Culture and Society

The RIAA is so petulant that Morpheus and Grokster weren’t held responsible for the piracy committed by their programs’ users that they are suing the Morpheus creator again – this time for a service that wasn’t even launched. Weep: The Recording Industry Assn. of America issued a brief statement in …

A battle of images: The beauty queen and the cad both have Web sites. Katy Johnson, who was Miss Vermont in 1999 and again in 2001, uses her site to promote what she calls her “platform of character education.” “She is founder of Say Nay Today and the Sobriety Society,” …

Though I have learned to wait for the other shoe to drop regarding these negotiations, this deal sounds very reasonable: College radio stations have reached an agreement with the recording industry to reduce the fees the stations must pay when they play music online. The agreement, reached Friday, supplants a …

As you probably know, we are affiliated with Amazon for purchase of CDs, books, DVDs, games, electronics, etc. that we review and/or discuss (buy lots, NOW), proceeds of which help fund Blogcritics (we don’t ask for handouts). It looks like we may be offering the Apple Music Store pretty soon …

“Hello MTV,” the name of new mobile phone service: Music video channel MTV is to venture into the world of mobile phone service provision in Sweden. Beginning this month, MTV Europe is to offer pre-paid mobile services in the Scandinavian country as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) over Telia …

Nullsoft leader Justin Frankel, now owned by AOL, released a new program last week, “Waste,” that makes it easy for groups of about 50 people to set up secure and private file-sharing networks – it also includes an instant messaging feature. AOL was not amused: Mr. Frankel, 24, went to …

Steve Lohr has interesting analysis in the NY Times: The future involves using the Internet to deliver commercial program content, mainly movies and music, to consumers who are equipped with a growing array of digital devices to receive it, from personal computers to digital televisions to smart cellphones. And the …

For $750 mil, AOL TW decides Microsoft is tits and Netscape is history: Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, and Steve Case, the newly unemployed former chairman of AOL Time Warner, were at the same cocktail party this week in North San Diego when AOL officially surrendered in the Browser …

Cal Coastline photo project captures Streisand estate – she sues: Barbra Streisand has filed a $10-million lawsuit against a multi-millionaire who posted a high-resolution photograph of her Malibu estate on an Internet Web site documenting erosion along the California coast. The lawsuit, alleging violations of the diva’s right to privacy …

I don’t mean “politically correct“: A legal dispute that threatened to derail Gateway Inc.’s groundbreaking plan to load music on its computers has been quietly resolved amid growing interest in such offerings by rival PC makers, executives and analysts said on Thursday. Months after announcing a first-of-its-kind deal in December …