As Google put thousands of public domain books online Thursday, Amazon.com responded by announcing plans to allow people to read books on the Web. Meanwhile, Random House, the world’s largest publisher of trade books, said it had come up with a business model for allowing people to pay to view its books on the Internet
With iTunes selling a couple of popular TV shows now there has been significant hesitation from other television producers to follow suit and put their content on the Web. It has also sparked activity from the actors unions who want additional compensation for what appears online. But there is also existing content that stands to be revived in this new context, older television shows from the 50s and 60s that have been squeezed out of the traditional broadcast by popular shows of more recent vintage. It was suggested to a producer who is presently digitising 27 episodes of a 1950s show called Captain Zero to offer it up on iTunes for a dollar an episode. Purveyors of old radio programmes have enjoyed a significant revival by embracing web-based technology
Austar has confirmed it will commence rollout of a broadband network, planning to have broadband in two regional markets by the first half of 2006, with 15 more areas online by the end of 2007
This has been a pretty big couple o’ weeks for Apple. New iMacs, new powerbooks, new G5’s and pro photography app Aperture all released. But for me, it’s new black video iPods and iTunes music store in Oz that’s really taken my fancy.
I see a white pod, and I want to paint it black… FINALLY! Black! Apple why has this taken so long! I’ve seen the black iPod Nano in the flesh, and that black is damn sexy! I mean Steve Jobs is always in black, so why not the pods up until now?
I of course have one of these babies on order, so I’m debating which would be the best/quickest/pain free-est option for exchanging my ye olde 3rdGen 30GB iPod for some bucks. Same goes for ye olde Sony Cyber shot camera.
ITunes Australia: Sony BMG have not signed up as yet, which is unfortunate, I think, well I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head which bands with Sony BMG I like. $1.69 per song, some albums going for $16.99. Is this too much? I don’t know. I guess I’d have to try the store out first to see how it goes.
Update: I got my iPod yesterday along with a camera connector. It is gorgeous and makes my 3rd Gen iPod look like a brick-like fossil. It does come with a flimsy case. This will have to do until I can find one that is more suitable. I used the new iTunes site to purchase Bjork’s Oceania video, store is quite nice to use, and the video playback on pod is great. You don’t get an AC adapter for non computer charging though, which sucks.
The camera connector works pretty good too so far.
After more than a year of speculation and false starts, Apple is finally expected to announce the iTunes Australia music store on Tuesday
15 years ago today, Col Needham posted some shell scripts to rec.arts.movies which allowed anyone to search lists of actors, actresses, directors, and biographies. From this humble beginning — which predates Yahoo, Google, and even the web itself — the IMDb has wrangled the collective wisdom of millions of submitters to become not only a top 100 web site but also a standard hollywood tool for film making. IMDb is celebrating with a retrospective of the last 15 years of IMDb and movies
The BBC has commissioned the Doctor Who scriptwriter Russell T Davies to make an adult spin-off of its most famous sci-fi show. The new programme will be called Torchwood (an anagram of Doctor Who) and will follow a crack team investigating alien activities and crime in modern-day Britain. It will feature in its starring role John Barrowman, who played Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who and who will play the same character in Torchwood
The people of Belgium have been left reeling by the first adult-only episode of the Smurfs, in which the blue-skinned cartoon characters’ village is annihilated by warplanes. The short but chilling film is the work of Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund. The short film pulls no punches. It opens with the Smurfs dancing, hand-in-hand, around a campfire and singing the Smurf song. Bluebirds flutter past and rabbits gambol around their familiar village of mushroom-shaped houses until, without warning, bombs begin to rain from the sky. Tiny Smurfs scatter and run in vain from the whistling bombs, before being felled by blast waves and fiery explosions. The final scene shows a scorched and tattered Baby Smurf sobbing inconsolably, surrounded by prone Smurfs. The final frame bears the message: Don’t let war affect the lives of children
Aardman Animations, the company behind Wallace and Gromit, has lost 30 years of its history after its Victorian warehouse in Bristol went up in flames
Sony has an odd response to complaints from fans who have discovered they cannot import their CD content to an iPod. Individuals who complain to Sony BMG about iPod incompatibility are being directed to a web site that provides information on how to work around the technology. In short, some labels appear to have been instructing customers how to defeat DRM — which is a violation of DMCA
Ronnie Barker, who became one of the country’s most popular entertainers through appearances in The Two Ronnies, Open All Hours and Porridge, has died aged 76 after a long period of heart trouble
It appears that the Hollywood monkeys have finally realised what the rest of us have known for years. Poor box office receipts over the summer weren’t caused by surging fuel costs, changes in audience preferences, or anything else. They were caused by mind-numbingly bad movies
After seven years of production, Star Wreck: In The Pirkinning, the Finnish Star Trek / Babylon 5 parody movie, was finally released on DVD a month ago and is now available for download. In spite of its practically zero budget, the film has a hilariously captivating story, top notch CGI and even a couple of performances from professional actors
IFPI — the international equivalent of the RIAA — has released a piece of software (Digital File Check) that will delete your P2P software, strongly implying that P2P is itself illegal and using ridiculous, non-legal terms like copyright theft
. So much for 17,000,000 freely shareable CC-licensed works, so much for the public domain, so much for everything except for content from giant publishing organisations. No word on whether this malware also deletes your web-browser, e-mail client and IM software, since all these, too, are sometimes used to infringe on copyright — via BoingBoing
LimeWire is working on new code that will block non-licenced material. The new code checks to see if shared material is licensed, if it is not, the LimeWire client will politely inform the user, LimeWire can’t determine if one or more files have been published under a suitable license. These files will not be shared
An hilarious cartoon from Jared Purrington explains how to convert your pet hamster to a mean, lean pit-fighting machine, and stage hamster deathmatches with your pals — via boingboing
The Authors Guild has filed a class action lawsuit against Google. The lawsuit claims that Google’s scanning and digitising of library books as a part of the Google Print Project constitutes massive copyright infringement
. In addition to the lawsuit The Authors Guild has also issued a press release to explain its actions. Google has responded, pointing out that the Library Project is fully consistent with both the fair use doctrine under US copyright law and the principles underlying copyright law itself, which allow everything from parodies to excerpts in book reviews
Copyright terms have been continually extended since they were passed into English law by the Statute of Queen Anne. As these monopoly rights have grown, so the public domain has shrunk, greatly reducing our access to creative works, condemning vast quantities of our culture to obscurity and disappearance, and limiting the opportunities for future creators to build upon the works of the past. The 14+14 campaign has a simple goal: to restore a balance long lost by returning copyright to its original term as laid down in the Statute of 14 years with the option of a 14 year renewal — via BoingBoing
The RIAA has been pushing the FCC to impose a copy-protection mandate on the makers of next-generation digital radio receiver/recorders. Never mind that digital audio broadcasting is not significantly greater in quality than regular, analogue radio. Never mind that its music quality is vastly less than than that of audio CDs. In spite of these inconvenient facts, the RIAA is hoping that the transition to digital audio broadcasting
will provide enough confusion and panic that they can persuade Congress or the FCC to impose some kind of copy-protection scheme or regulation on digital radio broadcast
The Gameboy Advance has changed its form factor yet again, this time to resemble an NES controller.
The new GBA Micro has a brighter screen than the SP, and appears to have grown back the missing headphone socket. Stylish, but I think I prefer the clamshell format of the SP. Happily the new SPs also have the improved screen.
RSS – Posts