(This post originally appeared on the Shapeways blog)

David Byrne’s op-ed in the Times on Sunday got me thinking about the importance of information sharing in online music services.  In that spirit, I decide to throw up this unpublished whitepaper from 2011-12 on ways forward for online music licensing.  Central to the idea is complete transparency on who is consuming what.  It provided a way for unlicensed services to become licensed and to minimize the economic value of unauthorized music distribution.  It certainly has its flaws (it fails to appreciate the importance that labels put on pricing different songs differently, which may or may not be a legitimate thing to consider in this context) but I’ve always kind of been partial to it.  Remember that at the time this was written Spotify had pretty much just launched in the US and its licensing situation was from from clear.  Anyway, for posterity’s sake here is the text of the whitepaper.  It never had a title.  

The most surprising thing to me about working at Shapeways so far is how people respond to copyright takedown notices.  In fact, it is fundamentally changing the way I think about online copyright debates.

Like many Americans, Adafruit decided to celebrate the recent 4^th of July with some patriotic music.  They scored a video celebrating the 4^th of July and US manufacture of Arduino with America the Beautiful, as performed by the United States Navy Band (a work on the public domain – more on that below).  Soon thereafter, they received a note from YouTube telling them that someone had issued a copyright claim against the video.  After some outrage, the claim was dropped.  But what actually happened here?  And why did it happen?

No, this isn’t a post about President Obama being “absent” from some policy debate or another.  Instead, this is really about President Obama being missing.  More specifically, this is about the missing high resolution 3D scan of President Obama being missing.  The file exists – why isn’t it public?