Culture and Society

I am very unhappy about this, but I certainly can understand it from her point of view: An anonymous Boston College student yesterday ended a legal fight to keep her identity secret from the music recording industry, which wanted to sue her for allegedly distributing copyrighted songs over the school’s …

California socks spam firm with $2 million fine: The state’s attorney general, Bill Lockyer, brought the case against PW Marketing of Los Angeles County and its owners, Paul Willis and Claudia Griffin in 2002, under a 1998 state anti-spam law. ….PW Marketing, Willis and Griffin were charged with sending out …

VentureBlog contributor Naval Ravikant, inventor of the jelly, muses on the ubiquity of wireless computing at Dartmouth: Instant Messenger for voice will emerge – Just as ubiquitous wired connectivity lead from email (sporadic and asynchronous) to IM (always-on and synchronous), so ubiquitous wireless connectivity takes us from cellphones to a …

Bookofjoe discussed Skype and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) a few days ago here. I (and about 1000 of my closest friends) got this about SIP directly from Michael Robertson, former MP3.com guru, now Lindows maven: SIP is to telecom, what MP3 is to music biz. Hold on tight boys …

Just yesterday we mentioned an editorial in Billboard (of all places – very significant as the industry bible) by a top entertainment lawyer telling the RIAA to give up the campaign against file sharing and join the 21st century. Todd Rundgren puts it even more strongly in the Hollywood Reporter: …

How well do you take care of your CDs and DVDs? I am pretty fanatical about it, figuring once it’s mine it’s mine and I don’t want to screw it up. I even have our 4-year-old pretty much down with the sickness: she knows to not touch the surface, to …

Very interesting study by blogger Darren at the Living Room on time-spent stats for blogs. Check it out: How long does the average blog reader stay on a blog on any given visit? I searched for the statistic on Google but couldn’t find it so I decided to do some …

This strikes me as a totally worthwhile endeavor, and I encourage your interest and participation: Hello Over the past several months, we have been planning and developing a project that allows artists to easily distribute their music freely on the Internet. The program produced by the Gnomoradio project will allow …

Somewhat to my surprise, several Blogcritics and some readers have indicated they weren’t aware that I write for MSNBC.com. I am forever indebted to Jan Herman for bringing me in to the fold, and I miss his editorial expertise greatly – be sure to check out Jan’s great Straight Up …

A fascinating new study on the “Analysis of Security Vulnerabilities in the Movie Production and Distribution Process” by AT&T researchers find that: Unauthorized copying of movies is a major concern for the motion picture industry. While unauthorized copies of movies have been distributed via portable physical media for some time, …