Culture and Society

The P2P networks, minus leader Kazaa, have revealed a new “code of conduct”: Several Internet “peer-to-peer” networks unveiled a code of conduct on Monday to encourage responsible behavior among the millions of users who copy music, pornography and other material from each others’ hard drives. The networks also asked Congress …

We mentioned yesterday a new organization founded to assist the targets of RIAA lawsuits, Downhill Battle. Here’s a word from founder Nicholas Reville: We really think that the major label lawsuits are just intimidation followed by extortion: the record companies scare people with a suit for hundreds of thousands of …

MusicMatch hops into the online music fray: MusicMatch … is launching an a la carte download service for the Windows Media platform. The service, which goes live today, will be integrated into the MusicMatch jukebox software and will feature 200,000 tracks, including music from all five major labels and more …

The ACLU has begun to throw its weight around in the key file sharing cases. We mentioned Friday that the ACLU filed an amicus brief in conjunction with the library organizations in the Grokster case in support of the file sharing systems – now it is supporting Boston College in …

Even though I am sympathetic to the concept of file sharing, think privacy and the Constitution are more important than protecting the recording industry’s failing business model, and think the RIAA’s tactics are ill-advised to the point of insanity, I also do not see the file sharing services as standing …

This new meta-data system for fishing tasty information from the vast web sea is pretty amazing: In short, there might be information hidden on the web that cannot be gleaned from any individual page, but becomes apparent when many pages are examined together. And that information could be of great …

What the hell has got into the librarians lately? They raised such a stink about the library records portion of the Patriot Act that Ashcroft had to break down and agree to make the records public. And they still told him to screw himself with an extended Dewey decimal. Now, …

Looking at the music industry lawsuit campaign from a purely tactical standpoint, the story Michael Croft shared yesterday – that the RIAA sued a 66-year-old woman for sharing 2000 songs via Kazaa when not only had she never downloaded or uploaded a song, but as a Macintosh user she couldn’t …

Not much defense for this: In what prosecutors say was the first jury conviction ever under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a Florida man was convicted in Los Angeles of selling hardware used to pirate DirecTV broadcasts. Thomas Michael Whitehead, 38, of Boca Raton, was found guilty of one count …

I admit I am on the horns of a dilemma regarding music file sharing: I think it’s inevitable, impossible to stop, the methods being used to stop it including the DMCA are far more damaging and dangerous to the nation as a whole than the “crime” itself, there are very …