Lab Notebook – August 18, 2012

Dessa: “Peddling a product that consumers can duplicate for free is a tricky business. With affordable consumer technology, you can now copy a song a hundred times, with no degradation in the sound quality—and most people seem to immediately recognize why that’s gonna make it harder to get paid for songs. But my first experiences with lossless, duplicable technology didn’t have anything to do with my career as a rapper. My first encounter wasn’t with a torrent site. Or a bootlegged disc. It was a tomato. Seeds, quite obviously, are the mechanism of plant duplication. You drop a sunflower seed in wet dirt and, bang, you get a brand new one. Essentially, you just ‘burned’ a sunflower. The seeds of this new plant can then be harvested and planted to create an infinite, almost lossless supply of flowers and seeds. ‘Seed saving’ is the term for collecting seeds to be replanted. So if farmers can just save seeds from previous crops, why would they still buy them from seed companies?”

A system to share your music clips integrates a one-click payment solution? Looks like SoundCloud might soon offer a service, which enables users “to sell their own tracks,” at least that is what Matt Brian, The Next Web, believes (and it is hard not to draw that conclusion).