There’s a ridiculous amount of misinformation spreading online about the new maps in iOS 6, compounded by incorrect press reports, vague statements by Apple, and the developer NDAs. I’m even guilty of spreading it myself, based on reports I’d seen on the blogs.

Using information provided to me by an anonymous Apple developer, I’ve pieced together the facts. Keep in mind that iOS 6 is still prerelease beta, and Apple may change anything at any point. Everything below is based entirely on the existing beta software and documentation that Apple’s provided to developers.

Were walking directions removed in iOS 6? Some press reports have stated that walking directions are removed from iOS 6. This is completely false, and walking directions are still in iOS 6. Here’s a screenshot of walking directions in iOS 6, courtesy of Philip Bump.

Were biking directions removed? Bike directions have never been available on the iPhone, and still won’t be in iOS 6.

Were public transit directions removed? As of this beta, inline public transit directions are gone from the Maps application in iOS 6. Clicking the public transit button will display a list of third-party apps that support routing in the defined map area, and will launch the app when clicked. Here’s the current screen in the beta, with no apps registered.

By release, this blank screen will be populated with a default list of appropriate apps from the App Store. The documentation states, “If the user’s device does not currently contain any routing apps, Maps refers the user to apps on the App Store that do.”

What about the new Transit APIs? The new Transit APIs, referred to by Scott Forstall at 108:58 in Monday’s keynote, allow developers to register their app as a directions provider for routing directions for a particular set of coordinates. It will then be displayed in the list of available third-party apps for transit. Clicking a transit app launches that app, passing the start and end values to the app. Contrary to other analysis, transit routes can’t be displayed inline from the Maps app.

How do the Transit APIs work? Apps can enable directions support by setting the type of directions they support, a geoJSON file specifying the map regions they support, and uploading it to iTunes Connect. Developers can specify a category (Car, Bus, Train, Subway, Streetcar, Plane, Bike, Ferry, Taxi, Pedestrian, Other).

Directions requests from Maps are handled by a special URL. From the documentation: “When the user asks the Maps app for directions and chooses your app, Maps creates a URL with the start and end points and asks your app to open it.” From there, the app can “compute and display the route using your custom routing technology.”

Of course, any of this may change before release. But, for the moment, the APIs simply don’t support inline transit routes from within the Maps app.

Are Street View photos removed? Yes, these were also provided by Google.

Why is Apple doing this? Do they hate public transit?! Of course not. Transit directions aren’t in iOS 6 because Apple replaced Google’s maps with their own solution, which didn’t include access to transit data. Maintaining transit feeds and keeping it up-to-date for hundreds of cities was presumably too difficult to attempt for this first release, so they decided to outsource it to third-party apps.

Is Google going to release a Maps app for iOS? We don’t know. Google hasn’t announced any plans for a native Google Maps for iPhone. And there’s a big unknown: if they developed it, would Apple approve it?

Hope that helps. Hit me up with any more questions, or if you have internal information, I’ll happily honor your anonymity.

Wired posted my new column yesterday, an attempt to coalesce some thoughts around a trend in fan funding that isn’t really happening yet, but really should be — fans hiring artists directly to make the art they want to experience and own. I’ve been thinking about this since 2008, and surprised it hasn’t emerged yet in a big way. I’m really just hoping that someone sees this and gives it a try.

Amanda Palmer blows up the music business.

Two weeks after Kickstarter launched in April 2009, I was fishing around for an idea to test the platform and launched a project for Kind of Bloop, an 8-bit tribute to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue.

Like many to follow, my Kickstarter project hit the initial goal in the first few hours and eventually quadrupled it, with $8,600 raised from over 400 backers. Modest by today’s multimillion dollar blockbusters, it’s still considered one of the site’s early successes. The album was released shortly after, adored by the only 400 people in the world who find the idea of “chiptune jazz” thrilling.

But unlike nearly every other album project on Kickstarter, I’m not a musician. I’ve never written a song, with or without vintage videogame consoles, and wouldn’t know where to start.

Instead, I hired musicians I love to make the music. My job was organizing the project — giving the musicians feedback, setting the budget and timeline, and handling all the mundane chores of licensing, production, promotion and fulfillment.

Without intending to, I’d added a new title to my résumé: I was a record producer!

As Kickstarter’s exploded in popularity, I’ve started to see signs that there are others like me — a movement of fans as producers, commissioning work from their favorite artists instead of waiting for the artists to come to them.

To me, it feels like the next logical step in the evolution of fan funding. Already, fans are expecting to witness the creative process with behind-the-scenes progress updates and feedback forums. Now, they may actually help decide what gets made. If I’m right, the implications for working artists is potentially huge, providing an unexpected source of revenue, as well as potential creative headaches.

Here are some potential applications, and some who are leading the way.

The New Event Organizers

The idea for Kickstarter began seven years before its launch with a concert in New Orleans that never happened. Perry Chen, founder and CEO, wanted to organize a late night event during the 2002 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival that would cost $20,000, but didn’t want to deal with the upfront risk. His thought: pre-sell the tickets to the nonexistent event on a conditional basis. If there wasn’t enough interest, he wouldn’t lose his shirt.

He gave up the project, but not the underlying idea. Ever since it launched, I’ve thought events were the most underrated use for the platform. The very first project to crash the Kickstarter servers, in fact, was the flood of people trying to buy a ticket to see Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum at a benefit concert in NYC.

Last week, I launched a Kickstarter project to fund XOXO, a new conference and festival in Portland, Oregon. I worked with Andy McMillan, the creator of The Manual and Build, to budget the costs, invite speakers, book venues, and effectively design an event without spending a dime. Within 50 hours, the event was completely sold out with over $160,000 raised, making it the largest event ever funded on Kickstarter.

We’d designed an event we would want to attend, and tested the waters to see if anyone else agreed. If they hadn’t, the only loss would have been our time.

Again, like Kind of Bloop, I found myself in the position of a producer; this time for a festival organizer instead of an album. I’m getting more and more comfortable in these shifting roles.

From the beginning, musicians have experimented with Kickstarter for funding their tours, from Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman’s five-city tour to Kim Boekbinder’s Impossible Tour, a set of ten separate projects testing local audiences.

As far as I can tell, nobody’s flipped it around and tried to commission a musician to play for fans. Most bands already play corporate events and private parties. If fans collectively raise the same amount of money, why not play a house show for them instead? For fans, it’d be a once-in-a-lifetime experience to see an artist they love in an intimate setting. For musicians, it’d pay well without the malaise that comes from playing the Intel holiday party.

Though there’s no reason commissioned works need to be limited to music.

Commissioned works are perfect for collaborations. Why not team up your favorite indie comic book artist with your favorite videogame creator, like Pixeljam and James Kochalka? Or musicians with authors, like Ben Folds’ collaboration with Nick Hornby? Or hire an illustrator you love to make art based on that cult indie film you and your friends keep watching? Sure, go ask Olly Moss to make prints based on Ghosts With Shit Jobs.

Projects like these have three big requirements.

1. Strong, achievable concept. Commissioned works should be scoped down to something realistic, because you’re paying for their time, but high-concept enough to capture the excitement of other fans.
2. Organizer. The funding may come from the crowd, but there needs to be a single person managing the project and handling all the logistics and small details.
3. Due diligence. The organizer will need a firm agreement from the artist, committing to a timeline, payment, and any other demands. Also, if the project results in a tangible work, determine who owns the rights to it before you start raising money.

Fans Liberating Art

The rights issue is an interesting one. With Kind of Bloop, it was effectively work-for-hire. I paid the artists the complete proceeds of the Kickstarter fundraiser and I owned the finished album, with the ability to sell it in the future without hassle.

But a new class of commissioned projects are taking the rights issue a step further, liberating works into the public domain. This week, two classical music projects that funded on Kickstarter released their work into the world, free of all copyright limitations.

Of course, symphonies from the Baroque period are already in the public domain, but the modern recordings of those compositions are almost all copyrighted.

The Musopen project, funded in September 2010, raised over $68,000 to hire the Czech Filmharmonic to perform original recordings of classical symphonies from Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and others. The result was announced last week: 27 symphonies, uploaded to Archive.org in raw ProTools format with individual recordings for each instrument.

A second German project, funded in June 2011, sought to create a new score and recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The Open Goldberg Variations completed recording in January and released the new score and recording into the public domain last week. A free iPad app followed, released only yesterday.

Both projects were organized and funded by fans of classical music. Fans did the research, raised the money, and paid musicians to do what they do best. Together, everyone worked together to enrich our shared culture, to the chagrin of classical record labels.

Every day, it seems like Kickstarter is evolving into a kind of dream factory — manifesting the dreams and wishes of an individual that shares a vision with their community.

If this is the future of fan funding, I’m in.

I’ve written a couple times about YouTube’s Content ID in the past, the powerful and oft-abused technology used to automatically detect potential copyright infringement and allow the purported copyright holders to block or monetize videos.

You probably saw Isaac’s adorable lip-dub proposal, choregraphed by a bunch of drama geeks in Portland.

In the Vimeo description, they also posted the video to YouTube, which is now “blocked on copyright grounds.” There’s only one possible infringement claim, and that’s the soundtrack, which used Bruno Mars’ “Marry You.”

Despite the fact that Bruno Mars himself loved the song:

Congrats to Isaac Lamb and the future Mrs..I don’t think I could’ve made a better music video for this song. Thank you vimeo.com/42828824

— Bruno Mars (@BrunoMars) May 26, 2012

Before blocking copies of the YouTube video, Warner Music Group filed a DMCA notice with Google to remove 27 links to the song from their search results.

There’s a strong argument that their non-commercial use of the song should be fair use, and that hyperlinks from Google should never be censored, but let’s just grant WMG the benefit of the doubt. It’s their song, and they’re clearly the copyright holder.

Instead, I want to draw attention to the other claimants for the YouTube copyright takedown — Keshet, La Red, and Scripps Local News.

I wasn’t able to find any information about Keshet and La Red, but why would Scripps be listed in the copyright claim?

A number of Scripps-owned local ABC TV affiliates aired the story, like this report from ABC 2 Baltimore. Content ID is smart enough to detect partial use of a video, and now even detects the melodies in cover songs. But it’s not smart enough to figure out that the original video predated the newer upload, as in this recent example with a comedian’s video broadcast on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

So the Scripps TV broadcasts are indexed by YouTube, and the Content ID robots do the rest. And because Content ID disputes are judged by the copyright holder, complaints are routinely ignored or denied.

As a final stupid footnote, there are still multiple copies of Isaac’s proposal on YouTube. The most popular? This one — uploaded by a TV news network.

I’m doing some testing with the Google+ Search API, and it seems like it’s completely broken. Can anyone else confirm?

Try searching for something popular using the Google+ API, ordered by recent. Here’s a test for ‘iphone’. For me, the most recent result was 25 minutes ago. (Your results may vary, depending on time.)

Now, do the same search on Google+ itself, and click the “Most recent” link to only show recent posts.

At first, Google+ shows the same sparse results of relatively outdated posts… Then, slowly, it populates with newer posts from the last couple minutes.

Unfortunately, I can’t figure out a way for the Google+ API to show those newer posts. Any help? Any Googlers out there able to help out?

On Tuesday morning, Andy McMillan and I launched XOXO, an epic festival and conference about disruptive creativity — bringing together artists and makers bypassing traditional middlemen to do what they love for a living, with the technologists building the platforms to make it possible.

If you haven’t already seen it, take a look at the video we made, which pretty much explains everything:

We’d confirmed most of the entire lineup by Monday, including the founders and CEOs of Etsy, Kickstarter, Metafilter, 4chan, Canvas, Simple, VHX.tv and The Atavist, and the creators of World of Goo, MakerBot, Indie Game: The Movie, Star Wars Uncut, Diesel Sweeties and Black Apple. And Julia Nunes! (This is as close to WaxyCon as you’re ever going to get.)

Andy and I debated back and forth about whether the project was ready to announce, and both of us were nervous. It’s a unique project for Kickstarter, and we didn’t know if we’d provided enough detail to convince people that we’re working on something really exciting. We’d run all the numbers, and to do everything we wanted without cutting corners or selling out, the tickets would cost around $400. Was that price too high? What if only business and marketing types sign up? Is the festival too long, too short, too far to travel?

So many doubts, so many fears. We were betting it all — pre-selling every single ticket with a $125,000 goal. And we were serious: if it came up short, we’d walk away. Months of planning would be wasted, but at least we wouldn’t have lost our shirts.

Until the last minute, we were debating whether to push it yet another week out to polish things up. Finally, we bit the bullet, cleaned up some final issues, and launched at 11:20am on Tuesday.

Hugely excited to announce @xoxo, a new conference & festival this September in Portland! Get your tix quick: kickstarter.com/projects/waxpa…

— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) May 22, 2012

The reaction was explosive and immediate. In fact, I’d fully intended to write about the launch on Tuesday morning, but within 30 seconds of posting the Kickstarter project, my inbox exploded. I knew that Kickstarter’s new social features were powerful, but this was intense. Before I’d even tweeted it myself, 20 people backed the project.

Less than two days later, it’s passed $110k raised with over 60% of the tickets sold. (Update: It sold out completely in 50 hours!)

This is the most money I’ve allocated to a Kickstarter project–because it’s going to be amazing. See you at XOXO kck.st/JDMcWl

— apocryphal mat honan (@mat) May 23, 2012

Its high time for a new tech conference for people who build things, not overrun w/ brands & marketers. I am all for kck.st/JDMcWl

— bigrocket.net (@bigrocketdaily) May 23, 2012

The list of speakers we’ve put together is great, but the list of attendees is amazing. We could easily do five more conferences just from the current attendee list. Some of the smartest and most creative people in the world are coming to XOXO, and almost every time I search a name I don’t recognize, I’m impressed. Putting all these people in one room is going to be something special.

As far as I know, XOXO is also the biggest event ever funded on Kickstarter. When I first started working with Kickstarter in 2008, the idea of funding events came up regularly. Kickstarter was originally inspired by a concert that Perry wanted to throw in New Orleans back in 2001, but didn’t want to deal with the up-front risk. I’ve always thought it was a perfect use for the site, but up until this point, barely anybody’s tried to fund their entire ticket sales on it. I think this really validates Kickstarter as a tool for funding events.

There are a million things to do and we’re just getting started. But, for now, I’m just grateful that everyone got it. We’re at the very start of a Cambrian explosion of creativity, made possible by technology. Everything is awesome.

Kickstarter. Steam. App Store. Food carts. Netflix. Square. I like this trend. DISRUPT ALL THE THINGS.

— Cabel Maxfield Sasser (@Cabel) February 9, 2012

Tonight, I watched Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech to this year’s graduating class of the University of the Arts. All of it’s worth watching, but this part of the speech (at the 17:20 mark) resonated with me.

We’re in a transitional world right now, if you’re in any kind of artistic field, because the nature of distribution is changing, the models by which creators got their work out into the world, and got to keep a roof over their heads and buy sandwiches while they did that, are all changing. I’ve talked to people at the top of the food chain in publishing, in bookselling, in all those areas, and nobody knows what the landscape will look like two years from now, let alone a decade away. The distribution channels that people had built over the last century or so are in flux for print, for visual artists, for musicians, for creative people of all kinds.

Which is, on the one hand, intimidating, and on the other, immensely liberating. The rules, the assumptions, the now-we’re supposed to’s of how you get your work seen, and what you do then, are breaking down. The gatekeepers are leaving their gates. You can be as creative as you need to be to get your work seen. YouTube and the web (and whatever comes after YouTube and the web) can give you more people watching than television ever did. The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are.

So make up your own rules.

I couldn’t have said it better.

So, go check out the project, watch the video, and check out the speaker lineup. If you want to, back it. And I hope to see you in September!

A little late on this, but wow, ROFLCon III was amazing. I was there to moderate a morning keynote panel on the supercut meme with Rich Juzwiak, Duncan Robson and Aaron Valdez, three of my favorite supercut creators. It was a privilege to share the stage with these guys, who are all amazing at what they do. It ended with a debut of Duncan’s Three Point Landing, which the audience adored. Here’s the whole thing.

Every talk I saw was amazing. All the sessions are making their way onto YouTube, and are all worth checking out. I posted some of my personal highlights on Twitter, but if you missed them, here are my favorites:

Jonathan Zittrain’s introductory keynote was thoughtful and inspiring. Jason Scott’s solo talk on the Mysterious Mr. Hokum is a crazy story of a pre-Internet scammer. Flourish Klink’s panel on fangirl culture was eye-opening, a glimpse into a massive subculture of the web I know far too little about.

The most entertaining, hands down, was Craig Allen’s behind-the-scenes story of the Old Spice campaign, with a surprise Skype cameo by Isiaiah Mustafa.

The most underseen and misunderstood session was Wonder-Tonic’s pitch for Localoffrly.biz, a douchebag startup turned into comedy performance art. (Bonus points for actually launching a site.) Hard to believe, but some people in the audience weren’t sure whether it was a joke, and started to get frustrated when they stopped the gamified talk between each “level.” Brave.

And, of course, Chris Poole’s solo talk, which ended up inspiring my Wired column that was published last Wednesday. I reprinted it below, hope you enjoy it.

Early this month, the Internet invaded the MIT campus for ROFLCon III, the biennial two-day conference that brings together the subjects of net memes with those who study and adore them.

Among the meme celebrities — Tron Guy, Paul “Double Rainbow” Vasquez, Antoine Dodson, Scumbag Steve and Chuck Testa all attended — were those who are deeply invested in the future of Internet culture, both emotionally and financially. Founders of community sites like Reddit and 4chan, academics studying memes, and the cottage industry that’s capitalized on them, most notably the Cheezburger Network’s Ben Huh. And, of course, the whole audience participated in their propogation.

From the moment I boarded the plane to Boston there was an undercurrent of change running through the conference. I sat next to Whitney Phillips, a University of Oregon doctoral student speaking on a panel about her research on troll culture. She’d attended every ROFLCon since 2008, and realized that she’d have to revise her thesis in the next month — the meme landscape is in a transitional period, but it’s not clear what it’s transitioning into. She echoed something I heard repeatedly over the weekend: “It just feels different.”

It felt apropos that this was the last ROFLCon, with the organizers “putting this trilogy to bed and riding out into the sunset.” Or, at least, until “we can figure out how to continue doing it great justice.”

The Internet is still spawning memes at an accelerated rate — and they’ll never go away. But there are some major shifts under way that may fundamentally change the way they’re created.

Every meme, like folklore, shares two common characteristics: It must show reproduction (the ability to be copied) and variation (the ability to mutate).

These days, memes spread faster and wider than ever, with social networks acting as the fuel for mass distribution. But it’s possible we may see less mutation and remixing in the near future. As Internet usage shifts from desktops and laptops to mobile devices and tablets, the ability to mutate memes in a meaningful way becomes harder.

From the Interest Web to the Social Web

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a fundamental shift away from discussion forums and other niche communities to social networks and aggregators. In a 20-minute talk at ROFLCon, 4chan and Canvas founder Chris Poole characterized this as a shift from the interest-based web to the friend-based web.

Poole is concerned that the web is losing its emotional depth, a richness that comes from lurking, failing and learning before finding your place in a community. The difficulty gave it more meaning, and the resulting communities added far more value to the web than they extracted.

Now, aggregators like 9GAG and Cheezburger are ridiculously popular, but memes rarely originate there. Unsourced images are posted and watermarked by their new hosts, muddling their origins and diluting the context of the original image. As Poole said, “It’s hard to feel emotionally invested in 9GAG.”

To me, this is part of the natural expansion of online community. Reddit users hate 9GAG for stealing their memes, but 9GAG is popular because it’s easier to use, making it more inclusive to Facebook users than Reddit’s sprawling subgenres and somewhat esoteric community norms. It’s the same reason that, for years, 4chan users hated Reddit for stealing their memes and bringing them to a community that was much easier to understand.

Unlike social networks, each successive community doesn’t seem to cannibalize its predecessor, but instead simply finds a larger, newer audience. The original community stays largely the same, which feels like stagnation relative to the “next big thing.” With each new site, the mainstream base and shared knowledge we call “Internet culture” converges into a mixed cultural heritage.

But there’s one potential risk that affects the cultural production of memes.

Meme Mutation

Ever tried using 4chan on a iPhone? It’s completely impossible to upload images from an iPhone or iPad, immediately limiting your contribution to the community to commenting alone. Sites like Reddit let you post a URL, but modifying and uploading images to a public URL from a mobile device is, for the moment, not easy.

Also for the moment, it’s extremely rare for mobile apps to allow community remix and sharing. In fact, I could only find two iOS apps that supported posting your own remixes to a public community space: Mixel and Make Pixel Art. (If you know more, leave them in the comments.) All others only support sharing to your contacts or your own social network, but not the public, unmediated space that memes thrive in.

It’s not surprising, then, that the only memes that seem to originate on smartphones are text-based — autocorrect fail, iPhone whale, and texts from last night.

It feels like we’re on the verge of a breakthrough to unleash the creative potential of these devices, but mobile developers are limiting our options to mild tweaking, at best. Instagram’s filters made the simplest cosmetic changes, and you weren’t able to modify anybody else’s work. Draw Something let you draw, but only with a single person and no shared history. Where’s the Canvas, Polyvore, deviantArt, and YTMND of the app world?

In the absence of good remix apps, image macro generators like Meme Generator and Quick Meme have filled the gap, making it possible to instantly generate a new meme from a mobile browser in seconds. No tools, or time investment, required.

This is incredibly empowering, but also limiting. Your imagination, and the scope of the meme’s breadth, is limited to the capabilities of the meme generator.

It’s reasonable to think the shift from desktops and laptops to mobile and tablets will continue, especially for the new generations of young Internet users that typically generate memes. If the app ecosystem doesn’t grow to accommodate it, we may see remix participation drop, largely substituted by the lightweight interaction of likes, favs and comments and lightweight prebuilt memes from generators.

In his talk on Saturday, Poole said, “Memes are the instruments with which we play music. The way things are going, we’re going to lose our song.”

Memes may not go away, but I’m worried we may lose the concert venues where the music is performed — the quirky, difficult communities that foster creative expression and make it meaningful.

We all break laws. Every day, millions of people jaywalk, download music, and drive above the speed limit. Some laws are obscure, others are inconvenient, and others are just fun to break.

There are millions of cover songs on YouTube, with around 12,000 new covers uploaded in the last 24 hours. Nearly 40,000 people covered “Rolling in the Deep,” 11,000 took on “Pumped Up Kicks,” 6,000 were inspired by “Somebody That I Used to Know.”

Until recently, all but a sliver were illegal, considered infringement under current copyright law. Nearly all were non-commercial, created out of love by fans of the source material, with no negative impact on the market value of the original.

This is creativity criminalized, quite possibly the most popular creative act that’s against the law.

I don’t think it’s an act of civil disobedience; nobody’s making a statement. Most people don’t know that cover songs need a synchronization license, and even if they did, trying to get one is a confusing and expensive proposition. Unlike the mechanical licenses used to release a cover song on an album, video sync licenses don’t have an affordable flat rate and require the publisher’s explicit permission.

Even as YouTube forges agreements with publishers to handle the synchronization rights for cover songs, it’s nearly impossible for musicians to tell whether their songs are covered or not.

This week, I set out to answer a seemingly simple question: when are YouTube cover songs legal, and how can we do this better?

Conflicting Information

Even trying to determine if a cover song is legal can be confusing for most musicians. There’s no shortage of answers online, but most of them are conflicting. Publishers, musicians, and lawyers all give different answers, none of which are totally accurate. Even YouTube’s own FAQs are incomplete, made inaccurate by recent settlement agreements.

Like any area of copyright law, there’s no shortage of armchair lawyering on blogs and discussion forums about cover songs. A common belief is that cover songs fall under the “fair use” provisions of the Copyright Act, but the question of whether a non-parody cover song could fall under fair use is untested in the courts. Despite this, over 60,000 cover songs on YouTube cite “fair use” in their title or description. (Whether uploaders actually believe that or are preemptively using it as a defense is anyone’s guess.)

Content ID detects one of Adrian Holovaty’s cover song

While they happily encourage fans to upload covers, YouTube makes it clear that users must have the rights to all content they upload. “We tell users they must own the copyright or have the necessary rights for any content they upload,” said a YouTube representative. “It’s ultimately their responsibility to know whether they possess the rights for a particular piece of content.”

Their only specific guidance for cover songs is in their Copyright FAQ, which says, “Recording a cover version of your favorite song does not necessarily give you the right to upload that recording without permission from the owner of the underlying music.”

But this answer isn’t fully accurate. YouTube’s negotiated blanket synchronization licenses for its users from thousands of publishers, most notably the settlement with the National Music Publishers Association last August. This agreement allowed publishers to opt-in to a program that let them take a cut from a $4 million advance pool and up to 50 percent of the advertising revenue from any cover song they own the rights to.

Frustratingly, we have no idea which publishers have signed on. The NMPA doesn’t publish the list, making it impossible to figure out whether your song is covered by the agreement or not. (I contacted the NMPA, but a spokesperson confirmed that information appeared to be unavailable, but was looking into it.)

Begging for Forgiveness

In reality, the only way to tell whether a song is legal is to risk breaking the law and losing your YouTube account — by uploading the video and waiting for copyright notices.

In the last few months, YouTube has quietly expanded Content ID beyond original recordings to detect cover versions and live performances using the underlying melodies. A YouTube representative confirmed with me, “Content ID’s technology allows us to identify works in an original sound recording, or in a cover version (by identifying the underlying melody of a song), using information provided to us by the publishers.”

YouTube hasn’t talked much about its melody matching technology, but it was in the news recently after a drunk Edmonton man belted “Bohemian Rhapsody” in the back of a police car. After the Content ID identified the song, EMI initially decided to take the video down, but soon changed its mind and authorized it with advertising.

Adrian shared a screenshot of his copyright disputes page.

Everyblock founder Adrian Holovaty is well known on YouTube for his acoustic guitar covers, which have amassed millions of views. I asked him if Content ID identified the melodies in any of his videos. So far, seven of his videos were identified, with all but one rights holder choosing to leave the video online and collect the revenue. Only one video his cover of the Village People’s “YMCA,” was taken down by the songwriter, leaving Adrian with a “copyright strike” on his account. YouTube’s policy allows three strikes before the account is terminated and all videos removed.

The Flaws in the System

The system’s not perfect, though. Unscrupulous individuals are routinely using Content ID to claim content they don’t own to harvest ad dollars from unsuspecting users. For example, two of Adrian Holovaty’s disputed tracks are Django Reinhardt songs from the 1930s, claimed by an obscure company named “Social Media Holdings.”

Other copyright claims may be accidental, as material they don’t actually own finds its way into the Content ID database, like this poor guy who’s received eight consecutive claims from companies claiming to own George Romero’s public domain Night of the Living Dead.

And Content ID isn’t immune to false positives, like the bird calls misidentified as music. Worse, for all these case, disputed Content ID claims bypass the DMCA process for counter-claims entirely, as I wrote about in February.

How can a musician decide what’s legitimate or worth fighting?

Still, YouTube’s Content ID is pushing publishers and rights holders into the modern age. It’s an ingenious approach for an otherwise dysfunctional copyright system that’s too hard for amateurs to navigate, making money for everyone involved while still allowing free creative expression.

The Need for Change

But there’s something strange about this begging-for-forgiveness approach to copyright. It’s like driving without traffic signs, only finding out you broke the law when you’re pulled over.

The real question: Why is it illegal in the first place?

Cover songs on YouTube are, almost universally, non-commercial in nature. They’re created by fans, mostly amateur musicians, with no negative impact on the market value of the original work. (If anything, it increases demand by acting as a free promotional vehicle for the track.)

The best solution is the hardest one: To reform copyright law to legalize the distribution of free, non-commercial cover songs.

Copyright law was intended to foster creativity by making it safe for creators to exclusively capitalize on their work for a limited period of time. Cover songs on YouTube don’t threaten that ability, and may actually prevent new works by chilling talent that could go on to do great things.

As we’ve seen with countless breakout artists from YouTube, budding musicians have built their careers from cover songs that evolved into original material. Karmin, Pomplamoose, Julia Nunes, Greyson Chance…. Even Justin Bieber started with covers of Chris Brown and Nee-Yo before getting discovered.

Now, the next generation of budding pop stars are covering Justin Bieber, with about 216,000 of them so far. It’s all part of the virtuous cycle of culture: We take from it, build on it, and then give back in return. The law should help that along, not hinder it.

Update: I originally published this column over at Wired on May 2. The woman I spoke to at the NMPA confirmed the list of publishers appeared to be unavailable, but promised to look into it. I haven’t heard back, so I followed up again. I’ll update here if I hear anything.)

Just for the hell of it, I charted the tenure for every one of Yahoo’s CEOs against the starting and ending stock price. Man, what a mess.

Just so nobody else ever has to do this, here’s the data, culled from Google News reports and YHOO stock quotes. Download as a CSV.

Is there a word for being totally proud of something and completely ashamed at the same time?

Context: Super Mario Summary reworks every level of Super Mario Bros. on a single screen, turning a side-scrolling platformer into a devious, addictive puzzle. Amazingly, it was built in only 48 hours by Swedish developer Johan Peitz as part of the Ludum Dare game competition. Read his postmortem of making the game.

Last month, in response to Yahoo’s wrongheaded patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook, I wrote about my experience filing patents at Yahoo. Patents I helped to file, ostensibly only for defensive purposes, were turned into blunt weapons to thwart innovation and extort money.

As I said, “I thought I was giving them a shield, but turns out I gave them a missile with my name permanently engraved on it.”

This week, Twitter announced their Innovator’s Patent Agreement, an open source contract intended to guarantee patents will only be used defensively, even when sold. The IPA seems to directly address the issues raised in my article.

Adam Messinger, Twitter VP of Engineering, wrote that, “With the IPA, employees can be assured that their patents will be used only as a shield rather than as a weapon.”

Every one of Twitter’s existing patent filings, including Loren Brichter’s famous pull-to-refresh patent, will fall under this agreement later this year.

Still, the IPA isn’t perfect, and it needs work to protect the intentions of designers and engineers. Instapaper founder Marco Arment pointed out that the contract’s definition of “defensive” is overly broad, allowing an unethical company to initiate a lawsuit for a range of reasons without requiring the inventor’s permission.

Hypothetically, if Yahoo had adopted the IPA, would it have prevented them from later suing Facebook for patent infringement? Maybe not. Facebook’s threatened several startups over trademark name issues in the past, including Lamebook, Placebook, and Teachbook. If any of them were also users, customers or affiliates of Yahoo, then Yahoo could bypass the Patent Agreement and file a patent lawsuit. (Though, if they did, the inventors could choose to sublicense their patents directly to Facebook.)

These problems are correctable though, and Twitter should be commended for taking this important first step. In a deeply broken patent system, it’s heartening to see an established company proactively try to work around its flaws. I hope agreements like these find wide industry adoption.

But this isn’t a real fix. Union Square’s Fred Wilson dubbed it Twitter’s “Patent Hack,” and that’s exactly what it is — it’s duct tape to patch a broken system, but it doesn’t solve any of the underlying problems.

The ideal would be patent reform, or if the system’s beyond reform, the abolition of business method patents entirely.

Marco Arment wrote, “A truly innovative stance would be for a large technology company to avoid filing patents, and to lobby aggressively for progressive patent reform to make that a practical choice for every technology company.”

Like I did last month, Marco vowed not to file any patents. “I fundamentally disagree that software patents (and many other types of patents) are a net gain for society, and I can’t participate in that system in good conscience.”

After all, if you only use them defensively, why do you need patents at all? Publish your work and establish prior art.

Sadly, prior art only works in an ideal world. As we’ve seen, the U.S. patent office routinely grants patents even when prior art exists. The recently passed reforms to the patent system, switching from a first-to-invent to a first-to-file system, make this more likely than ever.

For the moment, avoiding patents entirely isn’t a realistic legal strategy for large companies. Maintaining a patent arsenal won’t ward off shell company-style patent trolls, but it can protect you from competitors by allowing cross-licensing settlements. But all of that feeds into the “cold war” mentality of stockpiling patents you never hope to use.

Until we have real reform or abolition, ethical tech companies are forced to play the patent game, but at least engineers and designers now have a way to rewrite the rules in their favor.