Category: intellectual property

Aside from the blogosphere, there’s an amazing silence in the tech press about the Emusic acquisition. I find that awfully curious given the amount of press the troubles of the music industry garners on a daily basis, including the recent roll-out of Napster 2.0 and the forthcoming iTunes for PC. I really must ask, why…

Now that it’s several days after the Emusic sale announcement, their servers have been jammed, and getting any mp3s downloaded has been a challenge. Just like me, it appears that current Emusic subscribers are busy hoarding all the mp3s they can before the new limits kick in. Of course, that also clogs the Emusic bandwidth……

I’ve been a subscriber to the Emusic mp3 download service on and off for about 2 or so years. I was originally turned on to the service due to a free trial I got with the purchase of a CD burner. I stayed on because Emusic was the most rational of the music download services…

Another bill has been introduced into Congress to turn every 15-year-old kid with a CD burner and cable modem into a criminal. Reps. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and Howard Berman (D-Calif.) have written legislation that makes uploading a single copyrighted song punishable with a 5 year prison term and a $250,000 fine. Nevermind that you…

This is so obviously screwed up, that I can’t even muster a comment: “The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Tuesday he favors developing new technology to remotely destroy the computers of people who illegally download music from the Internet. The surprise remarks by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, during a hearing on copyright abuses…

The good folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation are keeping watch on a whole slew of state laws in the making aimed at massively restricting our rights to communicate electronically. The proposed bills generally prohibit four categories of activity: 1. Possession, development, distribution or use of any “communication device” in connection with a communication service…

The Age reports that at least one radio station is unable to play the copy-protected promotional CDs they received from EMI because they use computers and automated systems to play CDs, not regular CD players, which are supposed to be unaffected by copy protection schemes. I predicted this might happen back in November 2001 when…

My co-host on last Friday’s show contributed this news headline with a URL too-long to hear, remember and write down. So, here’s the headline and URL in question: Ever bought a copy-protected “CD” and found that it doesn’t play in a device like your car stereo or computer? Ever bought a foreign DVD only to…

The Supreme Court this morning released their ruling 7-2 in favor of the massive extention of copyright protection of the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, and against the challenge put forth by Eric Eldred and law professor Lawrence Lessig. This is bad news, since it cements the ability of the entertainment cartel to keep ideas and…

Tech Industry tells Music Industry, “get the gov’t off our banks and we’ll let you hop on instead. We’ll screw the consumer together!” — “Lobbyists for some of the nation’s largest technology companies will argue under the new agreement against efforts in Congress to amend U.S. laws to broaden the rights of consumers, such as…