Elian Personal Notes6/5/2000; 7:17:37 AM April 24, 2000: Since you asked, I'd mostly like to ditto the Curmudgeon's opinions on Elian, in as much as you can call them opinions.The only thing I will say is I started out agreeing with the Miami relatives at first, before I knew the whole story. However, also before I knew the whole story, they completely turned me off with their treatment of Elian. A loving family would have shielded him from those cameras, not paraded him. Later understanding of the facts brought me more in line with the rest of America.My point was that even before I knew the relatives in Miami were distant, the Miami relatives had already completely turned me off. They acted in a totally reprehensible matter. Not that Fidel is or was any better, but you expect better behavior from those who consider themselves superior to Fidel.
Clinton and Gore's big promise looks like a diversion... Digital Divide6/5/2000; 7:17:34 AM April 24, 2000: Regarding the Digital Divide, "'People make it seem like it's a racial issue when it's not,' Ellison says of recent efforts by the Clinton administration to address gaps in computer technology access. Rather than concentrate on race, Ellison would like for more attention to be paid to the influence of income disparity on the digital divide. 'This is about economics,' he says."It may be noble for the administration to be concerned about this, but solving the wrong problem is no good.
AOL Founder: Censor the Net? Ha! Censorship6/5/2000; 7:17:31 AM April 24, 2000: "Communist Vietnam, China, and even the U.S. government should think again if they believed they could censor the Internet, the founder of America Online said Monday."Maybe true, maybe not, but they can definately make our lives miserable, so lets stop gloating and start working in Congress. This false security stuff bothers me.
More artists to sue Napster says Metallica lawyer Music & MP36/5/2000; 7:17:29 AM April 24, 2000: "Expect more headline acts to follow Metallica's lead and launch legal action against controversial software developer Napster - so says the metal band's lawyer, Howard King."I think there's still some confusion going on here. Napster-the-company is doing nothing illegal. All it does is offer software and provide a free indexing service. You may want to sue Napster-the-software... but you can't sue a piece of software.And if you really want to nail Napster-the-company for enabling extensive illegal activities, then you better broaden your suit. Along with Apache and ftp server developers, and with the people who run IRC and the people who make the software to interface with it, like mIRC, you'd better add any other piece of software that is primarily or often used for illegal purposes. Are you going to nail Netscape for providing a newsgroup reader that allows anybody with an internet connection regardless of age to view porn?The whole "Napster-the-company is responsible for our [hypothetical] lost income" bit only makes sense in isolation from the rest of the world. Applied elsewhere it's pretty scary.Watch 'dem lines... they bite.Alternate view: Hail, Metallica! in Salon.
Despite 'Piracy,' CD Sales UP Music & MP36/5/2000; 7:17:27 AM April 24, 2000: "the industry has been claiming rather loudly this year that digital piracy would hurt music retail. Despite the fact that the issue might not come up as focal point in the lawsuit, the fact that people are purchasing CDs at a higher rate than they were in 1999 is going to have to be addressed in the court of public opinion."It's really only a PR issue that the industry grew, because the RIAA is right: "'If we grew 3 percent as an industry, maybe we could have grown twice as much,' [Alex Walsh, the vice president of market research for the RIAA] said. 'There is just no way to tell how much we could have lost. There is no scientific or empirical way to determine how much more music we could have sold.'" True. Still, this points to the dangers of making a snap argument that's convenient now but not thinking about the future: At some point in one of these lawsuits, the RIAA or one of its representatives will be wanting to put monetary damages on the losses, and I'm sure this will be thrown back in their face. I will if nobody else does "smile" It should be thrown back at the RIAA, because it is correct. We're all arguing from ignorance, and bluster serves no purpose.
PayLar$.com Music & MP36/5/2000; 7:17:25 AM April 21, 2000: "PayLars.com gives Metallica fans the chance to make a donation to the band to make up for all the revenue the band thinks it's losing to online MP3 trading. http://www.paylars.com/more_info.asp">Read more about what August Nelson is doing with the PayLars.com website."You can use this site to make a non-guilt-admission donation to Metallica for any MP3s you may have. As the site owner says, "'It's strange that any band would choose to sue its fans, private companies, and schools without at least asking if anybody would be willing to pay,' said Mark Erickson, CEO of August Nelson, the technology development firm that created the site."On other Metallica lawsuit topics, Indiana University has banned Napster again.
Doc Searls: Abolish Intellectual Property Laws General IP Issues6/5/2000; 7:17:23 AM April 21, 2000: "You know, quite frankly, I mean I'm going to go step way out here, I happen to think that if we got rid of all intellectual property law, and all copyright law for that matter, and just simply said, "Anybody can do whatever they want, we all inform each other," that's the virtue of being human, you know? If I inform you, you're different. And if you inform me, I'm different than I used to be."I understand where he's coming from but this suggestion goes way, way to far. Abolishing all IP law leaves us not free but defenseless. In re Dave Winer's recent troubles, if there were no IP laws, suppose Conxion just decided to block everything Dave says about them, realtime? Block the e-mails, snip those chunks out of Scripting News, change any image they want, etc. Dave couldn't claim copyright infringement, couldn't claim anything because he would have no property interest. With no IP laws we are defenseless in the face of those with the power to change things without our permission.This is the basic reason why integrity is so importent, and without some form of IP, we can kiss integrity goodbye. Unless we walk up to the server and extract something off of the disk, we'll never know for certain what somebody originally said. (There are ways to detect tampering with a message, but that doesn't mean you can reconstruct the original.)
Dr. Dre Sued By Lucasfilm
Music & MP3
6/5/2000; 7:16:18 AM April 19, 2000: "One day after taking legal aim at Napster, Dr. Dre is now the target of a high-profile legal salvo himself.... Lucasfilm's suit, which seeks unspecified damages, hinges on Dre's use of something called the "THX Deep Note," a sound trademarked by Lucas' company. According to Lucasfilm, the sound is the first ever to be trademarked; it should be familiar to moviegoers as the sound that accompanies the THX logo before films screened in theaters with THX sound systems."
Poetic justice, in a sick sort of way. "He who lives by the sword dies by the sword." "smile"
In Search of Skeptics Personal Notes6/5/2000; 7:16:15 AM April 18, 2000: The basic point of this article is that we should consider the consequences of laws constraining the Internet before we make them.Another case of "You'd-think-this-shouldn't-have-to-be-said,-but...""And so too is the danger of this legal imperialism also about time. If the imperialists are wrong, then we will have lost something important by the time the Internet's Robert Bork graduates from Chicago. We don't have 30 years to get this one right."
Screen Scraping Makes Web Comeback Content Integrity6/5/2000; 7:16:13 AM April 18, 2000:
Screen scraping's original purpose was to get information out of mainframe computers and into client server systems. The new breed of screen scrapers use HyperText Markup Language to pull information off one Web site and deposit it into another site or a database, even if the two sites are not connected or if one site would prefer not to share information with the other.Emphasis mine.Damage caused? You bet!
Screen scrapers may make it less likely that consumers will want to visit their banks' Web site, and they certainly don't help the brands the banks have worked so hard to build. They also introduce some security risk, since a hacker who gets into an aggregator's database of login information would be able to easily empty a bank account."Brand" is another word for the reputation of a company... which lives or dies based on the integrity of that brand.