I was looking for a way to includes these in my story about the brokeness of patent law, but they just wouldn’t fit. So here they are separately.
Increasingly, content owners are taking advantage of the vagaries of the “public domain” to make us pay for rights we used to take for granted.
For instance, when you [...]

Posted March 9, 2005 by Casey
Categories: Copyrights & Intellectual Property. . One Comment.

Hack-a-Day has just given me the best reason I’ve seen yet to take a closer look at iPod Linux: audio input without the cheap dohicky accessories and at up to 96KHz x 16bit. The five step instructions couldn’t be much simpler (well, it might be more complex once a person actually tries it, but the [...]

Posted December 30, 2004 by Casey
Categories: Technology. . 257 Comments.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer did another one of his monkey acts when he went ape about music and DRM.
Most people still steal music…We can build the technology but there are still ways for people to steal music.
The most common format of music on an iPod is ’stolen’.
It could just be a picture of what happens [...]

Posted October 8, 2004 by Casey
Categories: Copyrights & Intellectual Property. Tags: arstechnica, content, content consumer, content creator, copyfight, copyright, copyright law, drm, ipod, piracy, shite, steve ballmer. Be the first one.

TeleRead brought me this story about a copy protected version of the US Constitution that’s now selling on Amazon. Among the restrictions: it can only be printed twice a year. For those who don’t understand the irony already, the US Constitution is in the public domain in so many ways it’s funny, yet a commercial [...]

Posted July 4, 2004 by Casey
Categories: Copyrights & Intellectual Property. . 2 Comments.

Something doesn’t add up. ARIA, Australia’s version of our RIAA recently announced that sales continued to slide there this past year, while critics pointed out that they really had a record-breaking year with 50 million album sales. Thank ArsTechnica for the link. This matches news from the UK this past summer. So why is the [...]

Posted March 31, 2004 by Casey
Categories: Copyrights & Intellectual Property. . One Comment.

Googling “proprietary” results in lots of hits, but very few of them use the word in a positive sense. The Webopedia Computer Dictionary offers:
Proprietary
Privately owned and controlled. In the computer industry, proprietary is the opposite of open. A proprietary design or technique is one that is owned by a company. It also implies that the [...]

Posted March 25, 2004 by Casey
Categories: Technology. Tags: aac, audio player, beta, betamax, downloadable audio, downloadable content, fairplay, format war, format wars, ipod, portable audio player, proprietary, vhs, vhs beta, vhs v. beta, vhs vs. beta, windows media, wma, wmv. 4 Comments.