I bought a CD this week. Exciting stuff, eh? It's not worth a mention, of course, except that I thought I'd give a bit more interweb presence to whom I've discovered are quite a good local band. Friends of the Stars are based in Moseley, in Birmingham.

Somehow - I'm not exactly sure of the sequence of events leading up to it - I ended up on their email list, and they started sending me links to tracks and previews and things available online. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't spam, just that I probably signed up and forgot about it. Anyway, after having listened to their melodious folky kind of sound for a while, I decided to buy their CD, Lighting & Electrical. Click, click, click and I'm done, as is how we're used to these days. It should be here within a couple of days, I thought.

Just a couple of hours later, and Craig, from the band, emails me to say thanks for the purchase, and that since I'm only down the road, he'd just pop the CD through my letterbox. Great stuff. This has to be the antithesis of Amazon and CD WOW, the latter of which ships its CDs to the UK from Hong Kong in order to shave a little off the cost.

Nice one Craig, I'm enjoying your tunes very much.

As reported in the IMPACT legal blog and elsewhere, the UK government has launched a consultation on copyright exceptions. Perhaps unknown to many people, it is currently illegal in the UK to copy works, such as music and video, from format to format, device to device, unless explicitly permitted by the licence. Although many millions of people have probably copied music from CDs to their computer or music player, or from their computer to a CD to listen to in their car, this is usually illegal.

The proposals being consulted about, however, include the idea that consumers should be able to "make a copy of a work they legally own, so that they can make the work accessible in another format for playback on a device in their lawful possession". The aim of this exception would be to permit "format shifting", the "copying of legitimately owned works to different formats for use on different devices". The full consultation document is available here.

This seems to me to be one of the most immediately sensible and non-controversial things the government could do in the field of copyright at present.

But, restrictive DRM technology has been quietly, and not so quietly, weaving its way into people's homes and lives, on devices and in their music and video files. Current DRM technologies physically prohibit the kind of copying being proposed in the consultation, without reference to any national laws. How can these two ideas be reconciled?

Well, it's no secret that I am no fan of DRM, and would love this to signal the demise of such schemes which impose technical restrictions far beyond legal limitations. So, would this kind of DRM under such a new law be illegal? That seems an unknown at present, but even if not it seems unfair to criminalise anyone hacking such a DRM system in order to obtain their legal rights.

I'm a couple of days late with this post, but voting has now closed for Brummie of the Year 2007, and the winner is John Tighe, of the Spotted Dog in Digbeth! Congratulations John!

For those not familiar with John, his pub was served with a noise abatement order after over 20 years of being a lively and popular venue in Digbeth, prompted by complaints from residents of newly constructed city-living apartments. The campaign to keep Digbeth vibrant is ongoing. Keep up the good work folks!

Just beaten into second place, was serial blogger and key figure in Birmingham's creative scene, Pete Ashton. Well done mate! Somehow though, I don't think he'll mind coming second to John...

Full details of the poll is on the organiser's website: Birmingham, It's Not Shit.

Oh wow the Eurovision Song Contest last night was so much fun!

This annual political summit, craftily masked as a fantastic show of European culture(?), and commented on in the UK by the increasingly unimpressed Terry Wogan cannot be missed in my book. We got together enough people to pick countries out of a hat to cheer them on to victory or otherwise. My draw, Russia, did not do particularly well. But just over the border, Ukraine's shiny space-age gender-unsure Verka Serdyuchka shone, only to be beaten into second place by a lesbian group from Serbia. Brilliant, but Ukraine was robbed.

If you missed it, you really really have to check out the Ukrainian entry, video available in full here thanks to the wonders of the internet.

Terry's commentary usually holds as much intrigue as the show itself, and last night was no exception. When faced with describing the dominance of the Eastern European countries and the pathetic showing by those in the West, his only real comment was "I know, why don't we build a wall?" What a guy.

Fantastic news! Jarvis Cocker of Pulp fame and also known for jumping on stage to interrupt Michael Jackson's impersonation of Jesus at the Brit awards in the late ninetees - Jarvis Cocker is releasing a new album. Anyone who has seen my scrobblings on last.fm (or who knows me) will know that I'm a massive fan of Pulp. So... after several years away from the public eye, Jarvis is releasing a new album.

Keen to see when I'd be able to pick up a copy of his latest work, which includes the single "Cunts are still running the world" (already available for download, though guaranteed to stay off the radio without large holes in the song) I surfed on over to Amazon. Helpfully, the site did tell me that it would be released on the 13th November and I can even pre-order it like in proper record shops. However, the bizarrest thing about Amazon's page for the album (see here) is that their oh so well reputed recommendation engine felt the need to inform me that "customers interested in this title may also be interested in Ramada Jarvis Hotels"! This truly is the most bizarre effect of "helpful" semantic web stuff I've come across so far.

I wonder how far this kind of link can be stretched. Might people interested in James Morrison's new album "Undiscovered" may also wish to purchase expeditions to the South Pole? Or perhaps fans of Basement Jaxx might be interested in loft extensions as an alternative? The mind boggles. I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for more of these little nuggets of impromptu humour.

A few of my friends have recently introduced me to a website called Last.FM. The idea is quite simple, though I suspect that the mechanics behind it are quite complex. The basic idea is that as you listen to music, your computer uploads the title of the tracks you're listening to to the website and slowly it gets to build up a profile of the kind of music you like. The site then compares you to other users and starts recommending music to you. I have yet to build up enough information to get anything other than Queen, U2 and the Rolling Stones recommended, though I suspect most new users will get them.

It also allows me to make the latest addition to this website, the little "Recently listening to" box on the left hand side. It doesn't always update too quickly, but gives anyone who's interested a bit of a sneak peak into what my music tastes are. Actually, it tells you what I listen to while I'm working. I tend to have quite different tastes in the car, for example.

I can be found on Last.FM as prlewis.

So, I'm an advocate of Free Software, that much is known. But if I were to make a real shift in my usage of software and effectively stop using proprietry stuff, would I have to make sacrifices too?

One immediate thing which with just a little experience of using a system such as GNU/Linux anyone must realise is that multimedia stuff can be a bit of a pain. Many newbies attribute this to Linux's bad support for multimedia. "Linux just isn't as up to date as Windows for playing MP3's and DVD's" they say. Linux is apparently "not ready for the desktop", to quote an oft-used phrase.

Well this week, I decided to do a little delving to find out exactly why MP3's and the like are often not supported on Linux out-of-the-box and surprise surprise, it's nothing to do with technology, but licencing and proprietry restrictions.

The MP3 codec is a fancy bit of maths that basically compresses digital information. It is structured so as to be particularly suitable for audio signals. Part of this maths is patented. Actually, a fair amount of it is, and there are a number of companies which collectively issue licences.

My first reaction to this information was to wonder how this was enforcable, since (in the EU at least) software as such is not patentable. Always remember the "as such"! This doesn't stop the European Patent Office from issuing patents for software however, and quite a few have been. Apparently, the patentability only comes into question if the patent is challenged.

To make things slightly more complicated, the technology isn't licenced to end-users, only companies who make money out of it. This means that you don't have to hold a licence to encode or decode your own MP3's, but if you use software that you bought to do it for you, then the software company probably did. In fact, free (gratis, as in beer) code to encode and decode MP3's is provided by the patent holders, under the condition that it's only used for personal non-commercial activity.

In a world where everything is as black and white as some of these companies would like it to be, where companies produce things and consumers consume them, this model works perfectly. People can have MP3 libraries of their music (depending on the fair use law where they live) and companies can licence the technology to sell to consumers.

However, the world isn't quite like that, and Free Software is a case in point. FFMpeg, for example is an MP3 library released under the Lesser GNU Public Licence. It's important to understand the difference between patents and copyright in a case like this. The patent holders licence the MP3 technology from the patent they hold for use in systems, but it's perfectly possible to come up with a novel way of implementing the technology. This is what FFMpeg does and therefore their novel code can be licenced under the LGPL. Does FFMPeg breach the terms of the patent? Well, so long as we only use it for personal, non-commercial activities, then that's fine.

But, the LGPL requires that the software licenced under it must be able to be used for any purpose. So can I get FFMpeg and use it for my commercial activity? The LGPL says I can, and that's how I received the technology. This may, in fact be what is happening to SanDisk at the moment. Their stall at a trade fair in Germany was raided last week and all their MP3 players taken away following a court ruling in Italy.

I don't want to get too deep into the legal details here (mainly because I am not a lawyer), but it's easy to see why most Linux distributions don't ship with MP3 technology. MP3 code which is licenced in such a way that permits you to do anything with it, but subject to a patent which doesn't, is what's known as a "grey area".

Who is at fault here then? Is it the patent holder for allowing the stuff to be licenced under the LGPL in the first place, or the developer for releasing it in such a way that it permitted usage forbidden by the patent? Like I say, I'm not a lawyer...

So, the next relevant question is, if I'm to stick with Free Software wherever possible, do I use MP3? The answer has to be as close to no as possible, since the patent places severe restrictions on the technology's usage, which are not compatible with GNU licences. However, practically speaking this does mean that I can't listen to any of my MP3's. I could re-rip the CD's to Ogg/Vorbis files of course (which ahem, I may not be allowed to do in the UK anyway), but that will take a lot of time. Also, DVD's are very often encoded using MPEG codecs, so can I not watch them? (Don't even get me started on the CSS debate)

At this point, I really want to scream, since I don't have the time to research exactly under which conditions I am allowed to use various MPEG standard codecs, let alone even find out who owns them. Is it really this hard in a world where you don't rely on Microsoft or Apple to manage your computer for you? It shouldn't be...

So, for want of a decision and nice article summary, all I can end with is a plea for the wider adoption of open file formats. We're making some progress with office applications, let's give Ogg/Vorbis/Theora a boost too.