12 |MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC|JAN 2011 |www.maximumpc.com
QUICKSTART^
THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL BYTE RIGHTSQUINN NORTONQuinn Norton writes about copyright for Wired
News and other publications. Her work has
ranged from legal journalism to the inner life
of pirate organizations.I
like to complain that the copyright laws
we have don’t deal realistically with how
we consume or share media in the digital
world. Just to round out my complaints, I’m
going to whine that they don’t deal with how
we are creating digitally, either. As clever
as the creators of copyright were in many
ways, they have to be forgiven for never
imagining a world where we can use scripts,
algorithms, or Markov chains to generate
endless variations on a theme.
In America, what you create with ma-
chines is your copyright. In 2006, Harvard
Law student Rob Rogoyski decided to show
just how weird this could get; he decided
to compose all melodies. Rogoyski wasn’t
particularly musical. Being a copyright geek,
Rogoyski wasn’t after music. He wanted to
find out what happens when a 300-year-old
way of looking at the ownership of music
encounters a guy with a lot of hard drive
space and a brother who can write Java.
The number of original songs that could
ever be composed by musicians is effectively
infinite. But the number of possible melodies
songs can be made of, given a fixed length of
notes, is not. It’s in the low trillions. Large,
but doable, computationally speaking.
Rogoyski didn’t have the resources
to get into the trillions, but he could get
into the billions by generating and storing
melodies as number sequences. Then, he
gave everything in the Melody Machine away.
The theory went that if you heard something
in a song you wanted to sample, instead
of mucking with clearing rights you could
head over to the Melody Machine, find the
sequence you wanted, and use it to create
your derivative work. Or you could just listen
to it for free.
Everyone he talked to in the legal world
about his machine told him he’d never get
away with it. But everyone in the compu-
tational world knows without asking he
already did. In 2011, computation is part of
the natural world, and laws that fight with
the natural world always lose in the end.Copyright and the
Melody Machine
Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced
that the company is leaving the chipset
business, ending industry-wide
speculation over that very question.
“We are not building any more chipsets,
we are building SoCs now. We are building
Tegra SoCs, and so we are going to take
integration to a new level...,” Huang said.
Although Nvidia will cease building
new chipsets, the GPU maker intends to
continue shipping its current products
well into 2011. Those products include the
company’s chipset for AMD, as well as the
MCP89 chipset—the last chipset Nvidia
developed for Intel and which continues to
be used by Apple.Huang’s announcement isn’t all
that surprising, considering that Intel
essentially put the kibosh on a large part
of Nvidia’s chipset business. Prior to
Nehalem, Nvidia was producing chipsets
for Intel processors as part of a licensing
agreement between the two fi rms, but
Intel’s stance is that the license only covers
CPUs that don’t contain an integrated
memory controller. -PLNvidia Ditches
Chipsets
Business weakened by
standoff with IntelOne of the more noteworthy technologies in Apple’s latest
MacBook Air notebooks is an ultrathin form factor SSD. With
fl ash memory laid out along a narrow card similar to a RAM
module, the SSD can fi t into smaller spaces and accommo-
date more-ultraportable notebook designs. Toshiba is now
making those modules, known as the Blade X-gale series,
available to all device makers. The “drives” will come in
capacities of 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB. -KSApple SSD for Everyone
FCC PROBES GOOGLE
Street View data-collection saga continues
G
oogle may have been excused by the Federal Trade Commission for
inadvertently collecting personal information from unprotected Wi-Fi
networks, but the Federal Communications Commission wants to render its
own verdict on the matter.
At issue is Google’s admission in May 2010 that its Street View cars had mistakenly
gathered data, including email addresses, passwords, and URLs, in the process of
photographically mapping the world’s streets.
The company acted suitably contrite, enacting changes to its privacy policies and
promising better privacy training for its staff. And these measures seemed to satisfy
the Federal Trade Commission, which closed its investigation of the matter in October.
But Google is not off the hook just yet. The FCC has announced that it’s launching
its own probe to determine whether the unauthorized data collection violated the
Communications Act. -KSNvidia’s 790i SLI was the last desktop chip-
set produced for the PC running Intel silicon.