Culture and Society

I haven’t swan dived into the Great Blogging Ethics Debate, as Cynthia Webb calls it in the Washington Post, because it seems pretty obvious to me: Sean-Paul Kelley is a liar, a plagiarist, and an embarrassment to the blogging community. In case you have been watching a war or something, …

From Disney to your home digitally – what middle men? Walt Disney plans to start live tests this year on a digital home video distribution system which could bypass conventional rental services, undermine movie piracy, and deliver new profit streams directly to the group’s bottom line. The announcement, from Michael …

TiVO as content hub: The San Jose, Calif., company on Tuesday made available a new software upgrade that will allow its TiVo Series2 digital video recorders to tap content stored on a home PC. ….the Home Media Option software will let the TiVo boxes access and distribute content such as …

Following up on the case we mentioned yesterday, a Maryland court ruled a notorious spammer may remain outed: An Internet site that provides personal information about an alleged purveyor of mass e-mail is not harassment and does not need to be removed, a Maryland district court judge ruled yesterday. Francis …

Billboard relates Pat DiNizio’s subscription plan: New Jersey-based artist Pat DiNizio, lead singer/songwriter of the Smithereens, has founded Patrons & Artists Together, a boutique entertainment partnership meant to fund his recording and touring projects and reward participants with a unique music experience, as well as provide free music via the …

Nice overview of Napster history – did it really happen? – in LA Times excerpt from new book All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster by Joseph Menn: It all began with a poor Boston-area kid who came west to Silicon Valley and started a revolution. …

We have written about the multi-billion dollar lawsuit the RIAA just filed against four college students – copyright activist and Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig weighs in on the situation: They say I’m a pessimist about the future of freedom on the net, and they’ve got two books of mine to …

Spam scum George Allen Moore Jr., “Dr. Fatburn,” didn’t like being outed by angry geek and went to court: Francis Uy, a self-described computer geek from Ellicott City, decided to fight back by employing a tactic increasingly used by a small cadre of e-mail users fed up with spam: Outing …

They’ve been talking about this for 20 years, but now real time translation is “good enough“: Most Americans likely have difficulty understanding the broadcasts of Al Jazeera, the Arab news network, but several government agencies now can watch it while simultaneously receiving an English translation of the programming. Virage Inc., …

Declan McCullagh on the Computers, Freedom and Privacy (CFP) conference: At the 13th annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy (CFP) conference, attendees fretted about shrinking privacy, growing online censorship, and their reduced ability to make “fair use” of music, video and software girded with anticopying technologies. Events included panels with titles …