Cereal Solidarity is still making headlines, and perhaps deservedly so. The patent office itself has taken notice of our efforts. In the patent examiner’s summary of a telephone interview with Cereality and their lawyers, the patent examiner mentioned the Cereal Solidarity website and asked Cereality to respond to our criticisms!

The Applicants’ claims of novelty and/or unobviousness were discussed related to the above-mentioned prior art and commonly known practices previously in the public domain. PTO personnel presented the Applicants with internet commentaries regarding the subject application (Attachments 1- Cereal Solidarity and 2 - Patent News: Bad Cereal…) and invited commentary. No agreement regarding novelty or unobviousness was reached.

To read this document and maybe some other boring documents (annoyingly the “Non-patent literature” is not posted online), just search for patent # 11/078,686… this quote is on the 6th page of the first document listed. Linking to the document itself is difficult, my apologies.

So as I was saying, our Cereal Solidarity efforts have been mentioned in some mainstream news sources recently, including the Salt Lake Tribune (Cereal Daze: Not Just For Kids) and In These Times (Snap, Crackle… Patents). Bizarrely, In These Times neglected to mention Cereal Solidarity itself, and they unfortunately called us FreeCulture instead of FreeCulture.org, but that’s OK because they interviewed many of our friends such as Jason Schultz from EFF, Kembrew McLeod, and Nicholas Reveille from Downhill Battle.

Also strangely, Gavin started the campaign and has been the driving force behind it, but I (Nelson) ended up being the only person interviewed about it, for the Salt Lake Tribune. Poor Gavin only got a misquote in the UK’s Daily Telegraph ( Bran hits the fan in US ‘cereal café’ wars), where a chunk of the website that Karen actually wrote was placed in his mouth. We were somewhat annoyed at this lack of journalistic integrity, but Karen thought it was funny.

We plan to deliver the petitions soon. Stay tuned!

A word about Free Culture UK: we like them, but they’re not officially affiliated with FreeCulture.org. I just wanted to clarify that. We support anyone worldwide working for free culture, but although we have the same name, and similar goals, we’re not the same organization. Specifically, FC UK isn’t student- or youth-oriented, and so they don’t fit in our sphere of things. But we’d be glad to work with them, and if any students in the UK want to start a free culture group at their university, they could share affiliations with FC.o and FC UK.

That said, I encourage anyone in the UK to take place in their first Congress in London on October 1. Best of luck to you!

Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing claims (don’t worry, we believe him) that MSP, a new British ISP, “has secured a license from Sony that allows its customers to legally share any song in the Sony-BMG catalog with any other PlayLouder MSP customer, and to download these tracks from any ISP customer in the entire world.”

Apparently, PlayLouder MSP DSL costs about the same as other DSL offerings in the UK, but subscribers will gain the ability to legally download any music which Sony-BMG holds the copyright to (including “out of print” tracks), to share any of that music with other PlayLouder MSP subscribers, to do so using any file format at any bitrate and using any software. The music can originate from anywhere - P2P, CD, radio recording, etc. MSP is also in talks with several indy labels in an effort negotiate the same deal with them as well.

The system does have its drawbacks, however. As you’ve read, subscribers can only share with other subscribers, and on top of that MSP will be analyzing traffic to try to determine how many Sony-BMG songs are being shared (though this is, according to MSP, only to determine how much they must pay Sony-BMG). Using this technology, they will be actively blocking recognized songs from leaving their network, while allowing unrecognized files to flow like normal.

Although this setup isn’t perfect, it’s certainly the “best thing to happen to the copyfight” in a long time. As Cory points out, this is a lot like the Voluntary Collective Licensing system the EFF has been working towards for years. I personally don’t think that you should need a license to share music non-commercially, so I don’t think that this type of system should even be necessary, but it is certainly a step in the right direction. Hopefully we’ll be seeing many more deals like this in the future.

For those interested, PlayLouder MSP is set to launch at the end of September.