Culture and Society

This short web film, S-11 Redux, an entrant in the Sundance Online Film Festival, is worth looking at on several levels. From a copyright theory standpoint, it shows the importance of making products of mass culture available for all to “sample” toward the creation of new art. On a content …

Our own Kevin Marks has a complex and fascinating look – with charts, graphs and other pretty pictures – at Power laws and blogs. Being really bad at higher math and averse to long strings of numbers connected by symbols, this is what I gather from the data: the best-known …

US government released the report Friday. The president says this about that: My Fellow Americans: The way business is transacted, government operates, and national defense is conducted have changed. These activities now rely on an interdependent network of information technology infrastructures called cyberspace. The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace provides …

Verizon asks federal judge to “keep the cat in the bag”: Verizon Communications struggled Thursday to convince a skeptical judge that it should not be forced to reveal the name of a customer alleged to have downloaded more than 600 songs over the Internet. U.S. District Judge John Bates ordered …

Listen.com cuts its price per song download to 49 cents: Listen.com of San Francisco may have the songs, the technology and the distributors for a successful online music service, but it’s still missing a key ingredient: the customers. While millions of consumers are downloading songs for free from unauthorized services, …

First it was the colleges and universities, now the RIAA and MPAA are going after corporations in their anti-file sharing campaign: Movie studios and record labels are taking their case against illegal Internet downloads directly to corporations, where much of the offending action allegedly occurs. The Recording Industry Association of …

Why file sharing isn’t the recording industry’s biggest problem: It’s the busy season for number-crunchers at the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). By the end of February, the industry trade association will release new statistics on what it says is a dizzying two-year decline in CD sales. The latest …

MusicBrainz is here to help you with your music selection: MusicBrainz, an open-source music meta-data service, has announced the formal launch of its music recognition service designed to provide an open standard for recognizing and identifying digital music files, while providing an alternative to costly proprietary offerings. Supporting this effort, …

My beloved Valentine (who has a cold – get well) has an on the scene report from a protest where a dangerous social rift seems to be developing along the fault line of support for the war: As an impending war with Iraq looms like an outbreak of herpes on …

Inside Digital Media audio interview with Eric Garland of BigChampagne, the P2P measurement company. Highlights of the interview include: – Music that is popular on KaZaa differs from the SoundScan data – Billboard popularity charts also don’t match KaZaa. – New releases that are heavily traded on KaZaa become best …