While looking for a standard way to incorporate Creative Commons metadata to BitTorrent torrents I found some interesting applications of both technologies to the music industry:
- Jamendo-a repository of non-mainstream music albums as the one that you can see in the picture. Most music on the site is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence, thus the use and distribution of music is free in most common occasions. In order to save bandwidth Jamendo uses Peer-to-Peer technology (and yes, it is legal; the legality of a technology doesn’t depend of its misuses).
- Magnatune-is a little recording company whose motto is “We are not evil”. Indeed its business model is quite intriguing: all recordings are free to download, half of their income goes to the artists and you can choose the price of the albums you decide to buy. I really appreciate their refusal of the DRM techniques: these techniques are quite useless, since they bother legitimate users and are usually ineffective against illegitimate users. Magnatune has also a very easy way to licence music for commercial purposes.
- Prodigem-a hosting company that simplifies the use of torrents: in just a few clicks you can upload your files to their servers, choose the licence to use (all CC licences are there and some commercial licences too), create a torrent and even charge a fee for every download. The torrents are feeded by Prodigem servers until there are 3 other seeds on the Internet and after that you don’t pay Prodigem for the bandwith.
Update: Prodigem was acquired by MoveDigital and is a of July 18th 2006 a part of its services. See the announcement on their blog.
[This story is not complete and follows the rules of the previous post. It is also the first thing I write since a really long time, so be indulgent.]
Only two or maybe three hundreds yards separated him from the summit of the mountain. Eventually, after several hours of ascension and suffering under the summer sun, his efforts were quite finished.
Why did he undertake this trip? He didn’t know for sure. The routine of his daily life wore him out and stripped him of every peculiarity, every difference from the other human beings. He was just a gearwheel of a great machine that had no purpose beyond survival.
The mountain he was climbing was his redemption, a way to give the meaning of his life back. He decided to reach its summit, even if it were the last thing of his life… And now it was finished. No more looking out of the window of his flat and waiting for the good time to flee from the city, no more goals that would be worth living for.
He stood on the top in front of the precipice, his long hair wavering in the wind, staring at the whole world he left behind himself. It would be easy to make another step forward, to finish his life after a great deal, instead of dying a bit every day and resemble more and more the majority of the human beings. It would be easy for the muscles to move and the body to lose balance, but something in his mind stopped him.
Behind him, near the horizon, there was another mountain, with the slopes covered with snow and a steep path leading to the summit…
[There are no continuations of this story so far.]
I tried many times to write a novel, but because of many time constraints and a lack of imagination, I never managed to finish one. Hence I’ll try another approach: I’ll write the beginning of a story on my blog and leave it unfinished. Another blogger could post the continuation on his blog and either finish the story or allow others to continue it. The result would be a chain (or better a tree, since there could be more continuations of the same story) of blog posts around the Web.
The idea isn’t surely original. Among the forums of the ENS there is one dedicated to the creation of an interactive story with a much more complicated structure (topology) and on the blog of David Madore you regularly find his “Fragments littéraires”.
This game should have some rules in order not to write several unrelated pieces of the story:
- You should link your story to its father. You should do it both ways: write a two line preface to your story with a link to the father story’s post and write a comment or send a trackback to the ancestor with a link to your story. Many blogging utilities send a trackback to all links in your post, thus saving you some work
.
- You should try to smoothen the edges between stories. Even if you don’t like the style of the ancestor, you should try to change it smoothly.
- There is no real restriction on the human language used in your posts. A part in French, a part in English, etc.. could be interesting, but I’d say that avoiding too many changes is better.
- You should ignore these rules if you don’t agree with them.
If you don’t own a blog and don’t want to get one, you can send it to me at piotr DOT karwasz AT iecn DOT u-nancy DOT fr and I’ll post it with the correct recognitions.
I’ll post right after this entry the first part of a story you can continue if you wish. There are other stories that could be continued like:
Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire,
Et quod vides perisse perditum ducas.
Fulsere quondam candidi tibi soles,
Cum ventitabas quo puella ducebat
Amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla.
Ibi illa multa tum iocosa fiebant,
Quae tu volebas nec puella nolebat.
Fulsere vere candidi tibi soles.
Nunc iam illa non volt: tu quoque inpotens noli,
Nec quae fugit sectare, nec miser uiue,
Sed obstinata mente perfer, obdura.
Vale, puella. Iam Catullus obdurat,
Nec te requiret nec rogabit inuitam.
At tu dolebis, cum rogaberis nulla.
Scelesta, uae te, quae tibi manet vita!
Quis nunc te adibit? Cui videberis bella?
Quem nunc amabis? Cuius esse diceris?
Quem basiabis? Cui labella mordebis?
At tu, Catulle, destinatus obdura.
[Carmina Valerii Catulli, VIII]
No, I haven’t fallen so low as our friend Caius Valerius (Both pages are quite short, someone should make some changes), but I still must remember not to lose time in trivial matters and do eventually my job.
As of today the French edition is called bloc-notes or better journal d’e toile, because of major causes.
I think you all agree that this (and also my blog) are becoming grotesque, even my valuable school has adopted such stupid names as Normal` Pôt (the accent is reversed), Normal` Carte, etc. to make us as intelligent as the normal american after a lobotomy (sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude, I wanted say Psychosurgery, because it’s more politically correct).
The abuse of language is one of the aspects of human communication that displeases me more.
Most languages have synonyms that have already lost every difference in the sense, beyond phonetic aspects. Obviously most people use the language at the very basic level, so they cannot be blamed for flattening the language. The ones to blame are the compilers of dictionaries that don’t bring enough attention to the differences between words.
On the other hand we have the “abuse of language”. Many words became in the years to mean everything and nothing, and often the meanings have little to do with the real word. It’s the case of the word love for example, the in these days means more mating than loving. As for myself I think I will return to use the Greek words and .
Another interesting phenomenon is the shift of meaning between a chain of words as we have in the French verbs embracer (’to hug’, shifted into ‘to kiss’) and baiser (’to kiss’, shifted into ‘to have a sexual intercourse’). I still don’t know how to say to hug in French without implying the shifted meaning.
I would be quite interested to create a language that minimize such abuses and is wealth enough in meanings to allow poets to write poems. I am not sure though that this is possible, but I’ll try. I don’t mind if the number of speakers will be as little as that of the Zoinx and Blabo languages invented by my colleagues Apo and DH.
My today’s fortune cookie says:
Tell me why the stars do shine,
Tell me why the ivy twines,
Tell me why the sky's so blue,
And I will tell you just why I love you.
Nuclear fusion makes stars to shine,
Phototropism makes ivy twine,
Rayleigh scattering makes sky so blue,
Sexual hormones are why I love you.
Some time ago I wished the second part of it didn’t exist, I thought human beings were metaphysical entities, but I was wrong. As far as I can tell we love the sun, because it gives as energy and we are selected to collect it. We like company, because it is strategically better in the case of an aggression and last, but not least important, we love people of opposite sex because our hormones program us to transmit the species and the sexually transmitted disease we call life.
So please leave all your romantic attitudes and thoughts about a greater nature of human beings. They are just wrong. We are here to be born, reproduce and die. All other activities are only utilities to accomplish these aims.
In order to add something to my neverending projects I have started the Wikimonography - Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin. It is part of an überproject of Multimedia CDs intended to provide a complete encyclopedia about the best authors and musicians of every time.
The complete works of many scientists, musicians and writers are in the public domain, but I haven’t found yet an organized collection about them. I try to give a humble example of what could be done in the domain of the GFDL and I hope that others will follow me.
I put some informations on the project page, even if the most active page is that of the Italian chapter.
Je ne sais pas si ça mérite, mais voilà une poésie d’autres temps, plus heureux :
To the pretty girl with curly black hair
A great sadness pervades my heart,
The sun falls down and comes the night,
Throwing darkness on this world.
But brighter than the stars in sky
Shines the light of your beautiful eyes,
Which stands your figure out of the blue.
The breeze shakes your curly hair,
Your skirt waves striken by wind.
A poet could not be but gay
In such a jocund company.
Désolé pour les deux dernières strophes, je l’ai écrit dans la nuit profonde et même dans le paradis naturel qui me circondait j’étais pressé de terminer. Des moments d’inspiration comme celui qui a engendré ces courts vers arrivent très rarement dans la vie, je ne peux plus terminer de façon plus propre. Je ne suis plus si jeune et ce qui je éprouvais au temps m’est impossible à réproduire. Le moment plus heureux et douloureux de ma vie est déjà passé et je reste dans cette stupide mélange de ennui et volonté. Pour ne pas vous gêner le goût avec une autre poésie à moi et vous expliquer l’oxymore qui je viens d’écrire rappelez vous l’Odi et amo dont j’ai déjà parlé le 9 juillet.
