In the blogging community it isn’t difficult to find people who despise the current copyright regime and think it should be changed. But you’d have to look long and hard for someone who believes that copyright should be banned outright. Karl Fogel, a leading open source proponent and copyright activist, is not one of these people. He does feel, however, that this is a useful starting point for figuring out the right way to approach this issue. Rather than assuming that some copyright is necessary and trying to decide exactly how much is optimal, he suggests that we imagine a world without copyright and take it from there.
He contends at the beginning of the podcast that, not only does he not know personally what the right level of copyright is, but that it isn’t possible to know this based on current evidence, a view that I find eminently reasonable. I also agree wholeheartedly with the way he concludes our discussion:
I think that there is some built-in exclusivity there but I also think… whatever change is going to happen is going to happen essentially through a market process. It’s not going to be that Congress suddenly wakes up and drastically reconsiders copyright law. Instead, some number of artists, just as some number of software developers did a couple of decades ago, will by choice release their stuff under these liberal copyrights, And they will create this little fertile safe space for sharing that will grow, and basically we’ll have two parallel streams: there’s the old stream and the free stream. And people will just start choosing stuff based on what they like, not based on ideological concerns about how it was produced. And we’ll just see what happens.
At the end of the day, we need to create an environment where individuals can test their own approaches to copyright and let the market decide what works best. I don’t necessarily see as strong a connection as Karl between liberal copyright terms and free content, however, and I hope that this makes our discussion more dynamic and thought-provoking.
Oh, and having listened to the final product, I seem to be doing the majority of the talking. I’ve always wanted these podcasts to resemble debates rather than interviews, but I’m not sure that I’ve found the right balance yet. So I resolve in 2007 to make an effort in any future podcasts to shut up and listen, as much as possible.
Download the podcast (high quality, 50 Mb) (low quality, 12 Mb)
Hifi streaming (128 Kb/s):
Lofi streaming (32 Kb/s)
v0.54 has been out for a few days now. We like presents so we thought it would be a good idea to release this next version for Xmas so you can test it by sharing your Xmas photos and home videos. I have about 200 photos to share back with my parents.
Your feedback has been very good and we thank you for that! We know you were waiting for the new features for a while! But rest assured, there is still more to come! It’s only version 0.54 
One of our happy user left us a nice present too in our support forum: “Generally speaking AllPeers is a great example of progressive innovation through new technologies and platforms, I applaud its developers for being brave enough in bringing the needs of tech savvy users in reality.
Bringing those realities to action is not easy in first place. I expect many things to come from AllPeers…”
Promised, we’ll do our best!
I’ve felt for a while now that the instant messaging and web browser worlds are on a path of convergence. Yahoo is pushing their Messenger Plug-ins. Microsoft has a host of add-ins. Skype has a number of community-style extras.
But does adding web browser-like features to an instant messaging client really make sense? In our view, if there is going to be a universal communication client, then it makes much more sense to extend the browser itself. This is, after all, where we spend most of our time interacting with the online world. You can share content in your instant messenger but you really want to view it in the browser.
We started down this road quite a while ago with what TechCrunch called our “simple, persistent buddy list”. By adding identity and real-time presence information to the browser, we’ve created a kind of next-generation email with no spam, no file attachment limits and the immediacy of instant messaging (but without its disruptive nature).
The addition of instant messaging capabilities to AllPeers is significant because real-time communication is a important complement to sharing files and webpages. P2P means there’s no need to configure a server and all communication is encrypted to ensure privacy. It sits nicely alongside AllPeers drag-n-share functionality and gives a hint, I think, of the enormous potential that stems from adding identity and presence to Firefox. The next step is to integrate chat more tightly with drag-n-share to create a single coherent communication environment. Stay tuned.
Since no sacrifice is great enough for us, we went all multimedia and created a new tour of AllPeers using Matt’s voice.
Discover the new interface and the integrated chat in this video below, or go to www.allpeers.com/tour.php to see and hear it in its actual size and full glory.
We have created a profile on MySpace (Yes this is so last year!) but apart from Tom we have no other friends yet 
So if you’re on MySpace too (You know who you are), click here to join our MySpace network
Update: We now have 100 friends so I deleted Tom 
AllPeers 0.54.1 is now available for download from the official Firefox add-ons site. This is the first major user interface upgrade since the original public beta release, and we’re excited about all the new features:
You can now chat with other online AllPeers users with our new instant messaging feature. Right-click on the user in the contact list and choose “Chat with…” or select the same option from the “I want to” menu when viewing the user’s files.
We’ve reworked the view of user’s files to make it easier to track what you’ve received. Everything that is shared with you can be viewed in the user’s inbox (click on their name in the navigator). Click on a message to open it up and see the contents.
In the same view you can see what you’ve shared with a user by clicking on the “Outbox” tab. If the user has already downloaded a file from you, you’ll see the text “Uploaded” in the file’s thumbnail.
The transfer page has also been extended to include an “Uploads” tab. In this tab you can see which files you are actively uploading. Note that the file disappears from the view when the user has finished downloading, so to see which files have been uploaded successfully (as opposed to those that are still in progress) you should use the Outbox as described above.
There are a number of other fixes as well. Based on feedback from our users we’ve moved the forms for sharing, adding contacts, etc. into the navigator so that they don’t take up space on the righthand side of the screen. We’ve fixed the conflict with NoScript that some people were experiencing. Drag-and-drop of images from the web works again (on Windows only) and the context menus now work fine on Mac and Linux (they were a bit flakey before).
We hope that you’ll like this new release and we look forward to your feedback.
UPDATE: TechCrunch’s take on the new version.
Our friends at Vpod.tv have uploaded the video archives of all the presentations from LeWeb3 last week in Paris. Just search for the “leweb3″ tag, sit back and enjoy.
Web 2.0 mania has been pushing the inevitable question to the fore: has the irrational exuberance of the late 90’s returned to the web world? Time Magazine proposes a number of arguments refuting this, some rather convincing (the legions of crazed day traders that epitomized the previous boom are thankfully absent) and some rather less so (Om Malik actually has to pay for his own dinner a few times a week). Human nature being what it is, it stands to reason that we would shy away from some of the more extreme excesses of the dot com implosion with their memory still so fresh in our minds. Nonetheless, it’s worth asking how much real substance there is to the current web boom.
My latest relevation on this topic occurred in the toilet. In the men’s room of Paris Bodega, to be specific, where NetVibes held its lavish bash (itself a possible hint that we might be getting ahead of ourselves) on the first day of Le Web 3 last week. Above each urinal there was a small card advertising a French startup called Brossadomicile.com (Brush home delivery):
The advertised service offers home delivery of toothbrushes on a subscription basis. The argument is that French people don’t change their toothbrushes nearly as often as the four times a year recommended by dentists. The obvious solution? Deliver a new brush to their doorstep every three months. This amused me greatly, although my mirth was somewhat tempered by the fact that the first couple of people I showed the card to immediately assumed that the joke was on me for believing such an obvious hoax. Subsequent research turned up their plausible-looking website as well as a laudatory article on TechCrunch that put paid to any lingering suspicion that someone was pulling our collective leg.
Is it me? Even if the company has correctly identified a problem that people actually care about, which I doubt, wouldn’t a free service that sends you an email reminder every three months be just as effective? I simply can’t believe that home delivery of a two euro item available on pretty much every street corner is a viable business. And this, to me, is one of the best indicators yet that the bubble is back, different but in many ways just as silly.
A few weeks ago we announced we were printing some 500 Limited Edition AllPeers tee-shirts. They have finally arrived and we gave a few away earlier this week at the LeWeb 3 conference.
Share Different
File-Sharing for the Masses
Weapon of Mass Distribution
Don’t Stop Sharing
As promised we will send them to people who have answered our survey so if you have not done it yet, hurry up and help us make AllPeers better.
Cedric and I just got back from Loïc Lemeur’s Le Web 3 conference, which turned out to be far more emotional and controversial than I would have expected. The conference itself suffered to some degree from the same phenomenon that, by many accounts, left attendees dissatisfied at Web 2.0 last month. Now that excitement over the web’s renaissance has reached a fever pitch, there was simply too much hype, too many me-too startups, too many bland pitches and, frankly, too many people jostling for a sirupy coffee and a mini pain au chocolat before the morning’s first session. The level of attendance was both a testament to how far we’ve come since I blogged about Loïc’s first conference 18 months ago (where there wasn’t any coffee at all, sirupy or otherwise) and a bit of nuisance. Personally I like to wake up, consume a warm beverage and move my mouse in lazy circles for at least ten minutes before interacting with my fellow humans.
That said, Loïc has been slammed far too much over the past couple of days for what was really a heroic effort and at least a qualified success. The quality of the speeches and panels was higher than at most of the industry conferences I’ve attended, and the networking mojo in the common areas (and at the over-the-top Netvibes party on the first day) was excellent. I had many, many intriguing conversations, connected with far-flung friends and made a few exciting new contacts. And that, at the end of the day, is why we attend these shindigs, not to see two men in kilts mock-swordfighting while expounding, however entertainingly, on the latest developments in massively multiplayer online games.
Where Loïc took by far the most flak was over the last-minute addition of French presidential candidates François Bayrou and Nicolas Sarkozy to the program. As a supporter of right winger Sarkozy at a conference whose attendees clearly swung sharply left of center, he was predictably criticized for turning the event into his personal political soapbox. What these critics (including a totally biased article in the left-wing La Libération) generally neglect to mention is that he gave equal opportunity for the other main candidates to participate (an offer that only Bayrou accepted). What’s more, both Sarkozy and Bayrou spoke on a relevant topic: their take on the importance of the internet for the French economy and political scene. I read quite a few criticisms along the lines of “we didn’t attend an internationally focused technology conference to hear about French politics”, but the conference did take place in France, after all, and it seems perfectly appropriate to me to have prominent national leaders come in and give their view on the whole wild and crazy internet phenomenon.
Things could have been handled better. The lack of professional translation during Bayrou’s session made the affair a bit chaotic and doubtless gives fodder to the conspiracy theory-minded since headsets for non-speakers of French were made available during Sarkozy’s speech later in the day. And Sarkozy certainly didn’t help matters by running off in a fog of bodyguards and TV cameras without taking the time to answer questions from the audience (an experience a friend of mine characterized as “so Web 1.0″). But for what it’s worth, I’m not French (though I speak it) or right-wing, and I found both sessions to be among the most interesting of the entire conference. It’s not every day that we get to hear leading political figures, in the heat of a campaign, speaking live on topics that are near and dear to us. If I had learned that Loïc had had the opportunity to invite these figures and had passed on it… now that would have made me angry.
Tristan Nitot, President of Mozilla Europe, published today the latest Firefox usage stats according to French firm XitiMonitor.
According to this firm, 7 countries have passed the 30% mark. Well done! Tristan let’s celebrate this in Paris next week!
Some weeks ago during the Monaco Media Forum I was participating to a panel entitled “What lessons can we learn from MySpace?”. I took offense to hear that there is a revolution going on as proven by the fact Internet users are moving from a passive role (readers) to an active role (writers).
There is absolutely nothing new in the user’s hungry desire to produce content. From the day the web started to become more and more popular (around 1996), users were keen to create content. Around 1998-99, the second most trafficked website was Geocities, the ancestor of MySpace which was later sold to Yahoo for $5b. Geocities (and its clones) was a set of tools to allow people to start publishing on the web. At the time it was just text and pictures but people were creating their homepages quicker than you can say “Tom is not my friend”.
This is not a new trend. What is new though is the availability of better tools. MySpace, Vox, Flickr, YouTube are just making it easier to publish content and since the number of internet users is growing everyday one should not feel amazed to see the level of user’s generated content increasing. Just like the invention of the pen gave hordes of people the opportunity to produce content, these new online tools are helping everybody and anybody to produce content.
So what lessons can we learn from MySpace? None. It’s just another tool. It became the most popular one but at the end of the day it’s just a modern pen. As I said during the panel: “We are all pens manufacturers”
