From Sweden to the Nile

The past is the future. Streaming music online is called “radio”.

Last month’s issue of “Wired” has a fascinating article by Steven Levy, mostly about Spotify, the Swedish-based service for streaming music. He uses the article to explore the growth in streaming services (which come as Apple, Google and Amazon all are starting to launch their own cloud-based streaming or semi-streaming systems, and Facebook is adding links to music services).

He writes:

Ultimately, the effect of all these cloud services might be to clear one of the highest hurdles to a streaming subscription future: the psychological attachment that people have to owning their music. Once songs live in the cloud—and customers pay rent to store them—it’s a small step to do away with the concept of ownership altogether.

This rings very true, people are getting used to accessing the cloud rather than possessing every song. Similar sentiments were expressed in  recent episodes of the podcasts Tech News Today and This Week in Tech.

The “Wired” article also  goes on in a sidebar:

As Facebook opens its platform to streaming music services, competition to win users is fierce. Check out some of the contenders.

Besides Spotify, those contenders in the sidebar are Mog, Earbits, iHeartRadio, Turntable, and Rhapsody. One frustrating aspect is that most of these services are US only. (The big exception is Spotify, which started in Sweden, then spread to Europe, and finally to the US. It was interesting to hear Americans talks for months about how much they looked forward to getting Spotify, sort of like the way we look forward to almost everything.)

But actually one of those contenders, iHeartRadio, is an ios app that basically just allows you to listen to one of hundreds of Clear Channel radio stations. And this whole concept of listening to music from the cloud seems less cutting-edge than retro. It’s called “radio”. The world is filled with stations with varying music formats, most online, you just have to take your pick. Most of them come with commercials, which of course is what the streaming services offer if you don’t subscribe. They also sometimes include real live people talking about the music, perhaps with updates on the artists or other useful information.

When I downloaded iHeartRadio I found a station in San Francisco that seems to play the kind of music I like. Hopefully, besides the music, it also includes some local news and weather, maybe even traffic information. All of that can be fun for an expat, or just an interested person in the target area, or anywhere in the world.

The American Congress is debatting a bill called Sopa (the Stop Internet Piracy Act). Apparently drawn up by the music and film industries, according to Wikipedia:

The bill would remove the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and make social websites that host user content, such as YouTube, Tumblr and Facebook, responsible for ensuring that their users do not post infringing material. The bill would also make unauthorized streaming a felony. The bill would ban linking to sites deemed offending, even in search results and on services such as Twitter. The bill would mandate use of deep packet inspection by ISPs to watch all traffic of all users.

The bill has been met with massive criticism from the Internet community. Some observers have commented that the only countries with comparable legislation are China and Iran, not exactly regarded as paragons on freedom. In a letter to the committee the American Civil Liberties Union writes:

[T]he bill is severely flawed and will result in the takedown of large amounts of non- infringing content from the internet in contravention of the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution…. SOPA enables law enforcement to target all sites that contain some infringing content – no matter how trivial – and those who “facilitate” infringing content. The potential for impact on non-infringing content is exponentially greater under SOPA than under other versions of this bill.

But at the congressional hearing the only opposing voice allowed to speak was Google.

This is legislation would not just affect the United States. As Wikipedia notes:

The first section allows in rem legal action against “foreign rogue sites”, websites outside U.S. jurisdiction that “enable” or “facilitate” copyright infringement. The US Attorney-General could force US-based ad networks such as Google and payment processors such as Paypal or Visa to stop doing business with, and search engines to stop displaying results for, sites found to infringe on copyright.[17] Private copyright holders such as Universal Pictures could also require ad networks and payment processors to stop doing business with a site they say infringes on a copyright.

The Swedish Pirate Party has a single Member of the European Parlament, Christian Engström (he’ll be joined by another Pirate Party MEP when the Lisbon Treaty goes into effect in the new year). I asked him what the EU can do about this legislation which could have such severe effects on European websites. His less than encouraging reply yesterday:

There’s nothing the EU can do directly about the American law. The only thing we can hope to do to help those fighting for the freedom of the Internet in the United States is to provide a good example, by being a “Beacon of Light”.

But there’s a long road if the EU is to be a good example. At any rate so far it has been th EU that had followed The US by importing their restrictions on freedom here. We’ll see how it goes this time.

Yet, that same day the European Parliament passed a resolution oppositing Sopa and stressing:

…the need to protect the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication by refraining from unilateral measures to revoke IP addresses or domain names.

Interestingly, “sopa” is the Swedish word for a mess or garbage.