We're trying to prevent failed sharing.

Joi Ito (investor in our startup, Timothy Leary's godson, Cornelius' cousin, now CEO of Creative Commons) at the Red Lion in Hoxton last night.

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

- Steve Jobs, Thoughts on Music

In related news, we've just signed a deal with warner.

The micronation of Sealand is for sale, and PirateBay wants to buy it through microdonations. Presumably in order to establish a digital (mini-)utopia, seeing as copyright regulations are a little thin on the ground in the principality of Sealand. More pics.

In a network, simple & open standards always win. This is true at all levels of the stack - from protocols to data architectures to data formats. This is the lesson. We are learning it.

A few bits'n'bytes i glared at this evening:

• Microsoft's Darknet Paper
• Lawrence Lessig: Free Culture
• Del.icio.us DRM page
• The Law of Computer Entropy
• Cory Doctorow: Microsoft Research DRM Talk
• DRM is Doubleplus good for Business, Congress advised

My reading was prompted by Sun's announcement of it's royalty-free digital rights management initiative, which at first glance seemed absurd to me. The EFF (Doctorow) has called it a "walled garden" and that's what it looks like from where i'm sitting.

And it's Doctorow's talk that is the pick of the reading too. I'd recommend anyone interested in digital media read it if they haven't already. I agree whole-heartedly with this observation,

Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we've changed copyright. Copyright isn't an ethical proposition, it's a utlititarian one.

And the whole thing is well delivered, including some good points for you eBook non-believers (you know who you are!); speaking of which, i'll probably be compiling my fiction to PDF in the near future.