“If Hollywood could order intellectual property laws for Christmas, what would they look like? This is pretty close.” ACTA is short for Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and, “that’s how David Fewer, staff counsel at the University of Ottawa’s Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), summed it up,” said p2pnet. …
Canadians continue to fight passage of DMCA-like laws
The DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) was sold to the American people as a compromise: give media companies stronger powers to prevent people from copying their content, for longer periods of time, and in return they will make much more of their precious content much more available to many more …
Yahoo! Music Store closes…taking the keys with it
As reported in Ars Technica, customers who bought digitally restricted media (DRM) from Yahoo! Music Store will lose the technical ability to play the music they lawfully acquired. As Corey Doctorow has been teaching for years: 1. That DRM systems don’t work 2. That DRM systems are bad for society …
Creating value when copies are free
Kevin Kelly is a technology, brand, and design maven, not to mention Senior Maverick at WIRED magazine. He is in the process of writing a new book, and he’s collecting his ideas online in an area he calls The Technium. I just read his latest installment, and it reads like …
What is music worth?
I’m very behind on my blog postings, so don’t worry—you’re not reading my postings out of order. In October of this year, Radiohead put their album In Rainbows up for sale at whatever price you’re willing to pay. There was quite a flurry in the blogosphere, particularly from techcrunch.com, which …