Culture and Society

The legal and regulatory points are arcane and bone dry, but the implications for the future of file sharing are staggering. A little rethinking goes a long way, it would appear – this is very clever: A former McAfee CEO appears to have found a way around the legal minefield …

GarageBand.com is offering the Creative Commons Music Sharing License to artists who want to share their music via the site for free: The license allows fans to legally download, copy and share the song as many times as they want, as long as they don’t sell or alter it. For …

Sampling when the sampling was good.

McDonald’s is the latest non-music company (Pepsi, Starbucks) to use free music as a marketing tool: McDonald’s is partnering with Sony’s Connect download service to offer free digital music to its patrons. Through the international Big Mac Meal Tracks promotion, McDonald’s customers who buy a Big Mac Extra Value Meal …

Like the Energizer Bunny, the record labels just keep plugging away pushing here, prodding there, doing all they think they can get away with to limit the freedom of consumers, especially the digital freedom of consumers. The latest tactic: restrict the number of times blank CDs can be copied: Tools …

This is a very profound and philosophical debate touching upon where our priorities lie as a culture. It sounds like just another turf war between jobs and technology – between Paul Bunyan and the power saw – but it is also about our means of valuation of entertainment and art. …

And how it relates shock jocks, satellite video, driving 1,000 miles to Florida with little kids, and other picaresque ramblings.

“Big games”: hybrids between the real world and video games, are popping up in urban areas: Somewhere out there on the streets of Greenwich Village, a fellow student was running around in a yellow Pac-Man suit. His four pursuers, code-named Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde, aimed to track him down …

Blogger has upgraded in an effort to stop the world from passing it by, and – who knows? – maybe the new version is a big step forward. Since I only used Blogger/Blogspot for about seven months back in ’02, I don’t have first-hand knowledge, but from what I have …

The P2P companies have decided that ridding their systems of child pornographers is probably a good PR move: Online file-sharing networks, used by millions of consumers to trade digital music, videos, games and software, are beginning to work with law enforcement to crack down on child-pornography purveyors who use their …