It’s going to be virtually useless for anyone to go there for a few days, so be patient. When the demand slows down a bit, go to Movie88, where you can watch a movie, delivered on demand over the Internet, for $1. No kidding. If you want the story behind this, read this News.com article.

Now we all know that the MPAA is going to try to nail these guys to the wall, but there’s a deeper trend here that important understand. I mentioned in a previous post that the value of intellectual property was going to change as a result of the delivery vehicle changing from atoms to bits and this is yet another example. The fascinating result of this web site is that everyone is going to thrilled to have the opportunity to see these films, even at reduced quality through Real Player, on demand for only a buck. MPAA (and RIAA) take notice — this is a trend not worth fighting. It’s time to change your business models much the way that the news publishers did five years ago.

So I decided that doing this weblog by hand is too painful to continue. I took a look at Blogger and a couple of others but decided on Greymatter. It’s a pretty slick software package that’s written entirely in PERL. I’m running the site with Apache on Linux, so the installation was pretty simple. It has an easy to use interface that includes a commenting and voting capability. I haven’t enabled these features yet, but may in the future. Right now this weblog is read-only for the public, but I may choose to enable this in the future. The templating capability has allowed me eliminate the use of server-side includes for the sidebar and footer sections of the main page.

Any thoughts on weblogging software? Send me comments.

How times have changed for the folks at Sun. According to this Reuters article (via Yahoo), Sun Microsystems is going to roll out a line of servers with the Linux OS. This move is a continuation of events that started with their acquistion of Cobalt. Cobalt, if you recall, produced Linux appliances that were shipped in closed boxes. They run without monitors and keyboards — instead they boot up and are configured through a web-based interface (and a small LCD on the back of the unit). Seems that Sun is going to expand this line of units and treat them more seriously. These boxes are excellent small office/home office units — easy to configure, use and manage.

As IBM continues to shift its operating system strategy towards Linux, it appears that Sun is going to have to follow suit. It won’t surprise me if Solaris is phased out in the next five years. Sun will probably have to do what IBM has been doing — moving Linux onto its hardware architecture to achieve performance and scaleability. The current Sun/Cobalt Linux boxes are essentially Intel architecture units, but that won’t do for Sun in the long run. You’ll likely see Sun architecture boxes running Linux in the near future, which is where they will attempt to distinguish themselves in the market.

Seems that KaZaA has been nailed by the Dutch government. As the article says:

“A Dutch judge has ruled that Internet company KaZaA must stop its users sharing copyrighted music files, but the company said on Friday it could not comply because, unlike Napster (news – web sites), it does not know who its customers are.”

KaZaA uses FastTrack technology to implement its P2P functionality. It’s completely serverless, so there’s no way that KaZaA can conceivably comply with this ruling. Similar lawsuits by the RIAA and MPAA against Music City and Grokster will also create a compliance problem.

Frankly I think there’s going to be a huge compliance problem out there. These systems were built as serverless, self-organizing systems specifically so the companies could avoid any copyright compliance problems. In many ways, this problem is exactly like copy machines. As you know, you are not allowed to copy copyrighted material on a copy machine. Yet the publishing industry allows those devices to exist. The music and motion picture industries are now faced with this problem and they are likely going to completely fail in controlling it now that Pandora’s box has been opened.

The only potential outcome from these suits is that they can force certain developers to stop distributing their software. But this is clearly an infringement on free speech, which I don’t think will stand up in the Supreme Court.

Read the full article at Yahoo.