alex.mullr.net/blog

I find it really interesting hearing people’s thoughts on copyright, legality and entitlement. The red is me.

[03/01 00:56:51] limewire has free music
[03/01 00:57:05] limewire’s illegal
[03/01 00:57:37] last fm is doing exactly the same as limewire so technically it should b too
[03/01 00:57:54] except that they pay the artists… :)
[03/01 00:58:32] theres 1 positve

To summarise the conversation: It’s a good thing Last.fm pays artists; people like artists, and music, and want them to stick around (shocking!). Last.fm isn’t fluid enough at the moment, and is losing possible users to (loosely defined) piracy because of it. And it’s not obvious that Last.fm is any more legal than Limewire.

The reason this is being dragged up now is because I received an invitation for Spotify from Ernesto this evening. The complaints I’ve heard about Last.fm are that playing a song sometimes takes too long and it simply doesn’t have the catalog required to keep people interested. Spotify, it seems, solves these problems. After doing a couple of searches with people much more into shit popular music than I am, it passes the catalog test. It also passes the speed test, with songs playing instantly – if you put this in front of someone, I’m not sure it would be immediately apparently that it’s an online service.

The best news? At the end of last month, Spotify announced that they support scrobbling to Last.fm directly from the preferences of their application. The two services can play brilliantly together. Whilst I won’t be paying the £10 a month for Spotify’s premium service (hell, the adverts aren’t even intrusive or often), the UK-based scrobbling site should be glad to hear that they won’t be losing the £1.50 I pay them per month, either.

Here’s a question I’d like to throw out to the crowd: what am I supposed to do if I want to keep track of things that other people have uploaded to the web – in short, how do I track other people’s data?

Let me give an example to help explain: I’m at the Future of Web Apps conference (as I was last month), and somebody I’ve never met before takes a picture of me and uploads it to Flickr. I’d quite like to keep an eye on all the photos of me that are on Flickr, maybe to read comments, maybe to show somebody else at some point in the future. What can I do to help me keep an eye on this photo?

Answer: tag it. You might think that tagging is perfect for this, and you’d be wrong. To continue with the Flickr example: some people have it set up so that nobody can tag their photos, some people let their friends tag photos, and I’ve got no guarantee that the owner won’t remove the tag in a week, two weeks, three weeks time.

I need a way to edit the photo so that nobody else can change it, basically. At the moment, the way I’m doing it (and the only way I can think of to achieve this) is to “favourite” the photo. That’s crap, as it’s obviously not what the favourite feature was meant to be used for.

You might think I’m being anal about stuff which at the end of the day is just "on the Internet", but I think this example highlights a broader problem. I’m stuck for ideas.