Blog @ Digital Bazaar

A Collaborative Distribution Model for Music

The music industry, via Choruss, is shopping a new music licensing model around to universities in the United States. Like some before it, this one attempts to address the still rampant music piracy occurring via peer-to-peer networks by enforcing a pseudo-mandatory collective licensing agreement on every student attending a participating university. There were a number of very interesting parts to the proposal that we would like to work on improving with Choruss and any partner universities. There were also a few propositions that we think are harmful to the industry, artists and fans as a whole.

It should be no surprise that we think that any sort of mandatory collective licensing is a very bad idea, as is the “covenant not to sue” approach that Choruss is currently pursuing. Voluntary collective licensing, as proposed by organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is not a good alternative either.

The basic approach proposed via collective licensing is to allow the general public unfettered access to all types of intellectual property, such music, movies and books. One would be allowed to download copyrighted works via BitTorrent, Limewire, and YouTube without worrying about the copyright-owner filing a lawsuit. ISPs would include a collective licensing charge on your monthly Internet connectivity bill, say $10 for movies, $10 for books, and $10 for music, that would be distributed to copyright owners based on what one downloads.

While this may seem like a good idea at first, the approach is fatally flawed…

W3C: RDFa 1.0 is Official

RDFa became an official World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation today. This means that it has undergone an intense amount of design, feedback, development and scrutiny to become a recognized world-wide standard for the expression of web semantics. Manu Sporny, Digital Bazaar’s Founder, has been directly involved with the RDFa Task Force and the standardization work involved with this new Web technology.

We would like to thank Ben Adida (Creative Commons), Chair of the RDFa Task Force, and Mark Birbeck (webBackplane), the primary designer of RDFa, for their vision and tenacity. In addition, we would also like to thank members of the task force - primarily composed of Ralph R. Swick (W3C), Shane McCarron (Applied Testing and Technology), Steven Pemberton (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica), and Michael Hausenblas (JOANNEUM RESEARCH).

The Web is based on a core dedication to standards. It is individuals, such as those listed above, and their respective organizations that continue to lead the way in standards innovation on the Web. It is a largely thankless job, which is why we would like to extend our deepest appreciation and admiration for an excellent job on RDFa and all that those involved with the W3C continue to do for the World Wide Web and its citizens.

RDFa will have an effect on hundreds of millions of people around the globe. It is a great privilege and honor to be a part of that effort.

Thoughts on HTML5, RDFa and Microformats

This article was authored by one of our founders, Manu Sporny. He is an Invited Expert for the RDF in XHTML Task Force at the World Wide Web Consortium and a very active participant in the Microformats community.

We are first and foremost a media services company serving the music, movie, television and electronic book industries. Our mission is to help artists from every walk of life, in every corner of the world, to make a living performing their craft.

Our company does this by creating tools, services and online environments that monetize digital creations for artists by using cutting-edge technology to perform digital distribution. Peer-to-peer networks, swarming distribution, micro-payment-based transaction networks, semantic web technologies, cryptography and steganography are just a few of the tools that we use to deliver on our promise to our artists, publishers and content fans.

Over the past several years, we have been working to help create a standard method of expressing information about music, movies and television on the web with the Microformats and RDFa communities. It has always been our understanding that Microformats are only going to take the web so far, and we will need a more robust, standardized way of expressing semantic information.

Recently, several discussion threads have been started on the WHATWG mailing list (the group of people working on HTML5), that were very discouraging. Not only because they discount the need for such a standardized semantic mark-up technology, but because they are making the decision on factually inaccurate “gut-reactions” about how Microformats work. The exchange expressed a failure to understand the core need of the semantic web by the HTML5 community, mostly because they have never had to create a Microformat through the Microformats Process, nor implement a Microformat parser.

The rest of this article is an attempt to educate the larger web community about the limitations of Microformats, the Microformats Process, and why the web needs both RDFa AND the Microformats community in order to make the semantic web a reality.

We started out where most in the HTML5 community are, we thought Microformats would be the solution to the semantic web…

The Next Generation of Bitmunk Technology

In the next several months, we will be releasing technology that has been in development in our R&D labs for over a year and a half. This will be version 3.0 of our technology and it is a massive leap in speed, size reduction, and interoperability. What follows is a quick run-down on what we’re working on for Bitmunk 3.0.

Historically, most of our underlying technology has been written in Java. While it helped us prove the concept and get something into our customer’s hands, let’s face it - nobody likes running Java applications. All of our systems have undergone a full re-write to native C++. We have focused on making the next generation technology completely cross-platform, so there will be native versions of the Bitmunk buying, selling and management software for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

We have also focused on speed and size reductions to make sure that the Bitmunk software can be put anywhere that there is a computer connected to the Internet. This includes not only palm-tops and laptops, but mobile phones, web browsers, media players, home entertainment systems and a variety of other multi-media devices. Not only is the new Bitmunk software much smaller than the old Java stuff, but it’s fast. For example, the old software could perform about 50 transactions per second. Not bad, until you see what the new stuff can do. The new Bitmunk software can handle close to 4000 transactions per second. That means that at the most basic level, it’s 80 times faster than the old software. While we have made many optimizations, most of the slowness was attributed to the Java Virtual Machine.

Digital Bazaar’s R&D labs have also been working on a really cool new technology with the World Wide Web Consortium called RDFa. This technology will help us create a world-wide standard for expressing media such as songs and film in music blogs, movie sites, and other media-related pages.

We are also working hard to make integrating Bitmunk into next generation browsers such as Firefox, Songbird and Miro an easier task for those developers. Don’t be too surprised if you see our technology in some of those browsers before the end of the year.

While that’s all we can say for now, there will be a number of really cool initiatives that we’ll be announcing on this blog in the coming months. Get ready to see some really cool stuff.

Learn RDFa in 8 minutes

This is a follow-up to the video we released two weeks ago about the Semantic Web. The World Wide Web Consortium is working on a standard way to mark up semantics in XHTML called RDFa. We are heavily involved in RDFa development and believe it to be the right technology to express semantics on the web. This talk focuses on explaining the basics of RDFa in 8 minutes. It is meant primarily for people that can write XHTML by hand and is thus fairly technical.

The video covers many new technologies that will go mainstream in XHTML 1 and XHTML 2 in the following years; RDF, CURIEs, N3 Notation, and the basics of RDFa are discussed.

A high resolution version of this video and all source material used to make the video is also available under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License.