That Eolas suit — and its implications…

Eolas, a company with an intriguing name (‘eolas’ is Irish for ‘knowledge’) has successfully sued Microsoft for $521 million for infringing a patent Eolas holds on how plug-ins link into Internet Explorer (and browsers generally). Given that the patent applies to most browsers, people have been wondering what it might mean for them. Here’s a report which suggests that Eolas boss Michael Doyle (now there’s a good Irish name!) is a supporter of Open Source and is likely to be constructive. Phew!

Larry’s home movie

Larry Lessig’s got the iMovie bug. Here’s the result. Lovely.

Microsoft gets even more serious about Linux threat

Latest ploy is launch of an ‘information’ site publishing case studies purporting to show lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) for Windows installations. Well I never!

UCLA’s ‘World Internet Project’ releases its third report

Very useful sourcebook for data on usage etc.

Steve Jobs at Macworld — an exegesis

Nice piece by Daniel Steinberg. Jobs claimed that there are currently over 9.3 million active Mac OS X users and announced that the iTunes music store has sold more than thirty million songs since it was launched last April 28. The current weekly rate is just shy of one hundred million songs per year. Apple currently has a 70% market share of all legal downloads.

Window on the universe

“In the evenings, when my particular piece of Earth has turned away from the Sun, and is exposed instead to the rest of the cosmos, I sit in front of a keyboard, log on, and seek out the windows that look down at the planets and out at the stars. It’s a markedly different experience from looking at reproductions on paper. What I see is closer to the source. In fact, it’s indistinguishable from the source. These are images that have never registered on a negative. Like the Internet itself, they are products of a digitized era. Over the past couple of years I’ve been monitoring the long rectangular strips of Martian surface being beamed across the void, in a steady stream of zeroes and ones, from the umbrella-shaped high-gain antenna of the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. These pictures are so fresh that their immediacy practically crackles. Call it “chrono-clarity.” That bluish wispy cloud, for example, hovering over the Hecates Tholus volcano, which rears above the pockmarked surface of the Elysium Volcanic Region in the Martian eastern hemisphere — it has barely had time to disperse before I, or anyone with Internet access, can see it in all its spooky beauty. The volcano emerges from the pink Martian desert, which looks organic and impressionable — like human skin, or the surface of a clay pot before firing…”.

Beautiful essay by Michael Benson in The Atlantic which brilliantly captures the sense of awe and wonder about the Net that first prompted me to write my book.

Sound judgement

I’ve just connected a Griffin PowerWave and a pair of Celestion fSeries speakers to my PowerBook. Wow! (The kids have just asked me to turn down the volume — a world first in the Naughton household!)

Happy Birthday, Elvis!

It’s the King’s birthday today. Not many people know this. (Er, neither would I had I not been a reader of the New York Times, which is offering online trailers for some of his films, e.g. Jailhouse Rock.)

Wrapping up 2003

My Observer column looking back on 2003 is here.

File-sharing on the decrease says Pew survey

“The percentage of online Americans downloading music files on the Internet has dropped by half and the numbers who are downloading files on any given day have plunged since the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) began filing suits in September against those suspected of copyright infringement.

Furthermore, a fifth of those who say they continue to download or share files online say they are doing so less often because of the suits.

A new nationwide phone survey of 1,358 Internet users from November 18-December 14 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project showed that the percentage of music file downloaders had fallen to 14% (about 18 million users) from 29% (about 35 million) when the Project last reported on downloading from a survey conducted during March 12-19 and April 29-May 20.

“The record industry law suits have been a watershed event in American culture, so we naturally wanted to see how they might have affected people’s behavior” said Mary Madden, a Research Specialist at the Pew Internet Project who co-authored the new study. “While some people may simply be less likely to admit to downloading now, we have never seen an Internet activity drop off this dramatically. And the comScore data confirm that something significant has happened.”

The data from comScore Media Metrix, based on the company’s continuously measured consumer panel, show significant declines in the number of people with peer-to-peer file sharing applications running on their computers. The declines in the user base of each of these applications from November 2002 to November 2003 were: 15% for KaZaa, 25% for WinMX, 9% for BearShare, and 59% for Grokster.

Conversely, comScore has observed that in recent months a growing number of consumers have turned to a new generation of paid online music services. In November 2003, 3.2 million Americans visited Napster.com, which re-launched as a paid online music service in late October. Apple’s iTunes, which expanded to serve Windows-based PC users in mid-October, drew 2.7 million such visitors in November.”

[More in pdf download from here.]