things just got a lot more interesting. remember the debacle over web-radio and the subsequent ramming through of ridiculous fees for web broadcasters that far exceeded those applied to traditional radio? those crazy kids over at mit are yet again pushing the boundaries.
With Cable TV at M.I.T., Who Needs Napster?more...Two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a system for sharing music within their campus community that they say can avoid the copyright battles that have pitted the music industry against many customers.
The students, Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel, drew the idea for their campus-wide network from a blend of libraries and from radio. Their effort, the Libraries Access to Music Project, which is backed by M.I.T. and financed by research money from the Microsoft Corporation, will provide music from some 3500 CDs through a novel source: the university's cable television network.
The students say the system, which they plan to officially announce today, falls within the time-honored licensing and royalty system under which the music industry allows broadcasters and others to play recordings for a public audience. Major music industry groups are reserving comment, while some legal experts say the M.I.T. system mainly demonstrates how unwieldy copyright laws have become. A novel approach to serving up music on demand from one of the nation's leading technical institutions is only fitting, admirers of the project say. The music industry's woes started on college campuses, where fast Internet connections and a population of music lovers with time on their hands sparked a file-sharing revolution.
"It's kind of brilliant," said Mike Godwin, the senior technology counsel at Public Knowledge, a policy group in Washington that focuses on intellectual property issues. If the legal theories hold up, he said, "they've sidestepped the stonewall that the music companies have tried to put up between campus users and music sharing."
and then there's this:
Critics Press Case on TV Privacy RulesFederal regulators plan as soon as this week to adopt rules meant to keep people from copying digital broadcasts of television shows and movies and distributing them on the Internet, government officials and industry lobbyists say.
The rules, backed by the television networks, movie studios and a group of consumer electronics companies, are meant to encourage a swifter transition to digital broadcasts by television stations.
But the proposed regulations, which the Federal Communications Commission may adopt this week, have been criticized by consumer advocacy groups, and others, who say they would not effectively prevent piracy but could curtail the legitimate copying of television programs and might render current consumer electronics equipment obsolete.
The companies that designed the technical elements of the rules include important equipment makers like Hitachi, Intel, Matushita, Sony and Toshiba. But some other equipment makers, among them Philips Electronics, say the new rules may be anticompetitive by requiring all manufacturers to use the technologies developed by the group - and quite possibly also pay licensing fees.
more ...
geez ... i'm feeling really psychic today:
Amazon Offer Worries Authorsmore ...The online retailer Amazon.com has introduced a feature that lets users search for specific words or phrases in a database of the texts of 120,000 books, drawing skepticism from an authors' group.
The feature, called Search Inside the Book, lets anyone see a few pages of each book in which the phrase appears. Registered users can see up to 20 pages of a book at a time.
In a letter on its Web site, Amazon's founder, Jeffrey P. Bezos, said the feature was added to benefit customers. Amazon plans to add more books to the database.
Plans for it were first reported in July. Publishers have said that Amazon promoted it as a better way to sell books, by letting shoppers sample them - as they might in a bookstore. Some book publishers have said that by offering a source of information about a variety of topics, the feature may also help Amazon more than the publishers, because it will attract shoppers to other merchandise like music, electronics or apparel, as well as books.
Amazon said that 190 publishers were taking part, but some publishing executives said they were still watching to be sure that the new service did not hurt book sales by giving away contents.
well, just damn. here's another relevant article:
Two Companies at Odds Over the Internet's Futuremore ...One year ago, almost to the day, Samuel J. Palmisano, the chief executive of I.B.M., delivered a speech in New York that sketched his company's vision of the future of computing, which he called "on-demand computing."
Today in Los Angeles, Bill Gates, the chairman of the Microsoft Corporation, will present his company's notion of where things are headed, which the software maker calls "seamless computing."
Behind the marketing shorthand is a kind of war of ideas over what can be thought of as "the Internet, Act II," a technological evolution that has been gathering speed. The next-generation development of the Internet has been helped by the continuing and remarkable progress in hardware. But probably more important has been the embrace of a set of software standards - rendered in a nerdy alphabet soup of acronyms, like XML, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI and so on - that open the door to widespread machine-to-machine communication across the Internet.
Over the last couple of years, I.B.M. and Microsoft have cooperated closely to reach agreement on the software standards, known as Web services, necessary for this next step. The two companies, however, agree on little else.
The Internet Act I was mainly about e-mail programs and downloading digital information to look at or listen to - Web pages, animations, video and music. Act II should bring all kinds of automated transactions among businesses and individuals. And those transactions will be able to include a hint of computer-aided intelligence.
An example could be arranging an appointment with your dentist. Your calendar information, with stated time preferences and availability, exchanges data with your dentist's calendar to automatically set up an appointment. Similarly, companies should someday be able to conduct computer-automated auctions with suppliers. The next-generation Internet can be thought of as the beginning of what researchers have said might be possible with software agents, or bots, performing as human assistants.
the new york times is really quite fabulous today:
Want to Be Interviewed on the Radio? Well, Just Pay Up.more ...The caller to Joanne Doroshow's office last month described himself as working for Sky Radio Network, a company that produces programming for Forbes Radio, one of the audio channels available to passengers on American Airlines.
As the executive director of the Center for Justice and Democracy, a nonprofit organization that casts itself as a champion of consumer rights, Ms. Doroshow was asked if she would be interviewed for a talk show examining the issue of tort reform. When Ms. Doroshow agreed, she said, the caller informed her that it would cost her organization $5,900 to have its point of view heard. When Ms. Doroshow balked, she said, the caller offered to see if it could be reduced to $3500.
"I was furious," Ms. Doroshow said. "I thought this was another way corporations are dominating what people hear, and are getting only their side presented because they're willing to pay for it."
Ms. Doroshow was so angry that she directed lawyers for the center, whose board includes Erin Brockovich and Ralph Nader, to draft a complaint letter to the Federal Trade Commission, which the center intends to submit today. It asks that Sky Radio, which also produces programming for United, Delta, Northwest and several other airlines, be required to disclose prominently that its news-style programs are actually little more than paid advertisements.
No comments:
Post a Comment