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.

Whatever next Department

IBM buys PriceWaterhouseCoopers for $3.5 billion. Well, at least it’ll get rid of that crazy name.

The Register: Microsoft man seeks US Net Radio reprieve. A bill to protect grassroots Internet radio has been offered before Congress. The Internet Radio Fairness Act would exempt webcasters with less than $6 million in annual revenues from the additional RIAA royalty and from future royalty requirements. [Tomalak’s Realm]

A new challenge to the DMCA

According to this this NEWS.COM report, the ACLU have challenged the DMCA using an ingenious angle. A Harvard researcher investigating the encrypted block-lists used by filtering software companies wants to crack the encryption so that he can assess how effective the programs are. But that would constitute creating an anti-circumvention device, wouldn’t it? See you in court.