I’m giving a lecture next Tuesday at Florida State University’s London program. I’ll be talking about the Broadcast Flag and the coming European Broadcast Flag and what we can do to make sure that the former stays dead and the latter never comes to life. Seating is limited, so you need to email to get your spot:

When: Tuesday, May 24, 2005, 3PM

Where: Lecture Theatre, Florida State University, London Center, 99 Great Russell St., Bloomsbury, London, UK

RSVP: keith@art.fsu.edu

My column in the May issue of Popular Science magazine is online: this month, I talk about how the RIAA is trying to create a Broadcast Flag for digital radio:

Today you can buy similar devices for radio—sometimes called RiVos—including Griffin’s Radio Shark and Neuros’s MP3 Computer, that connect to your computer and record programs to your hard drive. The next generation of these gadgets will go those one better, recording all of the radio stations in a frequency band simultaneously, then picking out individual songs and arranging them into playlists. Goodbye channels, chatter, idiot DJs and throwaway music. Who needs live radio when you’ve got a RiVo?

The problem is that tomorrow RiVo may be illegal. A new generation of radio called Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB, a.k.a. digital radio) is coming, and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is dedicated to making sure no RiVo-like device for digital radio ever reaches the marketplace. DAB is just beginning to show up in the U.S., but it will eventually replace analog FM and AM broadcasts. What worries the RIAA is that a DAB signal sounds better than analog, and it can carry information such as names of tracks and artists and be easily recorded to a hard drive. RiVo functionality could be in every DAB tuner.

Wired News has just published an op-ed I wrote about the BBC’s amazing new open services and products, through which it embraces audience participation:

America’s entertainment industry is committing slow, spectacular suicide, while one of Europe’s biggest broadcasters — the BBC — is rushing headlong to the future, embracing innovation rather than fighting it.

Unlike Hollywood, the BBC is eager and willing to work with a burgeoning group of content providers whose interests are aligned with its own: its audience.

Hee-YAW! My second novel Eastern Standard Tribe, is a finalist for this year’s Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Last year, my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, won the Locus Award for Best First Novel.

Locus Magazine is the leading trade mag for science fiction, and the Locus Poll — from which the Locus Award nominees and winners are drawn — is the field’s popular award with the widest participation (wider even than the Hugos).

The Locus Award winners will be announced this July 4th weekend, at Calgary’s Westercon. Here’s the whole list of this year’s nominees (shockingly good company to be in, by the way):

Best Science Fiction Novel

The Algebraist, Iain M. Banks (Orbit)
Eastern Standard Tribe, Cory Doctorow (Tor)
Forty Signs of Rain, Kim Stanley Robinson (HarperCollins UK; Bantam)
The Baroque Cycle: The Confusion; The System of the World, Neal Stephenson (Morrow)
Iron Sunrise, Charles Stross (Ace)