Seller.dist.book

After trials, tribulations, false starts, wearing of sack cloth and much gnashing of teeth (and the blood of one dead chicken) I have successfully moved my weblog. For the past week I have been posting only at the new location. It works as expected. All is well.

New Home page.
New primary RSS.

Most of the archives will remain here in order to preserve as many links as possible, but I ran out of disk space and had to delete some of the early ones to keep the site under 40MB. All the archives are at the new site. Eventually I will come back here and put in re-direct meta-tags for both web browsers and RSS aggregators to automagically load the new location. In the meantime, if you have subscribed to a particular Category -- i.e. Patento.absurdium -- you can re-link to it via the Category links on the left.

Many thanks to:

Mark Pilgrim for design guidance and CSS creation
Erin Clerico at Weblogger.com for site hosting and comments configuration
Brent Ashley and Matt Mower for technical assistance
the entire Userland discussion group for moral support.

(drum roll please)

Now, on with the show.......................

Friday, September 27, 2002

Digital Hollywood Has Game

8:09:26 AM

comment []

I wonder if the biggest issue isn't really that consumers don't care.

DVD Makers Starting to Play Games. You've dropped your VCR player and soon you can forget your PC. At least, that's what the DVD industry is planning on. Michael Stroud reports from Digital Hollywood in Beverly Hills.
[...] Consumer electronics companies have yet to announce they're making DVD players incorporating the technology. If the players end up being too expensive, consumers won't buy them.
And most importantly, studios and consumer electronics companies will need to create a buzz about the features they're adding, or consumers won't care. Even with millions of PCs capable of playing enhanced DVDs now on the market, Wuthrich noted, "the biggest issue is that people don't know it's there."
[ Source: Wired News]

Thursday, September 26, 2002

Transparency in the Music Industry

1:22:27 PM

comment []

When the Nazis or the Soviets launched brainwashing campaigns labeled as education we called them propaganda or human rights violations -- here we just call them advertising.

Artists join industry campaign against music piracy. SiliconValley.com Sep 26 2002 0:41AM ET
[...]The music industry is launching a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign to combat Internet music piracy by appealing directly to fans to stop stealing.[...]
[...]Hilary Rosen, head of the Recording Industry Association of America, said the education campaign is part of a multifaceted strategy that includes combating file-swapping services in court; supporting paid alternatives such as pressplay, MusicNet and Rhapsody; and lobbying for new laws.[...]
[...]The print and television ads starting today enlist nearly 90 recording artists and songwriters -- including such superstars as Eminem, Madonna, the Dixie Chicks, Luciano Pavarotti and Brian Wilson -- who say illicit Internet downloads threaten the livelihood of everyone in the industry, from artists to record-store clerks.[...]
[...]"What we're doing is we are robbing our cultural past and we're destroying our cultural future," said David Benjamin, Universal Music Group's senior vice president of anti-piracy.[...]
[ Source: Moreover - IP and patents news]

The new laws we need to be lobbying for are those that will force full disclosure by any industry that wishes to mandate personal behavior. Before we let the RIAA and MPAA into our living rooms to run our lives, let's get a peek into their bedrooms and see just how much money really goes to the artists, just how much do the execs rake off, and just what sorts of practices do BMI and ASCAP use.

If you want to stand up in public and claim to be the Good Guys, stopping those who would rob our culture and destroy our future, you should have the fortitude to prove your motivations, your actions, and your vision are superior to the alternatives.

Wednesday, September 25, 2002

Real-Time Political Bullshit

9:20:58 PM

comment []

Hear Berman run. I'd listen to this, but it's awfully soon after breakfast. I don't know if I could keep anything down.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2002, Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time in 2141 Rayburn House Office Building, Oversight hearing on “Piracy Of Intellectual Property On Peer-to-Peer Networks.” Live Audio Feed - only available during meeting [ Source: Ray Ozzie's Weblog]

Sunday, September 22, 2002

Digital Rights Management and PDF

1:38:21 PM

comment []

Part one of a two-part excerpt from a recent work on digital rights management. The book, Digital Rights Management: Business and Technology by Bill Rosenblatt, Bill Trippe, and Stephen Mooney, was published at the end of last year. I've not read it, my only exposure being the excerpt linked here.

The excerpt presents a reasonably broad view of the DRM situation and makes some good points. But I take issue with the authors' treatment of DMCA and the Digital Signatures Act as just "a couple of new laws".

Digital Rights Management: A primer
Excerpt from the comprehensive new book by industry experts
[...]We take a broad view of the meaning and scope of DRM. When you create content (information), you inherently control a set of rights to that content--to see it, change it, print it, play it, copy it, excerpt it, translate it into another language, and so on. Traditionally, those rights have accrued from three sources:
--Legal: Rights that you get either automatically under law (such as inherent copyright) or by some legal procedure (such as applying for a patent)
-- Transactional: Rights that you get or give up by buying or selling them, such as buying a book or selling a manuscript to a publisher
--Implicit: Rights defined by the medium that the information is in
The most important thing to remember about DRM is that the first two sources of rights haven't changed much with the advent of technologies such as the Internet, cell phones, and MP3 files. Various parties have called for a complete gutting and replacement of the standing intellectual property (IP) law, but this hasn't happened and isn't going to. As discussed in Chapter 3 of this book, legislators have responded to new technologies by adding a couple of new laws instead, such as the Electronic Signatures Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.[...] [ Source: PDFZone]

Perhaps this excerpt takes the position out of context, and Chapter Three covers the far-reaching implications of DMCA more thoroughly, and more fairly. If anyone has read the full book I'd be interested in your opinion.