There’s a lot of confusion about the legality of downloading music and files on the internet, and the recording industry is eager to convince the public that downloads are piracy and downloaders are criminal.  That’s not necessarily what the law says, though.

Slashdot has posted a story about a new – and free – book about Canadian copyright law written by a group of law professors.

“The Globe and Mail reports that Canadian law professors have countered the Canadian recording industry's misinformation campaign in a new 600-page book that is being made freely available under a creative commons license. Led by Professor Michael Geist, the book provides full coverage of the possibility of Canada adopting DMCA-like copyright laws.” From the article: “The 19 copyright law professors, in a peer-reviewed discussion edited by Ottawa lawyer and Internet columnist Michael Geist, note that revisions to copyright law in the past were largely the result of negotiations among copyright stakeholders; today, however, the broader public is also demanding a seat at the table. 'The public's interest in copyright something inconceivable even a few years ago is the result of the remarkable confluence of computing power, the Internet, and a plethora of new software programs, all of which has not only enabled millions to create their own songs, movies, photos, art, and software but has also allowed them to efficiently distribute their creations electronically without the need for traditional distribution systems,' the book says.”

Our ‘private’ online information is safe as long as there aren’t any bored or competitive hackers around. I always enjoy reading about hacker conferences: 

It's the kind of show that attracts participants wearing T-shirts that say “I read your email,” and one who boasted it took him just minutes to get the hosting hotel's name and room number list — which enabled him to get a key to a room that was not his (it was a friend's), and bill hotel Internet usage charges to his friend's room, for fun.

He insisted he would pay the friend back.

Colleagues who have worked with hackers to test data security (it’s an excellent way to find holes) are bemused at the faith that most of us put in online security. I wouldn’t trust the privacy of confidential health information unless the system was exposed to a serious attack by experts (possibly using a contest as described in the link above)… and passed.

I enjoyed this somewhat technical article about Google’s effect on academic libraries and vice versa.

ALA | September 2005: If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em

Peter Binkley of the University of Alberta was one of the first to create a browser extension for Firefox that would add SFX link resolvers to citations in Google Scholar. Link resolvers standardize citations from disparate resources using OpenURL and compare the citations to a local library’s holdings—a middleman for finding full text of articles. Dozens of refinements followed, including plugins for Internet Explorer, links to other services, and ultimately a link-resolver service offering from Google itself.

It was this last move that made other vendors scramble. Despite long conversations with key players in the world of the OpenURL (the standard behind link-resolver systems), Google opted to bypass the standard itself and require libraries (through their various vendors) to send information about holdings to Google so that Google might create better service links to full text in libraries. You see, the Google index can’t create an OpenURL because it crawls the full text content itself and knows nothing about citations.

Surprisingly, what’s in it for Google is less clear than what’s in it for libraries. We add serendipitous access to commercial content that we are already paying for. Google needs a revenue angle, and I’d be willing to bet it will find one. But until then, link resolvers—SFX from Ex Libris, 1Cate from Openly Informatics, WebBridge from Innovative Interfaces, Article Linker from Serials Solutions, and others, I am sure—are rushing to equip their software so that libraries can send holdings information to Google. I’m also sure that at some point Google will not be the only destination; OCLC is keenly interested in capturing digital holdings information for its collaborative cataloging.

Internet-Based CME as Effective as Live Approach (free subscription required)

Internet-based continuing medical education appears to be at least as effective as conventional interactive workshops, according to the results of a randomized, controlled trial.

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association compared an Internet-based course on guidelines for treating high blood cholesterol and heart disease with a conventional interactive workshop. Compared to the live workshop, the Internet-trained group of physicians showed an equal increase in knowledge immediately after the training and 12 weeks later, but was more effective as measured by following the guidelines with real patients.

Says Dr Michael Fordis, one of the authors, ”This study provides some of the first evidence that in addition to enhancing physician knowledge, online continuing medical education can also improve patient care.”

 Update: This article offers a publicly available summary of the study.

Online subscription music services are developing approaches that find useful and relevant information through social networks.

Posted on Charity Village September 7, 2005.

One of the biggest problems on the Web is locating high quality
information that is relevant to your specific needs. Search engines
have been grappling with this since soon after the Web was first
invented, and the most successful engines use strategies based on some
sort of human filtering. For example, when you enter a search term into
Google, you will get sites that other sites link to. When you search
Yahoo, you will be using directories built by expert surfers. (For
anyone who's interested in the world of search engines, check out SearchEngineWatch.)

But
to really get a handle on how human filtering can locate relevant and
high quality material, you should look at the emerging music
subscription sites. Music fanatics, many of whom are youth, can be
thought of as 'lead users'
in technology. They spend huge numbers of hours listening to music.
They endlessly discuss the advantages and disadvantages of competing
services with their peers, and they are highly demanding regarding
price, quality and functionality. They are also a very large market
with money to spend. As a result, watching the online music industry is
like looking into the future for the rest of us.

I'm going to
focus on music subscription services because this is where search
functions get really interesting. These services play songs over the
Internet like a radio, but with a twist – they allow listeners to
create their own radio stations.

Right now, most of these
new-generation services are only available in the U.S. because of music
license restrictions, so I was only able to test Pandora and Yahoo's Canadian version of LAUNCHcast. Hopefully the other services will become available soon. For the benefit of U.S. readers, Napster, MusicMatch (recently bought by Yahoo) and Rhapsody also provide subscription music with a collection of about one million songs, almost all rock, pop, urban and the like.

***********

Two approaches to human filtering: Pandora and LAUNCHcast

The
two services I tested this month are beautiful examples of the two
major approaches to human filtering. The first service uses experts to
classify music based on defined attributes, and the second service uses
automatic filtering based on usage patterns.

Pandora, a new
subscription music service, offers members up to 100 personal radio
stations. Pandora has coded about 300,000 songs on almost 400
musicological attributes. Trained analysts take about 20-30 minutes per
song to “capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song -
everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation,
orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of
singing and vocal harmony.” When you select one or more songs or
artists, Pandora creates a playlist of similar songs from its “Music Genome”
database. Every time you give feedback on a song by rating it as “I
really like this” or “I don't like this”, Pandora immediately changes
the playlist of the station to incorporate your preferences. You can
play stations that have been created by other members, and share your
station with others. The service is free for the first 10 hours and
after that costs $36/year.

If you're interested in finding more
music like the kind of music you already listen to, it's a terrific
service. If you want to learn more about a genre, it looks like a
really helpful service because it defines similarity at the song level,
not on the reputation of the artist or the genre the artist usually
belongs to. And it's easy to use.

However, I found Pandora
unsatisfying because it didn't seem to filter by quality. A crummy copy
of a great song has many musicological similarities, but it's still
crummy. I'm not looking for music that is similar to the music I
already like (I could just keep playing my Elvis Costello records over
and over again). I'm looking for recommendations from serious
music-lovers who like the same kind of music I like, but who will
suggest new songs that I would never have thought of, or wouldn't have
expected to like.

So I'm looking for another definition of 'similar' that meets my needs. Which brings me to Yahoo.

Yahoo Music's
LAUNCHcast is a free music service (its paid version is not yet
available in Canada) that creates a personalized radio station matching
your special tastes. Here's how it works:

• During initial setup,
  you select your favourite genres and artists from a list of popular
  artists. Genres include pop, rock, adult alternative, R&B, rap,
  country, electronic/dance, jazz, blues, latin and reggae. You can
  select the entire genre, or specific artists within each. For example,
  under 'Adult Alternative' you can choose any combination of Matchbox
  20, Barenaked Ladies, R.E.M., Enya, Train, Goo Goo Dolls, Jewel, Tori
  Amos, Sarah McLachlan, Alanis Morissette, Coldplay, and Snow. If that's
  not your idea of a good time, you can add up to four additional artists
  and click on 'Create My Station'.

• Start playing your station. The songs will be played on your computer using Internet Explorer or the free Yahoo Music Engine music player (still buggy and slow – wait for it to improve), or on the new Yahoo Messenger with Voice instant messaging program (I recommend this option, but be sure to choose the 'custom installation' option
  and refuse to change your Internet settings. The program rudely changes
  your home page unless you tell it not to.) The music players will all
  offer you the option to rate each song, as well as the song's artist
  and album, on a five point scale from 'never play again' to 'can't get
  enough'.

• You can now refine your personal radio station to match your
  preferences. Each time you give a high rating, your station will be
  reprogrammed to play more songs by the same artist, more songs from
  that album, and/or more songs that are similar. When you give a low
  rating, your station will play fewer songs like that.

• LAUNCHcast defines similarity completely differently from
  Pandora. When you give an artist a top rating, your station will play
  more songs by other artists that are highly rated by other people who
  love that artist.

  For example, yesterday my personal radio
  station played a song by Joan Armatrading. I really like her, so I
  rated her as a '4' (”can't get enough”), which automatically increases
  the number of her songs on my station. But it also adds songs that are
  liked by her other fans. By clicking on Armatrading's name (as her song
  is playing), I'm taken to her dedicated page on Yahoo Music. The 'Fans'
  link pulls up a list of 93 personal stations that have given
  Armatrading a top rating. When I gave a top rating to Armatrading, my
  personal radio station started selecting songs that tend to be highly
  rated by these other fans of Armatrading, and in turn their playlists
  are now influenced by mine. If I want a more personal set of
  recommendations, or if I want to get more deeply into any particular
  artist, I can listen to any of those 93 fan stations. If I really like
  one of the stations in particular, I can add it as an 'influencer' to
  my own radio station. That person's preferences will influence my own
  playlist. I can have as many influencers as I like, assuming I have
  signed up to the paid service. Or I can just listen to that person's
  station from now on instead of my own. Some of these fan sites are
  extraordinarily diverse and interesting; it's like having a personal
  mentor who shows me through her record collection.

  Speaking of
  diversity, personal recommendations by a knowledgeable guide is the
  best way to expand musical horizons. If you only listen to songs that
  fans of Joni Mitchell tend to like, you're unlikely to bump into
  Outkast; it's a form of groupthink. Well-designed reputational systems
  like Yahoo's can allow you to use a variety of strategies to find
  relevant results. For future improvements, Yahoo should make it easier
  to locate influencers by their names or other characteristics. Wouldn't
  it be cool to subscribe to the personal station of your favourite
  musician?

• Most subscription services seem to allow users to share their
  playlists with friends. If you use Yahoo Messenger, you can set the
  options to show what song you are listening to when you are online. In
  fact, that's a growing problem with instant messaging applications; you
  have to be careful about your privacy preferences or you may reveal a
  whole lot more about yourself than you intend. But for youth (and music
  fanatics), music is a way to create and define community boundaries,
  and it's interesting how music services are contributing to this use.

To some extent, the creativity of the new music subscription
services are driven by the weird rules that are incorporated into
current music licenses. Services have to design clever workarounds that
satisfy their demanding and bad-tempered customers, while following
license restrictions so they can keep access to commercial music
catalogues. Subscription services can't play a specific song on
request; they have to play a “similar song”. Users can't rewind to
listen to a particular song, though it is allowable to skip to the next
one. All of these rules are intended to discourage illegal copying
(sigh), but they lead to ingenious solutions.

How is music like information, and what do these services mean for the future?

Music
is a form of information, but a very complex form. “Good music” is hard
to define, since it relates as much to a listener's personal taste,
mood and context, as to its quality as rated by experts. If we can
figure out successful search strategies for music, those strategies
should be useful for plain old textual information as well.

Reputational systems (see this pdf document for definitions and examples) like Amazon.com's recommendation engine and Slashdot's 'karma points'
are getting more popular for all kinds of uses, not just music. Expect
to see increasingly sophisticated ways of searching for information,
based on usage patterns and social networking approaches.

**********
Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.
President, RealWorld Systems

gkerr at realworldsystems.net