Category Archives: Technology

Time To Stick It To The Music Industry (follow-up)

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It pays to read k2.com. Not always, but definitely in this case. Just to refresh your memory, I posted an entry here about a class action suit against the music industry for price fixing called the CD Minimum Advertised Price Antitrust Litigation Settlement, urging you to sign up at their website. I was pessimistic, having seen efforts like this fail before, that any money was actually going to arrive as a result.

Boy, was I wrong. Just a day or two ago a check for $13.86 arrived in the mail, courtesy of the Attorney General of Virginia, Jerry Kilgore. This is what it looks like:

The note attached to the check reads in part:

Dear Virginia Music Purchaser:As Attorney General for the State of Virginia, I am pleased to enclose payment for your claim in the settlement of the Compact Disc Minimum Advertised Price Antitrust Litigation. The lawsuit was brought by the Attorneys General of 43 states and three territories and by counsel for Private Class Plaintiffs on behalf of purchasers of music CDs. In accordance with the terms of the court-approved settlement, payment is being made to music purchasers who filed a valid and timely claim.

...

It is a pleasure to bring this matter to a satisfactory conclusion and to return value to consumers who purchased CDs while the challenged pricing policies were in effect.

Jerry W. Kilgore
Attorney General of Virginia
Well, thanks Jerry!

How to never lose Pepsi’s iTunes giveaway

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I’m neither a Pepsi fan nor an iTunes fan, but this was too funny to pass up. Basically, if you tip a Pepsi bottle about 25 degrees from horizontal, you can read the cap and tell whether or not it’s a winner. Macmerc’s website has photos with circles and arrows to make sure you do it correctly.

So those of you who want a few free songs and don’t mind the taste of Pepsi, knock yourselves out :-).

Some Updates And Commercial Thoughts

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Prior to the last post, it had been a while since I had something to say. I tend to make posts when something interests me enough to write more than two sentences about the subject. Sometimes it takes a while to find a subject like that. Anyway, I don’t actually have much to write, but thought I’d point out a couple of commercial things on this web site and my thinking behind them.

First, I put Google ads on the left side of the pages. I’m pretty intrigued by the whole Google ad approach, where they read the text of the page to determine what ads to place. Some of the ads have been pretty amusing. I was mostly curious to see what ads would show up on a blog like mine. I also appreciate the basic usage counter that comes for free with this. And the occasional click through helps keep all of this running. I certainly miss the old days of when banner ads were paid on the impression as well as the click through.

Second, I’ve updated the recommended reading page. I did that because I recently had an e-mail exchange with a friend which included a list of books that I had read. I thought that I ought to try to do a better job keeping the book list up to date for two reasons — I’m often asked for book recommendations and I read so many books that this will help me recall everything that I’ve read.

Third, I put an Amazon “gift” button on the upper right. I don’t know if I’ll keep it, but was interested in the basic idea. Clearly, this isn’t much different than a street performer asking for donations. Well, in large part, that’s what all of us bloggers are. We put some effort into producing content and things like donation buttons allow for contributions in return. Obviously there are community aspects to the entire web log phenomenon, but there seem to be just as many performance aspects. If you are inclined to contribute, that’s fine. If not, that’s fine too. I don’t plan on canceling any performances :-)

P2P Companies Declare Filtering Impossible

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Well, duh. I wonder how long it took to figure that out. New.COM reports in this article that a report filed with Congress indicates that filtering out copyrighted or illegal content is technologically infeasible in a decentralized network. This isn’t rocket science here. The decentralized peer networks were designed specifically to avoid these copyright issues by not centralizing anything. To filter, the peers would have to communicate with a central server that maintained a database of prohibited content and, of course, none of the peer companies want to do that. Centralizing anything would make them liable for the content running on their “networks”, a decidedly bad idea.

Of course the RIAA points out AudibleMagic as a solution for this problem, but it’s not really. AudibleMagic sits at the ISP level and scans packets that fly by, essentially doing the same sort of content filtering that child protection software does to discover prohibited material. If the ISPs or certain enterprises want to get involved in this sort of filtering, so be it.

But in reality, AudibleMagic’s technology will work for, oh, about 10 minutes. I sure hope no one really invested much money in this company. How long do you figure until the peer networks start using SSL or other forms of TLS connections instead of unprotected ones? That’s the next logical step and then AudibleMagic is out of business. It’s trivial to set up arbitrarily encrypted connections between two end points. The encryption doesn’t even have to be that strong, just strong enough to make sure that companies like AudibleMagic don’t work.

If you really want “funny”, how about supporting connections on port 443? That’s the standard SSL port. Sure, probably a few people run web servers on the same box that they run Kazaa, but most don’t. Supporting port 443 for connections, with a fallback to the regular port will really foul up the works. Sure snooping sounds great until you’re snooping on ports that are also used for banking connections and credit card numbers and the like.

The only sane thing to do here is to end it. Canada has implemented a compulsory license with a tax on MP3 players (considering them recordable media). It’s time for the US to do the same.