Culture and Society

The Harry Potter rollout last weekend required almost as much planning as Gulf War 2: As if by magic, more than 400,000 families across the country opened their front doors Saturday to find a neatly packaged “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” book on their doorsteps. But the …

A short, sweet summary of the digital copyright issues we are always babbling about, from Robert MacMillan in the Washington Post: Buying an album or watching a film used to mean going to the music store or the movies, renting a video, maybe checking out the Columbia House catalog. Those …

There is much to be learned from internecine warfare – cartels never hold in the long run – look at what the baseball owners have done to each other over the years. The major labels are even more stupid and greedy: Two years after music industry lawyers pounded Napster Inc. …

RIAA suit victim Jesse Jordan has received 100% of the $12,000 payment to the RIAA his settlement required through donations – not exactly the “lesson” the RIAA wanted to impart: Thanks to the many generous people out there, I have recovered my savings. Please don’t send me any more money. …

It’s really very simple: the DMCA prohibition against circumventing DVD copy-control is a clear violation of consumer fair use rights. What do citizens do when the law clearly violates their rights? They ignore it: A little program called DeCSS caused a lot of commotion when it surfaced on the Internet …

What with investigating and preventing terrorism and other somewhat important things, you would think we wouldn’t want the FBI distracted by tracking down Kazaa users. Not according to these two entertainment industry ass-lickers: A bill introduced in Congress on Thursday would put federal agents in the business of investigating and …

Exclusive 30-second clips of most of the songs from Warren Zevon’s brilliant forthcoming album The Wind are now up on the MSNBC story. It’s an excellent way to get a head start and this fateful disc. Please check it out – the Internet is a very cool thing.

Let it never be said that our Blogcritics aren’t newsworthy. Ryan Irelan was featured in the NY Times yesterday – how cool is that? The compulsion to get noticed by some of the big fish in the blogging world is tempting for many, however, because it can lead to significant …

Time’s new list of the 50 Best Websites is pretty standard fare: most of the ususal reference, info, shopping standards that are pretty hard to argue with. But then we come to the Blogs section. There is only one. It is Gawker. Let me think of how to put this …

A gathering to explore the future of P2P in L.A. Auguest 8: P2P Summit announced today its formation and date for the upcoming summit focused exclusively on the explosive file sharing phenomena and its impact on the future of entertainment. P2P Summit is seeking speakers, sponsors and exhibitors for the …