There’s a simple alternative to the current web

I'm starting to think that remix culture has been essentially stifled by licensing. Artists like Steinski, Danger Mouse, and Girl Talk have gained notoriety exclusively through word of mouth. Copyright and licensing prevent them from monetizing their music, so they are forced to promote and release it in other ways, either quick pressed vinyl or free internet distribution. In a remix culture, I'm hesitant to describe anything as "pre-final", or, perhaps we should label everything as "pre-final".

I think a public domain or creative commons music community could develop a thriving remix community in unique ways. Remixes can be recontextualized as forks of music. I would imagine that fingerprinting could be used really effectively here, which will require some thought. As a recording artist, it would be really useful for me to be able to delete takes but retain them in version history. The music industry is filled with stories of the person who owns the recording studio retaining the masters to a session, and then refusing to cooperate with the artist. Opening that data up would be a massive boon not only to musicians but I think to recording studios as well, as the finer aspects of a recording session become much easier to access.

There's a deeper problem, though. There's a dichotomy between the binary blobs that DAWs use and the user-readable stem files that artists like Radiohead release. It's as though all the information about the studio session and all the non-temporal aspects of editing are obfuscated by assembly code. Ideally, it would be nice to replace the binary blobs that programs like Audacity and Ardour save to with human-readable stems that encode sound or video editing in metadata. Ultimately I think this is a critical UI requirement, but for now I think the best solution is to use git-annex to store .flacs and .oggs, as well as both individual exported stem files and binary project blobs. In the final analysis, different DAWs are really more like different instruments, and cross compatibility between instruments is a requirement.

Uploading files to a server is pretty easy, but what is a little more challenging is automatically licensing the content, uploading to your server, creating a torrent that uses the server as a webseed, and then publishing it to a tracker. This publishing flow would let me directly publish content even on my puny little shared web hosting account. Traffic load is automatically distributed through bittorrent, and censorship becomes much more difficult (albiet not impossible.) From there, I think, it would be fairly trivial to build a front-end to replace an interface like YouTube's "Submit Video" page.

Treating copyrighted content like viruses is a feature I would really like to see more of. While I'm a firm supporter of PopcornTime/Time4Popcorn/AsPopcornGoesBy, I don't really want to use it. I'd rather find public domain things to watch than Hollywood Movies or TV shows. I wish PopcornTime had a public domain feature.

If there are trackers that only use public domain or Creative Commons content, nobody has invited me to them. ;) I think it wouldn't be too hard to make a tracker that scanned for a machine readable public domain or CC license, but I don't have much experience with torrent trackers. I'd like to try and set one up soon, I think initially you could just moderate content. I'm kind of baffled by the direction Bittorrent, Inc. has taken, because they could just as easily be advocating for number of seeds as a surveillance-free fanbase metric, rather than just releasing DRM'd music through Bittorrent.

Huginn looks really, really interesting. I sure appreciate your posts. Thanks very much.

You can go into the options and disable your email host. It's not the easiest interface :) but the format is hopefully obvious: it's a JSON array; if any of the strings appears as a substring in the page URL, that page is excluded from text-only or full-page saving.

Copy and paste the same thing into "Autoindex exclude rules" and "Autosave exclude rules".

Could you expand on your feedback on pricing? Can't tell if you're saying $5 is too high/too low. If you wish you can also email me (I couldn't find your email on your site).

You're right. I apologize. Both to you, for getting heated, and to Maciej, for misrepresenting his actions in this matter. The misrepresentation was accidental, but it happened nonetheless. My comments were also extremely disrespectful and totally uncalled for. I'm truly sorry.

That wasn't too hard, but obviously a non-programmer would have difficulty understanding it. But hopefully and quite possibly you're working on a better interface, so not much of a problem for the time being.

I've got another piece of feedback. The numbers seem to be off for me in the web app. I t says I have over 300 pages bookmarked, while the interface only displays 100(which seems like the more plausible number).

$5 is kind of a norm these days, and a lot of times, its too high, depending on what the service is. For instance, there's IRCCloud. Obviously, the interface is good, and they provide easy to use mobile apps, but all that doesn't justify $60 per year. Another example is Pocket. I really like their apps, but they also followed the $5 norm. They aren't providing me much value to be worth $5(every month) to me, so I switched over to Pinboard(which, by the way, is one of those few services doing pricing right these days). There are a lot of services that I can justify paying $5 per month for, cloud storage for instance, but a bookmarking service, nope.

If you want to see the kind of backlash Pocket got for pricing their Premium option at $5, just have a look at this thread on reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/26qaif/pocket_intro...