Shawn Fanning—who started the war over file sharing when he designed the first version of Napster—now envisions a digital world where recording labels that want to sell songs online can post them for download, set a price, and let the marketplace do the rest. The key to such a community, he says, is a program called Snocap. The software, designed by Mr. Fanning, allows record companies to tag their songs and require file swappers to pay for the tunes if they try to download them illegally.
Snocap might sound promising to record executives, but there’s no guarantee the software will revolutionize song swapping. So far the only digital music service to embrace Mr. Fanning’s technology is Mashboxx, and that company comes with a bit of baggage: It is backed by Sony, whose experiments with intrusive copy-protection software have not endeared it to consumers. (The New York Times)
17 Responses to Imagining a Song-Swapping Utopia
Jonathon Owen - January 12, 2012 at 2:36 am
I think I’ve dealt with every item on that bulleted list. I could feel my blood pressure rise as I read through it. Some authors really do have a gift for finding ways to complicate the process. Luckily, the majority of authors are great to work with. But those other ones . . .
maw57 - January 12, 2012 at 10:26 am
Oh, the poor publishers. Maybe we need an article on the decline of production values in academic books owing to cutbacks.
Justin Boden - January 12, 2012 at 10:26 am
“Who me? Take instruction from a copy editor? I could do this in my sleep!”
Perhaps it’s not so much that they look down on copy editors, so much that copy editors are a scarce, pedantic breed who simply pay attention to things that boorish academics wouldn’t. Like instructions.
julievp - January 12, 2012 at 11:03 am
“If your marks on the proofs are nonstandard, you may incur typesetting charges. Let me know if you need any help.”
I used to think this kind of language seemed rude in a cover letter, but now I always include some kind of variation on this theme. I think it happened somewhere around Professor M, who, at 2nd proofs, gave me the “please replace chapter 5 with the attached new version” line. At least he said please!
Nice post – Julie VP
anon1972 - January 12, 2012 at 11:26 am
Ha, I feel for you. As a first-time author, I have been slavishly following instructions from my editor for fear that doing otherwise will have awful repercussions! I shall be sure to read the instructions that come with my page proofs EXTRA CAREFULLY.
I think it would be fine to write “If your marks on the proofs are nonstandard, you may incur typesetting charges. Let me know if you need any help.” Nice and clear! You might even add a clause to the first sentence: “…, so please read the instructions carefully!”
Jill Sulam - January 12, 2012 at 11:31 am
“Please don’t make corrections to your original Word files and send them as a replacement for the edited MS.”
The very idea of this makes me feel slightly faint.
jrscholar - January 12, 2012 at 11:48 am
To be fair, we, as a group, don’t tend to read instructions on the front end, either. As a member of an editorial board for a journal, I see a good number of manuscripts that suggest the author never took a brief look at our style guide.
biobabbler - January 12, 2012 at 12:17 pm
Re: “Please don’t make corrections to your original Word files and send them as a replacement for the edited MS.”
Yes, yes, YES.
Re: “Please don’t staple strips of retyped sentences over the sections you want replaced.”
Really? That’s a riot. =) Well, hello, 1982. How have you been?
22108469 - January 12, 2012 at 1:05 pm
The idea that freelance copy editors are gleefully “exerting power” over academics and their prose strikes me as some sort of paranoid fantasy. Working from a cluttered corner in a tiny home with never-fast-enough Internet, no air-conditioning, and none of the positives of working in a publishing office (the negatives are not part of this particular rant) doesn’t offer a sense of power–quite the contrary.
sand6432 - January 12, 2012 at 1:23 pm
You might want to write another column about the (many) authors who fail to read their contracts and have to be reminded to read them when they raise questions about matters that are already covered there.—Sandy Thatcher
Mary Davenport Davis - January 12, 2012 at 1:45 pm
Please keep these posts coming. As a Ph.D student with nothing published yet as well as a sometime freelance copy editor, they are really helpful. (And also funny.)
Joyce Bond - January 12, 2012 at 2:12 pm
This is why when sending back edited files for author review, I now type a short bulleted list of the most important instructions right at the beginning of the edited Word file itself–in the first file of a single-author book or in every chapter of a multiauthor book–using tracked changes so it most likely appears in red at the very top and gets their attention. And you know what? This has worked wonderfully!
I include don’ts from previous bad experiences, such as “Don’t write your responses to queries in a separate file.” I’ve had authors type their responses in a separate file as “1. No, 2. Yes, 3. OK,” etc., with no indication of which specific query they are replying to or what page it’s on. They number the replies sequentially as 1, 2, 3, etc., which doesn’t correspond to anything in the original file. Worse still is when they missed a query or two in their review, which throws off the whole rest of the list of answers. I got to the end of the list after transferring their responses to the original and find I still have remaining queries in the original file. Time to tear my hair out! Anyway, the list of dos and don’ts at the beginning of the file itself has helped substantially.
Guest - January 12, 2012 at 2:27 pm
If we had to learn to tie our shoes by reading instructions, we’d all wear loafers. Routines that editors find automatic may not, in fact, be as transparent as you seem to think.
It is a great joy to work with a knowledgeable and intelligent editor, someone who cares as much for the work as for a glitch-free production process. It is painful to be stuck with one who considers writers idiots. Writers are the ones who have to live with the editorial scars inflicted upon us by a hasty production process driven by arbitrary deadlines. Yes, some writers are idiots, but frustration exists on both sides of the process.
Once upon a time I asked for a change in a manuscript that the copy editor considered unnecessary and expensive, so I faxed her a twenty dollar bill. Want one?
nkharlamov - January 12, 2012 at 5:42 pm
Last night I was reading with horror the story of Alan Gilbert stopping performance of Mahler’s 9th at NYPhil because someone’s cell phone was ringing incessantly. Something tells me that students eating lunches in computer classes, authors ignoring the cover letters, and patrons forgetting or worse, unwilling to, turn off their cell phones at symphony halls – not to mention people chatting to bus drivers while the bus is going at full speed – are all instances of the same general phenomenon…
Carol Saller - January 12, 2012 at 5:57 pm
I can testify that at least the cover-letter thing is nothing new . . .
Steven Cruiser - January 13, 2012 at 7:03 am
If the format would be simple then the recruiter wouldn’t feel so hard to read it.
dmariemarks - February 1, 2012 at 2:34 pm
Mentioning money always seems to makes a writer pay attention.