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Cory Doctorow’s sci-fi novel Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom is in bookstores today. In keeping with the open source tradition, you can also download the whole flipping thing, as well as check up onn ews, reviews, press and whatnot on the book at Cory’s site . Here’s a …

Sprint and Warner hook up for streaming music clip service and new ring-tone features on cell phones: Selling ring-tones, or musical jingles that play on cellphones, is giving a little boost to the otherwise gloomy music industry, which is grappling with a protracted slump in CD sales and struggling to …

Scott Berinato writes in CIO: In 1984, the state methodically stripped the population of privacy and individual identity. This Orwell got wrong. In 2003, it’s largely corporations doing it. (Give the state time, though. The Total Information Awareness effort within the Department of Homeland Security, and aspects of the USA …

Washington Post on the CES opening: It’s the dawn of the new year, the time when the computing industry trots out its finest gadgets and future innovations at major trade shows. Following on the heels of Macworld, the much-anticipated International Consumer Electronics Show starts today in Las Vegas. The last …

More from the Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit: Amid grumbling that radio consolidation has led to a rash of bad music and rampant “payola” schemes that hurt independent artists, policy makers offered a sympathetic ear. “If you don’t have the money to play in the system, you are shut …

By then someone should have figured out how to make money again: The value of recorded music sales is likely to fall 6 per cent this year to $28.7bn as a combination of intense price competition, volatile consumer demand and piracy continues to dog the industry. Sector forecasts published on …

It sure seems like we’ve been hearing a lot about Islam being the fastest growing religion in the world, the United States, on Mars, wherever. It appears that isn’t true – I knew the Christians wouldn’t take that lying down: Pennsylvania State University Professor Philip Jenkins argues persuasively in The …

(well, possibly my ex-wife, but certainly not any of my ex-girlfriends who read this)

We regularly bash the major labels for their business practices, greed, dishonesty, resistance to change, sense of entitlement – I could go on until dark but you get the picture. However labels do one thing very well, as mentioned in a nice roundup of this week’s Future of Music Coalition …

Interview with Doug Morris, chairman and chief executive of Universal Music Group, the biggest record company in the world, in the Financial Times. That boy is an optimist: Mr Morris, however, rejects the widely propagated belief that the internet is going to eat into the music industry’s growth and profits. …