I spend most of my day today working on the computer and watching the MP3 Summit webcast. It has been interesting to see soo many people being at a conference like this without anyone knowing (even after 3+ years) on how the music industry is going to move online. Intellectual Property and how to maintain the property owners rights while providing the consumers with a pleasurable experience is still the sought after solution.
Today Cnet published this article that talks about the MP3.com "open" APIs and comments from the tech community saying that a system is not "open" unless it can be usable by everyone, but that is really what they are meant to be open APIs or Protocols per se. It seems to me the only way this is going to work is to really open up these APIs/Protocols and post the specs in RFC style format (maybe even submit them to the IETF). But if you open up the entire API/Protocol on how to talk to my.mp3.com or any other MSP service, and have it be a standard, it needs to be readily available and usable
by everyone while still have the ability to protect IP owners. This would probably mean some kind of public/private key or username/password scheme to protect who has the ability to access what data if this would be service you would have to pay for. This would probably have a similar issue in the RSS/RDF world of distributing articles
between content providers and general/subject related portal sites.
So in common terms, again, the API is "open", but not open enough! Or it should become at least either open source or an open specification that can then be implemented by anyone who chooses to do so.
MP3.com seems to show somewhat mixed feelings about the entire open source community. While allowing developers (such as myself) to release perl code to CPAN or providing a Linux version of BeamIt with GPL'd source and a closed library. I really wish it would have the ability too come out more and make the "open" be
really Open.
