Interesting examination of the resurgence of Sartre in France by Jim Holt (I much prefer Camus), looking at the liberationist philosopher and the communist/totalitarian – are they reconcilable? Maybe if you squint real hard. Here is my favorite part: By dint of sheer intellectual authority, Sartre could engage his bitter …

My friend Stephen, the musician (among many other skills and attributes including a PhD) touring Kuwait, Syria, and Lebanon, was astonished to find how far and quickly his letter to America had permeated the Internet. After appearing here on tbomedia.co.uk last week, it was disseminated far and wide (especially by …

Cary Sherman defends the RIAA’s tactics in a USA Today editorial. Please allow me to boil it down to its essence: piracy problem … piracy epidemic … multiprong strategy … warranted and effective … illegal file-sharers … our business … right and wrong … illegal file-sharing … threatening the jobs …

Since customers said “bite it” when labels released encrypted CDs that simply couldn’t be copied, this latest attempt at control can be copied but not uploaded to the Internet. I wonder how R&B singer Anthony Hamilton got to be the guinea pig: The disc has two sets of music tracks: …

As we here at tbomedia.co.uk know, how one responds to popular culture – or even IF one responds to popular culture at all – can say volumes about a person. How we entertain ourselves and sensitivity to art can reveal much about our inner workings. Stephen Snowder calls the media …

Okay, I made up the last part, but the librarians aren’t responding terribly well to Ashcroft’s peace offering from last week. PW NewsLine writes: “The FBI has a history, which Attorney General Ashcroft is ignoring, of violating civil liberties,” says Chris Finan, president of American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. …

Here is how the Magnatune Internet record label describes itself: We’re a record label. But we’re not evil. We call it “try before you buy.” It’s the shareware model applied to music. Listen to hundreds of MP3’d albums from our artists. Or try our genre-based radio stations. If you like …

From the way the RIAA is responding to the current digital challenge, you’d think the recording industry had never faced a threat from technological innovation before. That is hardly the case, as an interesting article in the NY Times today brings up: Since Thomas A. Edison recorded the human voice …

We have one remaining problem with the site today: while we control both tbomedia.co.uk and blogcritics.com, we are still having problems getting the .com address to point to the right address. Please make sure you have the tbomedia.co.uk address in your favorites, blogroll, links, etc. tbomedia.co.uk is our primary address. …

Please accept our apologies for the technical difficulties with the server that shut us down from last night until now. We have had quite good luck on that end, so I guess we were due. Things seem to be back to normal now – thanks for your patience and support, …