Techdirt. Stories filed under "cs3" Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us Techdirt. Stories filed under "cs3"http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Mon, 14 May 2012 19:30:00 PDT What If There Was A Music Collection Society That Actually Understood That Free Isn't Always Bad? Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120509/02510618838/what-if-there-was-music-collection-society-that-actually-understood-that-free-isnt-always-bad.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120509/02510618838/what-if-there-was-music-collection-society-that-actually-understood-that-free-isnt-always-bad.shtml C3S, or the Cultural Commons Collecting Society is trying to enter the market in Europe in a much more culture-friendly manner:
C3S is a collaborative effort to found a new and ground-breaking European collecting society for musical creators to register their works outside of traditional schemes, released under free licences for commercial exploitation. More than just for works published under Creative Commons Licences, C3S is open for other free licences as well.
The new operation wants to encourage free distribution for non-commercial use, and a much more reasonable (and appealing) deal for both musicians and consumers. Just the fact that the organization has to make it clear that members are encouraged to make use of free licensing is an amazing step forward. Compare that to organizations like GEMA that have tried refusing to recognize Creative Commons licenses, and operations like ASCAP, who insist that Creative Commons is threat to musicians, rather than a useful tool. Who knows if C3S will go anywhere, but it's nice to see that it's at least being tried.

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]]> well,-here's-a-shot http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120509/02510618838 Fri, 28 Dec 2007 09:42:00 PST Adobe Spying On Its Customers Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071228/020818.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071228/020818.shtml Valleywag, Adobe's CS3 design software includes a system to provide your usage data quietly to a "behavioral analytics" firm named Omniture. Of course, it does this without ever asking you if you want some random company knowing every time you use this piece of software. While it may not be doing anything nefarious, this certainly has all the hallmarks of spyware, including the fact that it tries to (weakly) disguise the connection to Omniture by making it look like it's simply pinging your local network. It's really amazing that companies keep doing this type of thing thinking that people won't catch on. There may be plenty of legitimate reasons for tracking the usage of a piece of software -- but if so, why not be upfront about it and let the user of the software opt-in to sharing his or her data? Yet another reason to use a firewall that catches these sorts of sneaky outbound connections. Update: John Dowdell, an Adobe employee (and long time Techdirt reader) has replied in the comments, noting that he's talking to folks at Adobe to find out the whole story, but he thinks it's the "live update" function. I'm not sure I understand why a live update function would call an analytics firm -- or why the ping to that analytics firm should be disguised as a local network ping, but that's the story coming out of Adobe right now. Will update again if any more details become clear. Update 2: Further response from Adobe here. It explains what the connection does and also admits that the company should have done a better job making it clear.

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