http://www.thefactz.org/economics/p2p_summary.html - interesting overview of statistical studies of filesharing’s effect on the sale of music.

43 folders aimed me at a beautiful confessional of music theft. The author is a die hard music fan and former staunch enemy of illegal downloading who has resorted, irregularly and rarely, to stealing music for a variety of reasons. The essay is a catalog of all the music the author has stolen and why.

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I’ve been catching up on my email newletter reading from Public Knowledge, The Center for Democracy and Technology, my web host.
The Public Knowledge news letter directed me, by way of BoingBoing, to an academic paper titled “The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution”. The Darknet is the collection of various content-sharing procedures […]

As I feared, guest “celebrity” writers don’t want to be corrected by their readers. The Huffington Post has removed all the comments savaging former RIAA CEO Hilary Rosen for her poorly researched post criticizing the iPod’s “incompatiblity” with other music services. I guess you don’t get to be the head of one of the […]

Arianna Huffington’s new blog, The Huffington Post, went live today. It’s supposedly a liberal response to the Drudge Report, but it actually seems to have kicked it up a couple of notches in interactivity. The Main Page branches off into the News Wire (which is the most Drudge-like section), and the Blog. The Blog […]

From the EFF’s latest Action Alert:

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has been wreaking havoc on consumers’ fair use rights for the past seven years. Now Congress is considering the Digital Media Consumers’ Rights Act (DMCRA, HR 1201), a bill that would reform part of the DMCA and formally protect the “Betamax defense” relied […]

I love the logo of Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. I think it captures very well the way past works support new works and how new works can illuminate old works.
Found while reading James Boyle’s article Deconstructing Stupidity where he analyzes several of the (perhaps well-intentioned) myths […]

Some of you have heard me complain about Apple’s kowtowing to the RIAA and other fatcat lobbying groups.
Now Apple is downgrading their software to limit streamcasting of music:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/15/social_music/
Maybe the article is right. Maybe digital is crap.

As part of the 6th Annual Roger Ebert Overlooked Film Festival, Jack Valenti (Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America) gave a speech and took questions today at University of Illinois, where I attend school. Jack’s speech was part of his “Moral Imperative” speaking tour, and contained many of the elements of […]

Standford Law professor Lawrence Lessig has released his new book, “Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity”. His publisher, Penguin Books, has agreed to allow the book to simultaneously be released online under a Creative Commons license that allows creation of derivative non-commercial works. […]