September 9, 2003

It’s just an empty page right now but Puretracks.com will soon bring legal downloadable music to us Canucks. If you download a song from Puretracks and burn it to a CD-R do you get a refund of the digital media levy? You've paid for that song, why should the music industry get more money from you? 10:10:10 PM

Say goodbye (maybe) to American Airlines, United Airlines, and the Boeing Company. A judge has ruled they can be sued by the families of September 11th victims because these companies and others negligent security procedures could have contributed to the terror attack’s outcome. United States District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said the hijacking and crashing of the planes was "a foreseeable risk". This should keep the lawyers busy for a decade or so. 9:56:57 PM

The (Recording Industry Association of America) RIAA managed to avoid suing a orphan with terminal cancer whose dog just died (as far as we know) but they came close, suing a 12 year old girl who lives with her mother and brother in a New York City Housing Authority apartment for sharing copyrighted music on the Internet. The girl claims that she though it was okay to download music using the Kazaa music-swapping service she her family paid for the software. If this is actually the case the RIAA needs to educate people that regardless of what Kazaa and other music sharing software services might suggest it is in fact illegal to share copyrighted music. Time until the 12 year old girl is no longer a defendant – 1 week tops. Update: 10pm : No longer a defendant - her family settled for $2,000. Which is vastly too much. 9:55:48 PM

Is it Nazi Glorifier; Filmmaker and Nazi Propagandist; Hitler's Filmmaker, or just scum? Adolf Hitler's favorite filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl had died. Best known for helping glorify Hitler she was a demented and evil to the end. E Online notes: "I don't know what I should apologize for," she told the Associated Press just before her 100th birthday last year. "I cannot apologize, for example, for having made the film Triumph of the Will--it won the top prize. All my films won prizes." Scum. 9:46:45 PM