When everything is Interlectual Property

Ok so at the moment we are haveing fun a games trying to bend ancient Copyright rules to match the digital age. But what happens when 3D printers are really commonplace. Neil Stephenson touched on this in his book The Diamond Age. where the invention of molecular assemblers allowed anyone to make anything.

If this comes about then the value of things becomes almost zero, and all the value is in the design or in the instructions to your printer to make something.

What worries me is that if we don’t sort out the current legal mess with copyright on music and video we will still be fighting these battles when this sort of technology is invented. With the impact on society many time that it is now.

The BBC Listen Again to pod

I have been downloading and listening to some of the BBC podcasts for some time now. I quite enjoy Digital Planet, and In Business. But through some frustration that the scope of this is so limited and knowing that mplayer played the full range of programs from the Radio Player website I did a little searching around and found this little script. I had a bit of a play around with this and added a few bits to it to make it a bit better, like getting the stream info and using these to set the ID tag for the audio file.

I was a little hesitant in releasing this to a wider world until I found that this product essentially did the same thing, (I bet there is some GPL software in there). And I also had a careful look at the BBC website’s terms of use which clearly state it is ok for personal non-commercial use.

So here is the current state of my script for converting streams from the BBC to mp3 or ogg. I use this to keep me amused on the daily commute. I do get annoyed with the number and the volume of announcements on the trains, I am already sat down so don’t need to know where first class is, or to take all my stuff with me, as to reading the safety card, has anyone ever read it?

I would welcome and suggestions for changes or improvements, to the script that is.

Listenagain.sh