iTunes, iMovie, and the DMCA

Thinking about David Weinberger’s call for DMCA civil disobedience.
An amazing hack for Apple’s iTunes and iMovie would be to enable blog entries to refer to music and movie clips.
Wouldn’t it be great to point to a movie scene or link to a tune that you’re talking about.
That would be 100% classic fair use, as intended by the Founding Fathers. It would be entertaining to try that one on in court!
I don’t have a Mac, so I don’t know whether and how it is doable but it would be fun.
This could use some good LazyWeb juice.

4 thoughts on “iTunes, iMovie, and the DMCA”

  1. I can imagine how something like this would be wired up. You’d need a streaming audio server. iTunes is scriptable. So you create a “blog this song” script. This would fire off the following events:
    1. Make an alias (symlink) of the song in your iTunes collection to the streaming audio server’s collection.
    2. Use xmlrpc to create a new blog entry with a link that points to that stream. Readers could click that link and they’d get the stream.
    It would take some doing, but it could be done.
    Alternately, I guess you could just upload the MP3 to your server, though one might run out of server space quickly.
    . . .
    I especially like how the RIAA is saying that importing stuff from Europe that is out of copyright there, but still under copyright here, is “piracy.” Riiiight.

  2. …same sort of thing could be scripted in WinAmp, no?
    The innovation here is the one-step publishing, right? I mean, I already can copy and paste a link to a stream in a post and assume somebody’s music program can take it from there when the link is clicked. So hacking up iTunes would just make it easier (and hence more likely) for me to blog music, right?
    Ditto linking to a movie clip.
    An even more interesting technical challenge happens when we’re talking about NOT streaming content (i.e. I own a dvd, you own the same dvd, I blog scene 23, and when you visit that post, your dvd player cues scene 23). Same with ebooks, music, etc.
    Dare we take it a step further and add a button in MS-Office (or Star/Open Office for you MS bigots) to “Blog this Document”?
    “Blog this picture (in iPhoto)”
    “Blog this email”
    What else?

  3. David —
    Yes, the innovation is one-click publishing — in this case, publishing with a links to an image or music or movie clip.
    Socially and legally, the innovation is being able to easily comment on rich media and implement our fair use rights to quote.
    – Adina

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