and 'Workers' Comp';"

After he received a cease & desist letter, he sued, claiming the law was a First Amendment violation. We had missed the news that the district court had dismissed the case, but that doesn't matter now, since the appeals court has brought the case right back (hat tip to Paul Keating for the news). The district court's dismissal was based on the rather simplistic analysis that the domain was commercial speech. The appeals court, however, feels there's much more worth looking at here, noting that commercial speech is still protected by the first amendment.

As with many new issues involving the Internet, the proper method of analysis to determine whether a domain name is commercial speech or a more vigorously protected form of speech is res nova. A domain name, which in itself could qualify as ordinary communicative speech, might qualify as commercial speech if the website itself is used almost exclusively for commercial purposes.

While this case is interesting in its own right, the fact that the court acknowledges that domains themselves are a form of speech certainly raises significant questions about the Constitutionality of the federal government seizing domain names -- and arguing that there are no First Amendment issues raised, since they're not pulling down the websites behind them. The domains themselves are a form of speech and the government is seizing them with no notice or adversarial hearing.

So, last week we wrote about Apple settling its patent fight with HTC -- though the terms were secret. It certainly sounded like it wasn't that much money, as HTC seemed to brush off the financial concerns. That appears to have caught the attention of Samsung's lawyers, who have now filed a motion asking the court to make Apple reveal the terms of its HTC settlement. Perhaps more important than the amount, Samsung wants to see if the deal includes all of Apple's patents, since there are some that Apple has been insisting it would never license as part of its argument as to why there needs to be an injunction blocking the sale of Samsung devices, rather than just monetary damages. It would undermine Apple's case if it then turned around and licensed those patents to HTC. As the linked article above notes, it would be surprising if HTC agreed to a deal that didn't include those patents. So the end result of the HTC deal may be that Apple just bargained away some of its ability to get injunctions against Samsung's devices.

We've covered the various regulatory and legal fights that Uber has been dealing with lately. The company, which basically has set up a super convenient way for people to book a ride (and, in some cases, taxis), keeps running up against a combination of local regulatory agencies who tend to feel that they get to lord over anyone who attempts to do anything involving driving people around for money, as well as existing limo and taxi providers who fear a more efficient system (especially when they profit off of inefficiencies). Of course, some politicians and taxi/limo drivers recognize that greater efficiency is actually good for everyone, allowing a more convenient and useful system, and filling in gaps when regulated supply strains the system.

However, too many are just focused on the status quo. And this isn't to say that there isn't a place for regulatory bodies to ensure that cabs and limos are safe and that they don't take advantage of passengers. But the line between protecting passengers and protecting legacy players from competition sure does become a blurry line very, very quickly. And this week a bunch of these companies have run into legal problems on their home turf. Uber, specifically, has has been sued in San Francisco by some cabbies demanding that the company be shut down. They claim that Uber's car hailing service is really an unregulated taxi service, and thus, unfairly competing with them.

Perhaps the bigger issue, however, is that the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) has fined Uber and two other companies, Lyft and SideCar (who offer ridesharing). As that Wired link notes, this seems to be a clash between two core concepts that seem to thrive in San Francisco: on the one hand, freedom to innovate and disrupt and, on the other hand, support in government intervention for the public good. I'd argue that the two concepts aren't in quite as much conflict as the article suggests, if the intervention actually is for the public good. The problem is that's not really clear here, and it's not hard to see how it's really for the sake of limiting competition.

SideCar points out that this is a case of regulators not knowing how to classify an innovation:

asserting that we are operating a transportation carrier... is like saying Airbnb is a hotel chain, that Travelocity is an airline, or that eBay is a store

Lyft, similarly, suggests that there's a problem in regulators taking a square peg and trying to shove it into a round hole, because they've never seen a square before:

Transportation has historically been a highly regulated industry, and the existing regulations weren’t designed to imagine a world where two neighbors who have never met are able to connect within a matter of minutes to share a ride across town.

Uber's CEO, Travis Kalanick, told Wired that the PUC fine is particularly ridiculous in its case, since it only works with drivers who are already regulated by the PUC. It's just offering them another channel for finding customers. But under the PUC's ruling, it appears that they want those people to be doubly regulated, which seems completely wasteful:

Our contention is that if you read the regulations, such a notion doesn’t make sense. Are we supposed to give drivers a second drug and alcohol test? Are we supposed to have cars inspected by the DMV a second time after they’ve already inspected (our) partners’ vehicles?

In the end, you have to wonder if the role that regulators have still makes sense for these kinds of innovators. Yes, there are issues about safety and avoiding scams, but the various companies have built in systems to deal with that -- such as driver ratings and public reviews. Those types of things weren't really possible in the past, which is why you needed a PUC to make sure taxidrivers weren't ripping people off. But now the "PUC" can be the public itself. But... that only works if you believe the regulations are supposed to help the public, rather than the legacy players.