Tag Archives: Sci/Tech

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 …

My friend Stephen, the musician (among many other skills and attributes including a PhD) touring Kuwait, Syria, and Lebanon, was astonished to find how far and quickly his letter to America had permeated the Internet. After appearing here on Blogcritics.org last week, it was disseminated far and wide (especially by …

Cary Sherman defends the RIAA’s tactics in a USA Today editorial. Please allow me to boil it down to its essence: piracy problem … piracy epidemic … multiprong strategy … warranted and effective … illegal file-sharers … our business … right and wrong … illegal file-sharing … threatening the jobs …

Since customers said “bite it” when labels released encrypted CDs that simply couldn’t be copied, this latest attempt at control can be copied but not uploaded to the Internet. I wonder how R&B singer Anthony Hamilton got to be the guinea pig: The disc has two sets of music tracks: …

Here is how the Magnatune Internet record label describes itself: We’re a record label. But we’re not evil. We call it “try before you buy.” It’s the shareware model applied to music. Listen to hundreds of MP3’d albums from our artists. Or try our genre-based radio stations. If you like …