As brought up on several music and technology sites, SDMI is looking for someone to hack their latest watermarking. After doing a little hacking, I realized that however much fun it was, it really didn't matter.
Since we really want to find something that allows for our current "fair use" rights, having what we have now would be a good solution from the consumer perspective. As an artist this might be a little bit of a different story, but you definately would like to make your own decisions and get compensated for your work, rather then giving a huge share to the record labels.
After getting several "employment opportunities" from different label projects such as Sony's "digital locker" project. I really look at this as an attempt to undermine the consumers interest. Therefore, as an EFF member, I am Boycotting the HackSDMI challenge. Whose servers, ironicly, sit only a single hop away from my co-lo box.
This salon article (note: I am currently working in the ex-salon offices in San Francisco.) Points out some interesting view points of some of the technology industry members of
the SDMI. Although, I think they might have a point, I still think probably the best way to ensure consumers rights is to Boycott the challenge. Hopefully they will then go live with a technology that is seriously broken and we can go on with life.
Things seem much more stable. I am working on cleaning up the layout a little bit. Making it more plain in a hope the pages will load faster and will format a little better. Slowly but surely things are getting much like the way I envision it. It is still pretty far away from that, but I enjoy the progress I have been seeing in it.
