The iPod: Early impressions

Over the weekend, I've been busy sorting out my massive mp3 and AAC collection, and ripping CDs I haven't listened to in years just to make it more likely I'd be able to listen to them again. And I've been playing with the iPod.

Now, it's a known fact among computer geeks that Apple is one of those companies that puts the most effort into matters of user-interface. I tend to forget that from time to time until something like the iPod comes along and reminds me.

I was just taking a look back at the review I wrote of the Rio 600 mp3 player, the only other mp3 portable with which I had any experience. All in all, there's almost no basis for comparing the two—and that's leaving aside the fact that the iPod has approximately 1200 times the storage capacity of the Rio. Just comparing them on the basis of their look, feel, and controls...the iPod wins out every time.

First of all, look at the Rio's overall design (via the picture in my review). I imagine that shape is supposed to fit your hand, but it ends up looking like someone left it in the drier and it melted. It looks, in short, like a toy. The iPod, on the other hand, is this small brick-shaped thing with nicely curved edges that fits easily into the palm of your hand. It has some heft to it; it looks like something you'd expect an adult to be using.

But the real genius of the thing is in its controls. What it has is a gray ring around a single button. That's all. The ring is positioned such that when you're holding it in the palm of either hand, the thumb of that hand has free traverse over the ring and button—and this places all the controls at your fingertips. The really clever thing is that the ring serves two functions—it's the scroller and the play/pause, forward, back, and menu buttons. Press down on one of the cardinal directions of the ring, and you press the button. But, move your thumb or a finger around the ring, in a clockwise or counter-clockwise direction, and you manipulate the scroller. It's just like a track-pad on a laptop, except in a circular direction.

The phrase "elegant in its simplicity" could have been invented to describe this gadget. It totally eliminates the sort of control confusion that you have in a device like the Rio where its play controls are also its cursor scroller. What's more, it cuts down on the number of moving parts that can wear out or jam up. It's also remarkably fast for scrolling through long, long lists of tracks.

Yeah, this thing is great; I'm looking forward to putting it to some serious use.

Free iPod...Received

Well, time to add my voice to all those people out there chanting words to the effect of "0mg 0mg 1t r177y c4m3!!!1!!!11! 1ts n0t 4 h04xx0r!!!!11!1!!!1!1!!!!!"

My free iPod arrived today.

It came by FedEx while I was at work, shipped directly from Apple, so I had a neighbor drive me up to fetch it from the nearby FedEx depot. I got the small cubical box home and slit open the top panels, and the first thing I saw peering out at me was a square black panel with the white Apple logo in the middle. I tipped up the box, and it slowly slid out: the 20 gb 3rd gen iPod box, in all its shrink-wrapped, multi-colored, black-silhouette-with-white-gizmoed glory. I have it sitting on the table next to me as I type now.

I haven't actually opened it yet. I'm not going to be able to use it, really, until I have id3 tags on all my copious collection of mp3s, and until I have a good carrying case (as I hear that iPods will scratch if you so much as look at them funny). I'm thinking I should leave it pristine until I'm actually set to hook it up, and...and...oh, heck with it, let me at that shrinkwrap.

First impressions: wow, the packaging is impressive. It's almost as stylish as the device itself. You slide the black box out of the multi-colored jacket, then it opens around the middle...and sort of unfolds like origami. It's almost like seeing the opening titles of a movie or a computer game: the first unfold produces two white panels, and the right one says "Designed by Apple in California" in grey letters on it. You unfold those, and on the left, the white square of the CD-ROM envelope and the word "Enjoy" in gray to the rightward edge. To the right, the Device Itself, in a little plastic wrapper with "Don't steal music," printed on it in four languages (English, French, German, Japanese). The tray in which the device sits lifts out to reveal the charger plugin; the CD box lifts out to reveal a USB cable and the "oh please mug me" earbuds.

I fiddled with the thing long enough to turn it on and see that at least the menus work. Then I put it back. No sense in messing around with it until I can actually take the time to tag all my songs and put it to use. Sure is a neat little thing, though. I mean, it's smaller than a box of cigarettes, and it can hold 20 gigabytes of Stuff.

I can't wait to try it out. Probably be this weekend before I can mess much with it, though.

Anyway, now you know: it's actually legit. Yes, Virginia, there is a free iPod.

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Here are my other stories about the Free iPod people, in reverse-chronological order:

Free iPods Redux Squared
Free iPods Redux
Free iPods: Worth the Cost?

Copyrights in the news: win some, lose some

Hello, it's me again.

I've been kind of busy over the last few weeks. Mainly, this is due to City of Heroes having slurped up my brain. I'm having great fun playing some characters on the Victory server; I may go into more detail about that down the line.

What I want to talk about right now, though, are a couple of copyright matters that have been on the horizon lately—one pretty good; the other possibly not so great.

But victories first. Not long on the heels of the garage door DMCA decision comes another DMCA victory. It seems that an appeals court has slapped printer manufacturer Lexmark down in a resounding legal decision that goes a long way toward remedying some of the problems with the DMCA.

The case in question involved Lexmark trying to use the DMCA to protect its monopoly in selling ink cartridges for its printers. In order to forestall competition from other manufacturers, they incorporated a security chip into their cartridges...and then sued an ink cartridge manufacturer under the DMCA when they reverse-engineered the chip to sell their own cheaper refills. I haven't read the whole decision, but the paragraphs of it that were quoted in this Ars Technica story were quite forceful; the judge did everything but call Lexmark "you idiots"—not only was the competing manufacturer's action not covered by the DMCA, but even if it had been, it would still have been permissible as fair use.

This is certainly a victory for opponents of the DMCA, and will hopefully provide a good precedent in deciding further questions of fair use vs DMCA. I think my favorite part, though, is where the judge is discussing the dangers of using the DMCA to support monopolies, and says,

But we should be wary of shifting the burden to a rival manufacturer to demonstrate that its conduct falls under such an exception in cases where there is no indication that it has any intention of No. 03-5400 Lexmark Int'l v. Static Control Components Page 22 pirating a protected work. See, e.g., Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture 187 (2004) (noting the danger that "in America fair use simply means the right to hire a lawyer to defend your right to create").

Yes, that's right, the IP judge quoted that book I mentioned in an earlier entry. It's nice to see that at least one IP judge is aware of the contents of that work. (You should go and read it right now, if you haven't already. It's free, and I firmly believe it may be one of the most important books about copyright ever written.)

I wonder what Lawrence Lessig will say about the other bit of news I have to mention today. Not content to be on the losing side of the battle over the parody The Wind Done Gone, the estate of Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell has sent a threatening letter to Project Gutenberg. It seems they're upset that Gone With the Wind is available from Project Gutenberg Australia's website, since the book is in the public domain in Australia but not in the USA.

Naturally the Slashdot crowd is up in arms over this. I'm just not sure, though. On the one hand, the Mitchell estate has a point—under the law, Gone With the Wind shouldn't be publicly available to Americans. However, it should be available to Australians under Australian law. The problem is how to make sure that only Australians have access to it.

Before the Internet, this wouldn't have been a problem; Australian publishers could print new editions of the book for free, but not market them in the USA. Now, though, the Internet makes any content available anywhere to anyone, more or less—and though there are ways to attempt to block access to people not within a certain country, these methods can usually be trivially defeated (as another new story this morning illustrated—George W. Bush's campaign website has been blocked to visitors from outside the USA but accessing it anyway is as simple as using a proxy). It really is as EFF founder John Gilmore said: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

This isn't exactly a new situation. For years, Gutenberg has had some books up in certain countries that were not yet out of copyright in other countries. Lady Chatterley's Lover, for instance (public domain in the USA, not in England), or the works of Kipling (ditto), or the later John Carter of Mars books by Edgar Rice Burroughs (like Gone, public domain in Australia but not the USA). When I first saw this, I wondered how Gutenberg could "get away with it," since even then I knew that the Internet would let people anywhere access the files no matter whether or not they were "supposed to." What is new is that someone's finally noticed and, apparently, decided to put the situation to a legal test.

In their letter, the Mitchell estate claims collusion between Gutenberg and Gutenberg Australia—in effect, that Gutenberg set up Gutenberg Australia as a way of getting around American copyright prohibitions. This could mean that, even though the server is in Australia, the estate would try to take the American Gutenberg organization to court over it. I don't know how closely connected the American and Australian Gutenberg organizations actually are, but it will be interesting to see who turns out to have jurisdiction—as well as what gets decided.

Christopher Reeve (1952-2004)

I'm wearing black today—or at least as close to black as my wardrobe can manage (which is navy pants and a black T-shirt with the "NewEgg.com" logo in silver on it). I don't do that for most celebrity deaths. But this time it was one of my personal heroes who died. Christopher Reeve is dead at 52.

As I got out of bed and stumbled into the living room to check my email, my web browser was pointed at websnark.com, so I hit refresh...and so the news (and Eric Burns's fitting elegy) was literally the first thing I saw when I came in to the computer this morning. What a way to wake up.

I'm going to be a bit of a heretic and come right out and say that I didn't really like the Superman movies all that much; the recent Superman cartoon series have been much better in terms of their treatment of the mythos. The first movie was decent, but it suffered a bit too much from "movie-itis". Lex Luthor wasn't properly menacing; he was incompetent. Heck, he wasn't even bald until the very last scene in the movie. (My guess would be that Gene Hackman didn't want to have to shave his head or go through bald wig makeup every day, so in order to get him they humored him.) Margot Kidder was terribly annoying. The movie's pacing was horrible, as it spent way too much time on Clark Kent's early life (though, ironically, that was probably my favorite part of the movie) and that slowed down the entire first half. Perhaps worst of all, there was an unused "Chekhov's gun": after the Fortress of Solitude advisors spent so much time telling Superman that messing with time was a Bad Thing, Superman went ahead and did it anyway (in a way that made no sense—making the world turn backward turns back time? What?)...and nothing bad happened. All that build-up...to nothing.

The second movie got a lot of critical acclaim for being better than the first; I didn't like it as much but that's a matter of opinion. Anyway, they should have stopped there.

Still and all, Christopher Reeve was just such a good Superman that I could almost forget all that. It seemed like he really "got" the character, and he had such good chemistry with Kidder that I could even forgive Kidder's annoyingness (for a while, anyway). But that's not why he was my hero.

Christopher Reeve was my hero because of what he did outside the movies. One day, he had a terrible accident, which resulted in that which most of us can only have nightmares about—total paralysis. Complete inertia from the neck down. That has to be one of the most horrible things you can ever have happen short of dying—because you're going to live the rest of your life as just a head, attached to a lump of meat that might as well be dead. It horrifies me every time I think about it; if that ever happened to me, I think I'd be seriously considering asking them to pull the plug.

But Christopher Reeve absolutely refused to let that get him down. He insisted he was going to walk again—and then he got the doctors together and started getting on with it. He kept spinal cord injuries in the public eye, he got attention and funding for research...if, someday, spinal cord injuries can be repaired or bypassed and paralyzed people start to walk again, they will have Christopher Reeve to thank for it. The man never stopped, never gave up...oh, I'm sure he must have had bad days, just like all the rest of us, but he kept on plugging away at it with the sort of superhuman determination that characterized his most famous on-screen role. Imagine that...the reason he "got" the role of Superman was that he shared many of Superman's moral qualities. Far too often, our idols have feet of clay. Reeve, after the accident, had a whole body that might as well have been clay, but he was far more of a superman than he had ever been on the screen. And he even found time to appear on the screen again, as well—having a recurring guest role in Smallville, and appearing in a remake of the Alfred Hitchcock movie Rear Window.

I gather Reeve was actually making progress on the walking front, too. I fully believe that if he hadn't gotten that infection, he would have made it to his feet again in a few more years. I wish so much that he had. I wish I could have met the man, just once, to tell him what an inspiration he has been to me. Such courage in the face of total adversity is rare in this world—and I think that's what Mark Waid & Alex Ross must have really meant when they dedicated Kingdom Come to Christopher Reeve, "who makes us believe that a man can fly."

Even living in a body that he could not move, Christopher Reeve flew higher than most of the rest of us can ever dream of doing.

Raving about Baen

Been a while since I've written here; my brain has been eaten largely either by work or by City of Heroes. Time to correct that a little.

I like reading. I like it a whole lot; in fact, I won a reading contest when I was in elementary school—kindergarten, to be precise, for reading a bit over 100 (I forget if it as 104 or 106) complete books in a month. Granted, many of them were Little Golden, but that's still a remarkable number for a kindergartner to burn through that fast. (I really should have won the next year, too, but I suppose now that I knew that I could I wasn't seriously interested in competing again.)

Anyway, I've continued reading voraciously to this day, and developed a particular liking for science fiction. And along the way, I've come to find that ebooks are a particularly convenient way for me to enjoy it. I don't have any problem reading off of a good high-contrast PDA screen, and thanks to how tiny bits and bytes are I can carry a veritable library in my pocket. I'm not going to get into the advocacy argument of ebooks versus print books; they both have their place and I don't prefer one to the other except in situations where one or the other is more convenient.

That being said, it's fortunate for me that one of the better science fiction and fantasy publishers today is also one of the most sensible in terms of its stance on ebooks. I am, of course, talking about Baen Books. Before Baen came out with its ebook programs, I was of course acquainted with it; they've been publishing a lot of good SF & fantasy (mostly military or political, but some other stuff too) for some time now. When they moved into the e-publishing world, they did it in a big way. In fact, there are three major ebook initiatives that Baen has done: Webscriptions, the Free Library, and the bound-in CDROMs.

Webscriptions was the first; a few years back, Baen decided that they would make monthly ebook versions of the new books they published each month available as a downloadable bundle. (What's more, they would make part of it available early, months before the book even hit the shelves.) The first few months were $10 each, then they moved up to $15, which is still a very reasonable price for 4 to 6 new ebooks per month. What's more, the books are available in a variety of formats (including HTML, RTF, and Mobipocket), with no DRM whatsoever, and purchased titles can be downloaded and re-downloaded in perpetuity without having to re-pay.

In order to serve as a demonstration for Webscriptions, Baen and author David Weber put the first book in Weber's Honor Harrington series, On Basilisk Station, on the website as a free download. A funny thing happened: suddenly the print edition of On Basilisk Station became Baen's best-selling book ever. Out of this came the idea for the Baen Free Library: authors who cared to do so could make one or more of their Baen works available for free download—and many did; there are now over two dozen books in the Free Library that can be downloaded at no charge. Several essays on the subject, how well it's worked, and related matters have been posted to the site as well.

But Baen wasn't content to stop there; starting in David Weber's recent Honor Harrington novel War of Honor, Baen has been putting out CDROMs bound into selected first-printing hardcovers. These CDROMs contain literally dozens of ebooks, including many that have never been included in the Baen Free Library, and other goodies; some of them also contain mp3 audiobooks. And perhaps the best thing is, the disks come with explicit permission to copy and share (but not sell). As a result, the disks have been copied, passed around, hosted on-line, shared on peer-to-peer networks, and even made available via BitTorrent, where literally thousands of copies have been downloaded.

Why is Baen so free with its books at a time when the content industry is calling for more and harsher DRM? Perhaps the biggest reason is that Jim Baen feels that most people these days prefer tree-books to ebooks for pleasure reading—but when given the chance to read a book in electronic format, they may read enough of it to decide they like it enough to purchase the actual physical product. So, the more he gives away, the more he will sell. More information can be found in the "Prime Palaver" essays in the Baen Free Library.

And it does seem to be working; not only has Baen not had any sudden collapse of revenue from its free ebook programs (and given how communicative the Baen folks are with readers and fans via the Baen Bar, we would certainly hear about it if they did), they seem to be publishing more than ever. The Palaver essays include some proof that Baen authors have seen not only their Baen titles start selling better after putting free stuff up but their works from non-Baen publishers have gotten a boost as well.

And for those people who, like me, do enjoy ebooks for pleasure reading, it's a godsend. Not only are these books free (or cheap, in the case of Webscriptions), they're exactly the kind of book I like to read—and they don't take up bookshelf space in my already-overcrowded apartment. Plus, I can legitimately copy them (those which are on the CDROMs, anyway) and give them to other people—including David Weber's entire Honor Harrington series.

Anyway, I strongly urge folks who're interested in science fiction and fantasy to give the Baen stuff a look. Visit the library, check out Webscriptions, browse or download the free CD content...it's all good stuff.