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 Tuesday, July 29, 2003


"Glory days over for illegal file sharing: analyst" [Canada.com]

Besides the quotes from analysts, the article focuses on Canada:

Brian Robertson, president of the Canadian Recording Industry Association, believes the group's "more educational stance" that features TV ads that appeal to people's ethics when buying music will eventually help shift many Canadians to industry-sponsored services.

However, Mr. Robertson didn't preclude the possibility that Canadians could face lawsuits come fall, should education efforts fail.


2:01:39 PM    

I have no knowledge that would allow me to try to make an intelligent guess about the merits of SCO's lawsuit against IBM over Linux, but this piece by Bryan Taylor has at least the appearance of totally blowing SCO out of the water -- it's by far the strongest anti-SCO argument I've seen. [ZDNet, thanks to Michael Swaine].
12:22:32 PM    

Musician Jody Whitesides, an artist whose music can be found on BuyMusic.com, tells MacInTouch that he was never contacted for permission:
Here's what I've deduced... BuyMusic.com (which I will refer to as BM) got their "vast" music library of 300,000 plus songs from a company called The Orchard. The Orchard is a distribution company that has consistently shafted artists [...] So, without the express consent of what is likely lots of The Orchard's catalog, BM has put it up for sale at the bargain price of $.79 a song.... So, now they can tout they're selling tracks at $.79, and they can say they have a library of music of over 300,000 songs. But what they don't tell you is that it comes from musicians/bands who were not asked for permission, and who will likely not see a penny of any sale made through BM.

11:37:30 AM    

Check out the links on Slashdot re the Pentagon's "Terror Futures." This is not a dumb idea. It is a very good idea, which I have been a proponent of for years, but also does have certain risks. It may not be optimal to use it in the long-term in the exact setting and form proposed by the Pentagon. Nevertheless, the holier-than-thou, mindless attitude of certain Democratic senators, who called the plan "morally repugnant and grotesque" is just about enough to finally put me over the edge to become a Republican, and I've consistently voted Democratic for 2.5 decades.

The fact is that markets are the best way we know of to combine the knowledge and experience of many people into an "overall opinion." They aren't perfect, far from it. But like democracy itself, which is "the worst possible system except for all known alternatives," it is the best known way of combining opinions. And the issues that the Pentagon is trying to use this mechanism to make predictions about are issues that, for the sake of our future, we need to do the best we possibly can to understand.
11:13:04 AM    



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