Microsoft announced that they will no longer support former MSN Music customers who want to play their DRM disabled music on new computers. For Microsoft, apparently it’s digital restrictions management (DRM) or nothing. Jennifer Granick of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, … Continue reading
Introduction Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash) is a proprietary program probably best known these days for two things: showing people videos (YouTube) and making animated interactive graphics on the web (many ads are require Flash). Flash documentation was also, until … Continue reading
The Canadian Broadcast Corporation recently released “Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister“, a competition show where five candidates competed to become the crowd favorite. The show is licensed to share. There’s been some buzz about it online (1, 2) and for … Continue reading
Boing Boing celebrated Public Domain Day today, when many works by authors who died in 1957 enter the public domain in countries that use a “life plus 50 years” term of copyright for personal works (the minimum term required by … Continue reading
The Globe and Mail tells us: Earlier today, Industry Canada, a ministry of the federal government, released a surprising study of peer-to-peer file-sharing on the music industry. The study is called The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on … Continue reading
Marco Tabini describes why he finds the GPL to be “morally repugnant” in the context of discussing the copyright infringement lawsuit facing Verizon right now. Verizon is accused of distributing the GNU General Public Licensed software “BusyBox” without distributing the … Continue reading
The New York Times’ review of Dell machines featuring the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution is a recent illustration of the problems one faces confusing price and freedom, then deciding that freedom (the more important of the two) isn’t worth talking about. … Continue reading
Tristan Rhodes describes the pitch and allure of the open source movement perfectly and simultaneously (perhaps inadvertently) describes why that pitch has so little allure to those who frame the issue in terms of price: What is the main benefit … Continue reading
She likes the largest multinational corporations and disfavors the smaller ones. Cory Doctorow on Marybeth Peters is illuminating: Marybeth Peters, the US Register of Copyrights, has come out in favor of the controversial 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, saying “it … Continue reading
The latest change to iPod software that rendered the audio listening device less interoperable has been broken. This isn’t the first time iPod and iTunes-related algorithms were broken and it won’t be the last. Read more about the news or … Continue reading