Friday, August 16, 2002

BIG RECORD LABELS SUE BIG ISPS OVER MUSIC BOOTLEGGING. "Record Labels Sue Internet Providers over Site." Major record companies are suing the biggest American Internet service providers to force the ISPs to block access to a Chinese Web site which allegedly carries bootleg music. Plaintiffs include business units of Vivendi, Sony, RCA and AOL Time Warner; defendants include units of AT&T, Cable & Wireless, Sprint, and WorldCom. The site in question is Listen4ever.com From Slashdot | Discuss 5:56:11 PM    comment []

LOSING FACE. "And after Baghdad, Delaware!" Patrick comments on today's report in the New York Times that leading Republicans are criticizing President Bush's plans for an Iraqi invasion. He notes that a key Bush advisor defended the plans on the grounds that Bush would lose credibility if he DIDN'T invade Iraq after all his big talk. Patrick says, "In other words, we're no longer arguing the merits of a "pre-emptive" strike against Iraq. Rather, we're arguing that we have to do it because our credibility depends on it. My own carefully-considered, weighing-both-sides opinion: Uh oh." 11:22:45 AM    comment []

DOGS AND CATS LAYING DOWN TOGETHER! "Next, 'Biblical molestation' isn't really molestation, either." Patrick writes: "Political aptitude test! You are Jeb Bush, governor of a state whose child welfare agency has recently driven into the ditch. Children in the state foster care system have died of mistreatment and neglect--or vanished entirely. The Bush reputation for hard-nosed competence is at risk! What do you do?" The answer: appoint a guy to head up the department who wrote an essay defending "Biblical spanking" that raises bruises or welts, He also said Christians shouldn't marry non-Christians, wives should view working outside the home as "bondage," and more. "DCF leader: It's OK to spank." The nominee, Jerry Regier, also urged Christians to take "whatever actions we can, within our biblical and constitutional limits, to realign county, state, and federal legislation regarding family issues in order to make it conform to the Bible's view of reality and morality," according to the Miami Herald. 10:53:58 AM    comment []

LETTER TO LILEKS. An e-mail I just sent to James Lileks (Lileks links here and here. From: Mitch Wagner To: James Lileks Date: Friday, August 16, 2002, 10:17:18 AM Subject: First editions of "regrettable food"? I'm interested in getting a signed first edition of "Regrettable Food" as a gift for a friend who collects first editions. Is such a thing available? What would you charge for it? Please bear in mind when you quote a price that I like the guy a lot but it's not like he donated a kidney to me or something. Mitch Wagner 10:23:03 AM    comment []

DOWNLOADS ARE GOOD FOR THE MUSIC BIZ, SAYS ANALYST. "MP3s are good for music biz - Forrester." The Register reports: Forrester Research has surveyed a thousand music customers and concludes that MP3 downloads are good for the music business. Twenty per cent of those surveyed - two groups Forrester describes as "music lovers and music learners" - buy 36 per cent of CDs, and these enthusiastic downloaders said MP3s had no effect on their CD purchasing. "The idea that digital music is responsible for slump is completely false," concludes Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff. The news will dismay the entertainment pigopolies*. Forrester attributes the 15 per cent slump in music sales to a number of other factors. The economy is in a slump, there's much more competition from games, from DVDs - which saw an 80 per cent rise in sales - and most interestingly - from the "limited playlists" rotated by commercial US radio stations. Forrester notes that one company, ClearChannel controls 60 per cent of radio, so new artists don't get the opportunity to be heard. The headline and lede of the article say that filesharing is GOOD for the music biz, but the story merely says that Forrester was unable to prove that filesharing is BAD for the music biz, which are similar but very different statements. Last year, music sales were down only five percent, even as the music industry itself claimed that five times as much music was traded illegally as bought legally, according to a recent speech by Lawrence Lessig, an intellectual property lawyer who's done a LOT of stumping on the subject of reining in IP law abuse. He notes that there could be several factors causing the slump, including a recession. His conclusion: even if the five percent slump were entirely caused by filesharing, that's insufficient economic harm to justify rewriting the entire copyright code and requiring the entire PC and electronics industry - with ten times the revenue of the entertainment industry - to redesign all their products with copyright protection as the primary design criterion. A recording of Lessig's talk is here. It's a very interesting and informative overview of the copyright issue, spelling out the basics in terms a layman can understand. Lessig is a lively and interesting speaker, and his voice here is synchronized with a slide show. The talk is rather long for a computer presentation, however - about a half-hour, I think, although I wasn't timing it - and a rather big download, about 8 MB. Still, it's a worthwhile use of time and computer resources. 10:11:06 AM    comment []

SUN WANTS TO TAKE COMMAND OF LINUX "Multiple wars raging in Linux land." InfoWorld writes, "Sun Microsystems roiled the competitive waters of the Linux world this week with top company officials making it clear the Linux community sorely needs a 'benevolent dictator' to usher it to the next level where it can more effectively compete against Microsoft." 9:36:08 AM    comment []

LINUX ACTIVIST QUITTING HP "HP's Linux icon chooses politics over paycheck." Bruce Perens, a leader of open source and senior strategist with HP's Linux software group, plans to quit HP to focus on political activism. Although HP has benefited from his Linux expertise, the company has been putting pressure on Perens to mute his activist tendencies. In late July, the Palo Alto, Calif., company forced Perens to cancel a demonstration he had planned that would have put him at risk of violating the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). His boss, Martin Fink defended the decision, and noted that he "didn't want any of his employees going to jail." Perens was to reveal the recipe for a software program that would allow a DVD (digital video/versatile disc) player to circumvent some digital rights management (DRM) technology. Such a demonstration is prohibited under the DMCA, Perens said. He had aimed to show how trivial most DRM technologies are. After Perens leaves HP, he will follow through with that demonstration, he said. 2:44:01 AM    comment []

VENDORS SEE DESKTOP LINUX OPPORTUNITIES. "LinuxWorld Expo: Red Hat preparing desktop Linux." Sun and Red Hat are readying versions of Linux for the desktop. Linux hasn't gotten much desktop adoption to date, but the two vendors see an opportunity as customers are getting ticked off at Microsoft. 2:32:40 AM    comment []

That's a honkin' big server farm. "Google gives testimony to Linux scalability." Google is using 15,000 Linux servers to power its search engine. That's fifteen THOUSAND individual computers. They get queries every day from Antarctica, and they probably get queries from the International Space Station too, says co-founder Sergey Brin. 2:18:20 AM    comment []