Cloud nine

We’ve been having crazy weather — torrential showers followed by patches of sunshine. And amazing cloudscapes.

Face painting

Observed at the Summer Picnic at my son’s school.

Schadenfreude over Google

Lots of people are licking their wounds over missing out on Google. Nice piece in today’s NYT based on talking to some of the Sand Hill Road venture capitalists who were offered a slice but failed to see the opportunity. The piece quotes one such loser as saying:

“The thing we couldn’t come to grips with was, ‘Gee, can we work with these two guys?’ It was clear our vision of how things had to be done were totally incompatible with their vision.”

“We were wrong,” he said. “It would’ve been a great investment. But nevertheless, if you think you’re going to be instantly in conflict with the principals, you don’t want to make the investment.”

One meeting, he said, left him feeling that the two Google founders, then in their mid-20’s, were headstrong and naïvely egalitarian in ways that seemed incompatible with their ambitions.”

I love that bit about Larry and Sergey being “headstrong and naively egalitarian”. It didn’t put off John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, the two venture capitalists who did bet on Google. When it was reported that the pair had put $25 million into the company I remember thinking “This will fly”, because Doerr has always had terrific judgement. His $11 million stake is now worth $3 billion. Not bad, eh?

Writing in the Boston Globe, Jonathan Zittrain from the Berkman Center concludes that the company’s Dutch auction was a success. “Google gave the public a chance to buy shares directly, on an equal footing with banks and big traders,” he writes. “The response from the financial establishment was understandably sour. The result was that, during Google’s so-called ‘quiet period’ preceding the IPO, the information vacuum was filled by the establishment, which gravely identified the company’s ‘missteps’ and ‘blunders.’ … The auction worked as a pricing mechanism precisely because the valuable expertise of the investment banks and institutions was naturally folded into the bidding process, lowering the cheekily high price Google was initially seeking and leaving sentimental investors for once with the chance to sell brand new shares side-by-side with the big players when the opening bell rang.”

Couldn’t have put it better myself. In fact I did in my column last Sunday!

What the Appeal Judge wrote

The Judgment in the MGV vs Grokster case makes fascinating reading. Here’s Para 10:

“While Grokster and StreamCast in particular may seek to be the ‘next Napster,’ …, the peer-to-peer file-sharing technology at issue is not simply a tool engineered to get around the holdings of Napster I and Napster II. The technology has numerous other uses, significantly reducing the distribution costs of public domain and permissively shared art and speech, as well as reducing the centralized control of that distribution. Especially in light of the fact that liability for contributory copyright infringement does not require proof of any direct financial gain from the infringement, we decline to expand contributory copyright liability in the manner that the Copyright Owners request.”

P2P file-sharing services are legal, says US appeals court

Wired story:

Peer-to-peer file-sharing services Morpheus and Grokster are legal, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.

The decision is a blow for record labels and movie studios which sued the peer-to-peer operators claiming that the services should be held liable for the copyright infringement of their users.

The Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America have long argued that rampant trading of copyright songs and movies on these file-swapping networks has crippled their businesses.

The decision upholds an April 2003 U.S. District Court decision that these services should not be held liable for the illegal behavior of their users. The studios and labels appealed the decision and the appeals court heard oral arguments on the case in February.

The district court correctly applied the law, wrote Judge Sidney Thomas, a member of the three-judge panel for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“History has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology be a player piano, a copier, a tape recorder, a video recorder, a personal computer, a karaoke machine, or an MP3 player,” Thomas wrote. “Thus, it is prudent for courts to exercise caution before restructuring liability theories for the purpose of addressing specific market abuses, despite their apparent present magnitude.”

Holes found in XP ‘security’ update

Well, well. From BBC Online:

“Barely hours after home users started securing their PCs with a key update for Windows XP, security experts have found ways around it.

The SP2 update makes XP less attractive to virus writers and malicious hackers by plugging widely exploited loopholes.

But discoveries by security firms Secunia and German company Heise show that some holes have been left open…”

EuroFOO Launch

Tim O’Reilly launched the Friends of O’Reilly Conference in Enschede a short while ago. Lots of interesting people, and the first self-organising conference I’ve ever attended. Plus wireless, wireless everywhere.

The perfect rainbow

This evening there was a torrential shower followed by sunshine. The result: the nearest thing I’ve seen to a perfect rainbow. Infuriatingly hard to photograph, though — especially with a digital camera. This doesn’t do it justice.

Absorption

Music reaches places other art forms cannot touch. There was a jazz group playing outside the railway station in Avignon. The woman in the picture spent at least 20 minutes listening with a rapt smile, tapping her feet, lost to everything except the music. She was still there when we left.

Provencal decor

Funny how simple things can be beautiful. This is an alcove in my bedroom in Provence.