General
I'm feeling a little better -- more tired than dizzy today -- and spent a few hours at the IETF meeting (ipr and sip WGs). But when I told Helen that I was sick, she said "I suggest reading a good fiction book", so I took her advice and bought William Gibson's Pattern Recognition at Borderlands and read it almost straight through.
I found the set-up much more exciting than the conclusion, but Gibson is still an enthralling writer and didn't butcher the technology as badly as he might have. The well-connected NSA agent in the trailer part was a bit much, though.
Pattern Recognition has a properly blood-curdling (or chilling) villain.
Even though my labyrinthitis may be on the way out, my arms have gotten really sore again.
I ate lunch from Tu Lan during the break in the IETF meeting, and it was delicious.
Cory takes me to task for suggesting yesterday that EMusic needs to support Ogg Vorbis. He argues that it would be more expensive for them in various ways (including storage costs) and that they're unlikely themselves to be paying any per-track royalties on MP3 downloads.
But in fact, the MP3 patent licensors are charging a percentage royalty on "related revenue" and EMusic could actually save money by allowing us an Ogg Vorbis download option instead of MP3-only. (That's assuming that the marginal cost of offering this option exceed 2% of their revenues, and that they can find an accounting model which distinguishes "MP3-related" and "non-MP3-related" revenues in their business.)
That 2% of related revenue would probably be defined as "reasonable and non-discriminatory" by most standards bodies. As one person commented in the ipr WG this morning, a little 2% here and 2% there soon adds up to 50% (if you were using 25 technologies with such patent claims against them).
I started to write a rant about patents here, and the collective action problem, but really, in this particular case, none of that is very relevant. Many existing businesses which are paying the 2% MP3 tax can probably realize substantial savings by the incremental step of offering Ogg downloads and streams in parallel to their existing MP3 downloads and streams. They don't have to stop offering MP3s. They can pass some of the savings along to their customers. (E.g., for every Ogg you download, you earn credits which you can redeem for extra bonus tracks.) If this were done, it could provide a specific and totally non-ideological way that Oggs could become appealing to random music fans, which would also facilitate support for the format in players.
