I enjoy a good clean fight as much as the next guy, but watching Canadian cable companies simultaneously laying a social media beating on television broadcasters while showboating to seem to be on the side of consumers, while the broadcasters return blows from behind a human shield of local programming cuts is, well, too much for me. I prefer tuning into the UFC and if I want to go-Canadian, Georges St-Pierre, because the opponents seem to have more respect for each other.  As Corus Entertainment president, John Cassaday notes today to Canada’s broadcasting and telecommunications regulator, the CRTC, at hearings in Gatineau, QC, the current crisis mentality in the Canadian broadcast industry is in turn fostering cynicism, animosity and a risk of a rush to the exit for advertisers. Enjoy the CRTC hearings, if you can stomach them.

“Culture is impossible without a rich public domain – culture grows by accretion, with new forms building off the old,” is the compelling mantra of Nate Harrison in his modest-but-powerful video posted on  You Tube about the ownership of sound samples.

Harrison casts light on the issues and implications of copyright in music (specifically, musical samples) through the history of the “Amen Break,” a six-second drum sample from the B-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. This sample was used extensively in early hip hop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum n bass and jungle music… a six-second clip that “spawned several entire subcultures.”

The original creators of the Amen Break have never sought legal action to claim ownership of this notable six-seconds of sound. It seems that by the overall amount of its appropriation by producers and Dj’s after the advent of sampling technology in the early 1980s the break had entered into the public domain. Harrison notes, “to trace the history of the Amen Break is to trace the history of a brief period of time when it seemed digital tools offered a potentially unlimited amount of new forms of expression; where cultural production at least musically was full of possibility by virtue of being able to freely appropriate from the musical past, to make new combinations and thus new meanings.”

There are two copyrights involved in the Amen Break. The first is the copyright in the sound recording: if the owners of the masters could prove copying of their recording, then this could be the basis for an infringement claim. However, it appears most uses have been re-recorded (e.g. the drum tab on Wikipedia is readily available, and certainly electronic kits would involve a re-recording – not only to ‘clean up’ the sound quality, but also to chop it up, space out the individual beats and create a new sound conducive to drum n bass).

The second copyright is in the musical composition. This is the interesting part. When the original recording was first released, the break was not what would at the time have been classified as a hook. It was a break, which by the standards of the day, I would argue, was not unique enough to attract copyright protection. Since then the break has been sampled and used to the point where it has attracted an independent identity (with the help of advancements in sampling, recording, and production technology). The interesting part is, who owns the new identity? Does a new identity accrue back to the original copyright holder? Is it something that one of the early appropriators could claim copyright in? Is it a public domain identity? Seems it’s the latter, in that its use is ubiquitous and no one person can step forward as being the original user of the same four bar beat used in a manner that now by more contemporary standards is unique.

When I read in the Globe and Mail that Pirate Bay was being purchased for $9-million, I figured this could be a good example of how innovators, who often are branded as outsiders or scofflaws, eventually find their niche. Well, that still may be a path to success on the Internet, but apparently not in the case of Pirate Bay, where the new owners are attempting to set up a business that would sell the metrics of illegal file sharing back to the victims (i.e. to sell information back to movie, record and software companies about content uploads and downloads by the site’s estimated 20 million users). So far there has been a particularly frosty reception from the owners of those rights.

Started by a group of pro-piracy Swedes in 2003, Pirate Bay soon became one of the largest bit torrent trackers in the world.  From then until now the site has been involved in a number of lawsuits, which eventually led to the 2009 arrest and sentencing of the four main operators of the site. In June 2009 Global Gaming Factory GGF (a Swedish advertising company) announced they would buy Pirate Bay for approximately $9-million, a deal that was set for August 2009.  The time has arrived and as one might have expected GGF is facing criticism. Seems the only value to be extracted from this business model is notoriety.

Anyone who’s not on an iPhone might be Apple-green with envy over the amazing choice of apps available for download at the iPhone App Store versus the apps at Blackberry’s App World. There are far more iPhone apps, they tend to be less expensive, and they don’t run on Blackberrys. Is this inevitable, when apps are written for different operating systems because they have to be written in different languages? Is this a continuing, deliberate fragmentation of the market to create the appearance of separate solitudes between Microsoft and Apple operating systems and the devices that run on them (i.e. Blackberry and iPhone, respectively)? Maybe both, but what else is new? Well, crowd-sourcing efforts by developers to get their apps on both platforms with the least amount of effort, by creating more elegant code that shares the logical design of the app across both platforms.

What this means for the longer term is that as more and more software development kits (SDKs) in Objective-C (iPhone) and Java (Blackberry) get into the hands of grassroots developers hoping to make money selling their apps online, there is going to be a push toward cross-platform programming. As pointed out by developer Teabot on Stackoverflow.com, the core application code can be written so that it appears very similar on either platform, with API wrappers around the edges of the code that can be re-usable.

To achieve the same look and feel on each platform would require very different ‘physical components’ according to developer Grouchal on Stackoverflow.com, but Teabot goes on to claim that you should be able to share the logical design of your application if you carefully separate it into highly decoupled layers. This is still a big win because the logical application design probably accounts for a large part of your development effort, according to him.

This type of chatter shows it’s inevitable that the division of the apps market across operating system platforms will become eased, as grassroots developers become more inventive in finding ways to bridge the language barrier.

by Tanaz Irani (Spec. Hon. B.A, Pol.Sci.)

It is common and accepted knowledge that once users establish an account on any one of the numerous social networking sites available today, those users are making themselves vulnerable to privacy invasion in a number of ways. Earlier this year Facebook updated its policies on user generated content to allow virtually all uploaded material to be used by the company for advertising, marketing, or essentially any other purpose, even long after the user deletes an account. These policy modifications did not go unnoticed, and in fact were met with public complaint and threatened legal action. This ultimately encouraged the good people at Facebook to return to the older version of the policy; however Facebook is not the only entity that users need to be aware of in respect to privacy concerns.

More and more employers are using social networking sites as a tool to screen potential employees. With the multitude of recent layoffs, and economic hard times, employers are turning to such digital tools to help sort through the numerous applications they receive – weeding out those whose online profile does not meet the standards or desires of the company. Is this (very personal) background check fair? The truth is that outside Quebec, B.C, and Alberta, Canada’s invasion of privacy laws do not extend to information in the hands of private entities, so user beware!

There are a number of pros and cons involved in the question of social networking sites and their interaction with the corporate world. While employers are accessing and assessing the posted content of current and potential employees, complaints made by these individuals against companies for their hiring and firing practices, are on the rise.

It is worth mentioning the “Cisco Fatty” case (as coined by the Globe and Mail newspaper on March 23, 2009). When following a job offer at Cisco, a Twitter user in California sent out a “tweet”: “Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty pay cheque against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.” In less than an hour, she received a reply -from a worker at Cisco- and word is she never got that fatty pay cheque.

Companies on the other hand not only can benefit from this watchdog potential, but also from the timely, financially-sound simplicity of socializing and networking via these sites. Perhaps a ‘poke’ on Facebook does not make the same impression as an expensive luncheon with a client, however it might suffice as a reminder to the client. Of course, it must be noted that such financial benefits are offset by lost productivity related to employees wasting company time surfing around, chatting with friends, stalking old classmates and taking part in innumerable quizzes, games, and various other applications. Heck, I may not be Twittering about it, but all the research and writing for this particular blog entry was done on company time! Is this lost productivity or will the ebb and flow of the digital corporate collision balance itself out? As an increasing number of people have quit smoking, could taking a social networking break be seen as the new smoker’s equivalency break?