The Register brings two stories that are relevant to the music download debate. The first one is that music sales in the UK are still increasing, with growth in the last year of 2.1%. Wait a second! Aren’t music downloads supposed to spell the death of music sales? Isn’t it Read more…
This is sort of old (from last Tuesday), but I haven’t seen it posted elsewhere. The heirs of the sculptor Paul Landowski, who is the author of the famous Christ the Redeemer statute in Rio de Janeiro, are asking for royalties from the admittance ticket sales into the attraction. This Read more…
Remember Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”? Remember the chorus of kids singing “We don’t need to education”? Now, those kids are asking for the royalties that they are due from the recording of those famous lyrics. EMI, Pink Floyd’s record label, has declined to comment, but those kids Read more…
This is an interesting exchange of ideas about open access journals between Matthew Cockerill, the editor of BioMed Central, and John Enderby, vice-president of the Royal Society. The centre of the debate is about the fact that publicly funded research is eventually made proprietary because the copyright is assigned to Read more…
Groklaw smugly reported this earlier. Steve Ballmer asked computer industry to create a computer worth $100 USD. A company called Solar PC has met the challenge with a small computer that runs Linux by using live CDs. BTW, aren’t Live CDs great? I have tested Knoppix and SUSE 9.2 recently. Read more…
The BBC reports that accounts in the popular game Half-Life 2 have been cancelled by the manufacturer. The developers were able to require authentication for the online part of the game, and have been able to shut them down. I am not sure why they are so enthusiastic about it. Read more…
The latest version of Kazaa now offers internet phone technology from Skype. This seems to be a natural progression for their P2P technology, enhancing the possible non-infringing uses of such networks. However, Kazaa still suffers from spyware, and it has been also losing customers to e-Mule, which has built-in torrent Read more…
Trust James Boyle to cut through the nonsense and provide an excellent picture of what is taking place with the calls for more protection for databases. The evidence is finally taking shape that more protection for databases in Europe has not been translated into more innovation. My favourite part of Read more…
CNN reports that new software is being designed to tackle art forgeries. The software conducts a mathematical analysis of the piece, uses some algorithms and establishes wether a piece is forged or not. I am guessing that this will work better with classics and not with Brit Art. Can anybody Read more…
The Nosoftwarepatents.com website has posted a statement by European OSS superstars Linus Torvalds (Linux), Michael Widenius (MySQL) and Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP) against software patents. The statement pleas to the European Council to consider the damage caused by software patents. They call the proposed directive “deceptive, dangerous, and democratically illegitimate”.