Wiretap - 10,000 Kilograms of Radio (11 MB MP3) From 2006-06-23 with host Jonathan Goldstein.

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I have decided to remove the Unofficial This American Life podcast at the request of TAL’s webmaster Elizabeth Meister. Contrary to posts on Boing Boing and elsewhere, Jon Udell and I did not recieve a “nastygram” or formal ceast and desist letter. Rather we received friendly emails from Ms. Meister, This American Life’s webmaster, making a request to take down the hyperlinks and RSS feeds, or she’d regrettably have to get lawyers involved.

While Ms. Meister did miss the mark by accusing us of copyright infringement without a clear understanding of what we were actually doing, or what copyright law allows, she was trying to be polite and friendly which I appreciate.

To be clear, I was not storing or making any copies of their work, I was simply providing links to publicly accessible MP3’s hosted on This American Life’s own servers. It is my position that hyperlinking to publicly accessible MP3’s is perfectly legal (see Ticketmaster v. Tickets.com) and fundamental to the existence of the web.

While I am confident that I am breaking no law, I am respecting TAL wishes by taking down the podcast and archive page which points to their MP3’s. This American Life has decided to take the bizarre approach to Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) by asking nicely… which I suppose is better than using some Windows only Microsoft Media Player DRM or Sony Rootkit DRM.

The real issue, I believe, is of course money. This American Life has chosen to distribute DRM encumbered episodes for downloading/timeshifting via Audible at 4 dollars a pop. TAL’s rational is that their contract with contributors states they must pay the contributors for each download. This excuse is a little strange considering This American Life writes the contract. Altering future contracts, and making the episodes freely available for downloading/timeshifting is feasable (NPR has done it.) Doing so would increase listenership. An increased listenership would mean TAL gets more money from advertisers underwriters, which can then be used to compensate story contributors. Everyone wins. If you are skeptical that making the MP3’s freely available would increase listenership, just look at recent examples that underscore the power of the Internets:

- Saturday Night Live’s “Lazy Sunday” digital short gets put on the web and suddenly people remember that SNL still exists.

- According to Wired.com in regards to Jon Stewart’s appearance on Crossfire, “Three times as many people saw Stewart’s appearance online as on CNN itself”

- Today, ABC announced that in their ONE month trial of putting shows on-line for free with commercials that they were viewed 11 million times. In NINE months, they’ve only sold 6 million commercial free episodes for $2 each.

The new demographic that This American Life and public radio so desperately need to capture aren’t listening to FM, they aren’t buying content from Audible, they aren’t listening to content when you tell them to. Either offer the content without barriers, or prepare to be replaced by someone else.

If you’ve made it this far, I encourage you to write to This American Life to let them know how you feel: web AT thislife DOT org. Be polite. Ms. Meister and the rest of the TAL staff are people trying to tell you great stories while being able to fulfill their daily nutritional requirement. Also if you listen to TAL regularly, send them a few bucks. If you donate here, the funds are used for covering bandwidth costs for TAL.

Wiretap - This One’s for the Children (11 MB MP3) From 2006-06-09 with host Jonathan Goldstein.

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Wiretap - Goody Two Shoes (11 MB MP3) From 2006-06-02 with host Jonathan Goldstein.

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Atiz, that company that was sending me unsolicited email about their automated book scanner a while back, recently announced a new product for digitizing books, the “BookDrive DIY”. The design is very similar to Archive.org’s Scribe project. It cradles the book in a V shape and uses two overhead mounted Canon Digital SLR cameras. A human must manually turn the pages. The system, without the cameras or a computer is $3500. It includes software for capturing and cropping photos. You are on your own for OCR. It isn’t clear to me how the “transparent plane” is raised to allow page turning.