Excellent Salon piece on the dogged obtuseness of the record companies

“The Berman bill could be seen as a new low for the industry — further indication that it sees the fight against MP3s as its defining cause and will go to any length to pursue it, no matter how outrageous. During the last three years, the battle against file sharing has become the entertainment industry’s version of the War on Drugs, an expensive, protracted, apparently ineffective and seemingly misguided battle against a contraband that many suggest does little harm. The labels’ main strategy — busting the biggest dealers in an attempt to strangle the supply of free MP3s, while offering few palatable solutions to stem the demand — is a classic tactic from the War on Drugs book, and it has failed just as clearly. Despite the RIAA’s recent settlement with AudioGalaxy — in which the trading service agreed to make available only those songs that it had formal permission to list, an agreement that renders AudioGalaxy useless — researchers believe that more people are trading music than ever before…”

[ More.]

The piece also includes a really useful quote about the Berman bill:
“It’s not that different from making it legal to break into someone’s house to make sure they don’t have any illegal Mickey Mouse posters on the wall,” says Adam Fisk, a Gnutella developer who works on LimeWire, a popular file-trading software application.

The Berman bill provides a vivid illustration of who imbalanced things have become. It treats IP as an absolute right rather than a community-bestowed one, and seeks to justify appalling behaviour in defence of property. Well, there was a time when owners of land were allowed to behave like that. But, at least in the UK, one is no longer allowed to shoot or injure someone just because he is trespassing on your property — or even (c.f. the case of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer jailed for shooting a burglar) someone who is breaking into your home. That’s because over the centuries, British society evolved a balance between (i) the rights of property-owners and (ii) reserving the right to exercise force to lawful authorities.

My Observer column about Cambridge’s proposed new policy on intellectual property is on the Web.

BlogTree.Com is “the blog genealogy site. You can register your blogs and record which blogs inspired their creation. You can also search for existing blogs and view which blogs they in turn inspired.” Great idea! [Scripting News]

Paul Boutin explains how to record vinyl on a Mac.

Useful review of PressPlay

by Steve McCannell.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: ‘Politics of Control’ Leads a Law Student to Challenge Digital-Copyright Act. Q&A with Benjamin G. Edelman. There are a few specific examples that make it all fit together. Certainly, this filtering is an example of control, someone getting between you and where you want to go. You want to read about breast cancer, N2H2 says that that’s pornography, and so they won’t let you. [Tomalak’s Realm]

Really good review of Larry Lessig’s Future of Ideas

Reviewed by Arthur Morin.

Creative Commons shows its preliminary metadata spec.

Anatomy of Blogging — with insight

Meg Hourihan’s lovely essay, entitled “What We’re Doing When We Blog”.

Campaign for Cambridge Science

Cambridge University, which along with MIT and Stanford, has a liberal policy on academics’ IP rights, is proposing to change it to a much more repressive regime. As usual, the people behind this have no idea of what they are effectively doing — killing the geese that lay the golden eggs — and indeed seem contemptuous of the notion that there is any connection between liberal attitudes towards IP and industrial creativity. Here’s a splendid polemic by Ross Anderson against this idiocy. For a comparison between Silicon Valley and Route 128 (the Massachussetts equivalent) see here. And here’s how MIT handles Faculty IP.