The actor who plays the time-and-space warping Hiro Nakamura
in the hit US TV show Heroes
has made some positive comments about file-sharing after it became evident that French fans had either teleported into the future and watched the show before it aired on TV, or maybe downloaded it using BitTorrent
The contentious Russian music download site allofmp3.com looks set to resume business after a Moscow court ruled it was legal under the country’s law. A statement on the website, shut down in July, said the service would resume in the foreseeable future
. Before it closed, the cut-price music site claimed to be the second biggest seller of downloads after iTunes. It was the subject of countless lawsuits from UK and US record labels that claimed it violated copyright law. A representative of the music industry said if it started trading again it would still be in clear violation of copyright laws
Vint Cerf — one of the handful of researchers who helped build the internet in the 1970s — said that the television industry would change rapidly as it approached its iPod moment
. The 64-year-old, who is now a vice-president of the web giant Google and chairman of the organisation that administrates the internet, told an audience of media moguls that TV was rapidly approaching the same kind of crunch moment that the music industry faced with the arrival of the MP3 player. 85% of all video we watch is pre-recorded, so you can set your system to download it all the time,
he said. You’re still going to need live television for certain things — like news, sporting events and emergencies — but increasingly it is going to be almost like the iPod, where you download content to look at later
Wal-Mart has hopped on the DRM-free bandwagon with the announcement that it will be participating in Universal’s DRM-free sales pilot. The quality looks good: 256Kbps MP3 for 94 cents apiece, but customers are likely to be turned off by the retail chain’s continued censorship — via Slashdot
Video Ezy is planning to release an electronic movie rental box in time for Christmas in an attempt to hold off online competition. Video Ezy has ordered 10,000 home media centres from data communications producer Mobilesoft, at a cost of $4.5 million. The centres will underpin its electronic rental service. Customers will use the centres to play movies they have downloaded on portable storage devices in a store. Portable storage devices will be used to download files from in Video Ezy stores, and they can be watched on the media centres
Pay TV sales company Multi Channel Network has cast doubt on the future of the digital video-recording platform TiVo, which is backed by the Seven Network, telling advertisers the venture may never get off the ground. Rob Leach, head of MCN’s interactive television division and formerly of British pay-TV company BSkyB, said TiVo had bombed
in Britain after proving to be a difficult product to market
partly due to high set-top box costs. The comments come after media buyers denied a report last week that 20 advertisers had paid $1 million to participate in interactive advertising trials on the TiVo platform
I’ve been meaning to take a crack at amigurumi, but haven’t been able to find a pattern I liked until running across heavens_hellcat‘s crochet pattern on LiveJournal — via CRAFT
A paper published by UCF researchers claims that bad movie physics hurt students’ understanding of real world physics. Some people really do believe a bus traveling 70 mph can clear a 50-foot gap in a freeway, as depicted in the movie Speed. The professors published this paper out of fear that society will pay the price. One of the authors commented on advancements in the past years All the luxuries we have today, the modern conveniences, are a result of the science research that went on in the ’60s during the space race. It didn’t just happen. It took people doing hard science to do it
— via Slashdot
A Russian court has found the former boss of www.allofmp3.com not guilty of breaching copyright, in a case considered a crucial test of Russia’s commitment to fighting piracy. The allofmp3.com web site angered Western music companies by undercutting the price of downloads in deals they said breached copyright law. Denis Kvasov, head of MediaServices which owned the site, was put on trial after entertainment companies EMI Group, NBC Universal and Time Warner pressed for a prosecution
Universal Music have announced that they’re going to try selling much of their catalogue without DRM from now until January. People who don’t want to pay for music just download it from P2P, where all the music is already available for free, without DRM. If you want to convince people to buy your music, you can’t start by making it worse than the free stuff. So it’s inevitable that Universal would come around to this position. They’re not selling DRM-free tracks through iTunes (where Apple charges a 30 percent premium) — they’re selling them through Apple’s competitors — via Slashdot
In a big win for TV viewers around the country, independent EPG provider IceTV has won their eight month battle against Channel Nine. This morning Justice Annabelle Bennett ruled in favour of IceTV that their EPG does not infringe Nine’s copyright in their television schedule. The entire Nine Network case was dismissed, with IceTV declared an independent compilation
built wholly by their own means
Pretty self explanatory, really… some twisted Korean genius has come up with origami versions of pretty much every unit from Starcraft. Some of the Zerg models are quite beautiful.
The paper battle scenes are impressively nerdy.
A security expert hired by eleven Oklahoma State University students picked apart the testimony of the RIAA’s own expert witness, pointing out the oversimplifications made by the RIAA in its lawsuits against suspected file-sharers
One of the largest surveys of music consumers (PDF: 2007 Digital Music Survey) to closely examine the question of DRM has an important two-part message for the music industry. The first is that DRM is definitely turning consumers off music sales, and charging them extra to get rid of it may be an uphill battle. The second message is that knowledge of DRM and its problems is spreading fast
A gorgeously steampunk animated short from Blur
Elton John is whining that the internet is destroying good music and stopping people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff
. He laments the way that the internet and the emerging industry of digital music has created a cold and impersonal world for artists to create new music in. Poor Diddums
The New York Public Library has just installed an Espresso book-on-demand machine and they’ll print 20 public domain titles from the Open Content Alliance free of charge for any patron — via Boing Boing
Brian May, the lead guitarist from rock band Queen, is close to earning his doctorate in astrophysics — more than 35 years after quitting his studies to become a rock star. May arrived on the island of La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands several days ago to conduct astronomical observations in support of his thesis, according to a statement by the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands
The British Government has rejected extending copyright for sound recordings. This is an important development in the face of trends to extend copyright duration, although it leaves British copyright protection for music recordings at a shorter duration than for written works. The decision came despite fierce lobbying from the large British music industry. The music industry will now lobby directly to the European Commission, but without the support of the national government, its position is significantly weakened. British copyright for music recordings therefore remains at 50 years after the date of release of a recording, in contrast to 95 years in the US and 70 years in Australia — via Slashdot
A howto guide for creating your own religion for fun and profit
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