Culture and Society

A gathering of experts last Friday at a University of California at Berkeley conference on the law and policy of digital rights management seemed to produce a consensus: The DMCA is being used for purposes far afield from Congress’s original intention and is doing more harm than good: “There has …

N.Z. Bear’s blog ecosystem is back with some new fillips. Go check it out. I am fascinated by the fact that we are down the list a bit from where Tres Producers was even though Blogcritics.org gets about five-times the traffic. The ecosystem is based upon links from other blogs, …

MuchMusic, much in the news of late, will air the popular AOL online concert series: While many companies are considering putting shows online, the partners believe their project is the first time content has been repurposed in the other direction. This is AOL Music’s first television production. “With over 1 …

Kate Hudson handed out Oscars for Scientific and Technical achievement over the weekend: Scientists who develop the film, software and other technology behind the movies gathered for a Scientific and Technical awards ceremony at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel before the main Oscar pageant on March 23. Most years a …

The 610 congressional websites have gone from pretty crappy to pretty good in just one year, according to the Congress Online Project: More specifically, the study determined that 50% of congressional office Web sites received a grade of A or B, compared to only 10% of the sites in 2002 …

Sony’s blue-laser video recorder goes on sale in Japan next month: The BDZ-S77 will go on sale in Japan next month. It is based on the Blu-ray optical disc format announced just over a year ago. The nine consumer electronics companies behind it are promoting it as a system for …

The NY Times takes note of a convergence of the legal digital music services around the price of $10 per month and 99 cents per download: Has the music industry found the 99-cent solution to its file-sharing woes? “Solution” is far too final a term for this business still very …

Pay by mobile phone in Europe: Four of Europe’s leading mobile phone operators have announced the formation of a mobile payment services association which will provide their customers with a multi-network, commonly branded solution for making payments using their phones. Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone, along with Spain’s Telefonica Moviles, announced …

Sony had a successful year in 2002 and are now discussing ambitious plans for the future: SONY seems to have learnt one basic lesson of corporate public relations: messages are better received when you are making money. Little more than a year ago, when the company reported losses of ¥43.3 …

As we have been reporting, the RIAA’s website is one of the most targeted sites on the Internet, the RIAA having made many a hacker friend with its policies toward P2P. So you would think that the RIAA would have a phlanx of security experts running its website – um …