Madonna’s American Life

There is a new song by Madonna’s that got leaked and obviously ended up on p2p file-sharing networks. I’m not familiar with the specifics of the song itself. The interesting tidbit is that a decoy song also got leaked. It’s a mostly empty track containing the following prose by the artist herself:

« What the fuck do you think you’re doing? »

It’s supposedly been offered with a attractive name on filesharing networks.

It’s been reported by Billboard, Arstechnica, BiPlog
and many many others .

Well I got curious and I managed to find the decoy file. It was named « MADONNA-AMERICAN LIFE- LOVE PROFUSION-New.mp3 ».

Now I wonder… This was obviously put on a p2p sharing network by the rights holder. Under what kind of licence is it released? Until further notice, I’ll consider that there is an implicit licence to redistribute attached to this work. But just in case, I’ll stick to providing you with a small excerpt of the 4:33 original track.

I’ll let you discuss on the implications and the rationale behind the release of such decoys.

YOLT

The Yale Journal of Law & Technology, weblog-style… It’s really weird for me to see that my profession, that I generally consider one of the most technologically-cautious (to be polite) out there, is actually taking a leadership position in experimenting with, and adopting, innovative content distribution methods on the Internet.

Fixing the analog hole

…You have the right to whatever rights the MPAA grants you. And you’ll be damn happy to have them! That essentially sums up the MPAA’s attitude toward “consumer” rights to listen/watch/copy/balance on their heads the media they purchase, er, license.

dixit Algorythm about a post on Cruelty to analog by Cory about a meeting of the Analog Reconversion Discussion Group .

According to his post, it seems the Analog Rights Management could be fairly blunt:

In an effort to address this inevitable « equivalence gap, » Hunt’s presentation set out the minimum set of « states » that the MPAA demands in any analog signaling (read: watermarking) system. They are:

1. Copy Never [and no redistribution]

2. Copy once (similar to the SCMS system used in DAT) [and no redistribution]

3. Copy no more (the condition of a second-generation « Copy once » copy) [and no redistribution]

4. Copy freely, but no redistribution [redistribution controlled by encryption]

5. Copy and redistribute freely (could be implemented either by absence of a signal, or by specific « copy freely » signal)