Rip: Mix: Burn: Sue!

If you haven’t already heard or seen it, Ed Felten’s President’s Lecture in Princeton is a must. It’s the best exegesis yet of the collision between digital technology and the copyright industries. Available in all kinds of formats from here.

Camcorders catch up with the iPod

JVC is about to launch a new generation of camcorders which record not onto ye olde videotape but onto the same kind of tiny hard drives (microdrives) used in the iPod.

You can get about an hour of MPEG2 (i.e. DVD quality) movie on a 4GB drive (the same one that’s in my mini iPod). But of course the big gain is that you can delete duff sequences and free up recording space on the fly.

Internet Explorer’s market share continues to slip

OneStat.com, an Amsterdam-based company which monitors real-time web usage is reporting that Microsoft’s share of the browser market continues to slide — down 5 percent from May to 88.90 percent. Mozilla’s browsers have a total global usage share of 7.35 percent. The new Mozilla’s Firefox has a total usage share of 4.58 — up from effectively zero a year ago. The total usage share of the main Mozilla browser was 2.1 percent at the end of May. Nobody who uses Firefox will be surprised.

Wonder what Microsoft will do. (I’ve discussed the company’s strategic dilemma with IE before.) The thing about Firefox, you see, is that it’s open source software, so there’s no possibility of destroying it the way MS destroyed the (closed source) Netscape operation. Watch this space.