The Betacantrips Travelogue

Politics never go out of date, right? This came up at least a year and a half ago. Via Suzanne, who writes, "Not happy about this." Wired writes about Sony BMG v. Tanenbaum.

The Justice Department, where President Barack Obama has tapped five former RIAA lawyers to serve, said copyright infringement "creates a public harm that Congress determined must be deterred."

Joel fights back, the website supporting the defendant. Wikipedia coverage. The fines were later reduced to $67.5K (one-tenth of what was originally asked), but both parties filed notice to appeal.

Seen via Planet Debian: this fascinating quote from a Pennsylvania court in 1853.

Before publication [the author] has the exclusive possession of his invention. His dominion is perfect. But when he has published his book and given his thoughts, sentiments, knowledge or discoveries to the world, he can have no longer an exclusive possession of them. Such an appropriation becomes impossible, and is inconsistent with the object of publication. The author’s conceptions have become common property of his readers, who cannot be deprived of the use of them, or their right to communicate them to others clothed in their own language, by lecture or by treatise.

Today’s Diesel Sweeties touches on an important theme: fuck the RIAA.

The post on Grafodexia.

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/86637/emi-quits-selling-cds-to-indie-record-stores/

Useless — doesn’t even mention 3hive or netlabels like 8bitpeoples (although they do mention Hype Machine). The article on CNN.

Online music is confusing these days.

Haven’t read the paper yet (and Slashdot tends to sensationalize), but if so, that would be totally awesome. The story on Slashdot:

Hucko writes “Ars Technica has a story about a study by Cambridge law professor Patricia Akester that suggests (declares?) that DRM and its ilk does persuade citizens to infringe copyright and circumvent authors’ protections. The name of the study is ‘Technological accommodation of conflicts between freedom of expression and DRM: the first empirical assessment.'” The study itself is available for download (PDF); there’s also a distillation here.