ABC Australia nearly 2 million podcasts per month

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is claiming it will see 2 million podcast downloads per month by the end of 2006. There were 1.5 million in June 2006.

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Even though you bought it from me, I still think it's mine.

A federal district court has ruled that a consulting firm did not violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act when performing maintenance on StorageTek tape backup systems. StorageTek had claimed that Custom Hardware illegally tricked a tape backup unit into granting its technicians full access to the system’s internals.But Judge Rya Zobel in Massachusetts ruled (click for PDF) on June 28 that because StorageTek’s GetKey security did not “effectively control access” to the system, the DMCA did not apply. Zobel awarded Custom Hardware summary judgment on that point, although the lawsuit will continue on other grounds.

DMCA dismissed from tape backup lawsuit | CNET News.com

On the ground war-reporting

YouTube – Broadcast Yourself.

One of the amazing things to come out of YouTube is for the people of Israel and Lebanon to post video of what is happening in their towns. This gives the world the opportunity to gain information that is not filtered by world-wide news organisations. Of course, those posting video can have their own bias, but the volume and diversity of posting should provide us with a wide field of information to allow us to make balanced judgements.

Hobbies

Me diving off Airlie Beach, Queensland, Australia

XM Satellite sued

USA record labels have sued XM Satellite  because XM customers can purchase a device that lets them record music. I wonder if they’ve ever heard of cassette tapes?

“The lawsuit, filed in May in New York by the largest record labels, accuses XM Satellite of “massive wholesale infringement” because the new gadget can record hours of music and automatically organize recordings by song and artist. The device is sold under the slogan, “Hear it, click it, save it.”XM Satellite noted that the trade group for the largest labels, the Washington-basedRecording Industry Association of America, supported passage of the 1992 law.A spokesman for the recording association, Jonathan Lamy, said XM Satellite’s legal arguments were “arcane.””If XM wants to compete with iTunes, Rhapsody and similar music distribution services, it needs to obtain the appropriate authorization,” Lamy said.”

XM Satellite asks judge to throw out suit – Yahoo! News

The recording labels just don’t get it. How is XM being a distribution service? What is functionally different from a cassette tape?

As usual, if something is new then the labels attempt to twist the situation to say it’s different to existing circumstances. Perhaps, one day, they will decide to give consumers what consumers want, rather than what the labels want to sell. This attitude will ultimately speed their decline in importance in the marketplace.

Audio books are an avenue for the back catalogue

New chapter for the audio-book market

Digital downloads are capturing a larger slice of the audio-book market as publishers make more titles in their back catalogues available.

Watch out for DRM traps

Here’s an excellent article on the pitfalls of purchasing music online…

The Customer Is Always Wrong: A User’s Guide to DRM in Online Music

A few alternativesIf you want to purchase music online without DRM, check out these services offering MP3s:emusicAudio LunchboxBleepLive DownloadsMagnatuneGaragebandArchive.org/AudioThere is an increasing variety of options for purchasing music online, but also a growing thicket of confusing usage restrictions. You may be getting much less than the services promise.Many digital music services employ digital rights management (DRM) — also known as “copy protection” — that prevents you from doing things like using the portable player of your choice or creating remixes. Forget about breaking the DRM to make traditional uses like CD burning and so forth. Breaking the DRM or distributing the tools to break DRM may expose you to liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) even if you’re not making any illegal uses.In other words, in this brave new world of “authorized music services,” law-abiding music fans often get less for their money than they did in the old world of CDs (or at least, the world before record companies started crippling CDs with DRM, too). Unfortunately, in an effort to attract customers, these music services try to obscure the restrictions they impose on you with clever marketing.This guide “translates” the marketing messages by the major services, giving you the real deal rather than spin. Understanding how DRM and the DMCA pose a danger to your rights will help you to make fully informed purchasing decisions. Before buying DRM-crippled music from any service, you should consider the following examples and be sure to understand how the service might limit your ability to make lawful use of the music you purchase.

EFF: The Customer Is Always Wrong: A User’s Guide to DRM in Online Music

How stupid of Sony

Judge Grants Final Approval for Sony BMG CD SettlementA U.S. District Court judge in New York gave final approval Monday to a settlement for music fans who purchased Sony BMG music CDs containing flawed copy protection programs. “This settlement gets music fans what they thought they were buying in the first place: music that will play on all their electronic devices without installing sneaky software,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Legal Director Cindy Cohn. The claim process actually began back in February and provides anyone who purchased Sony BMG CDs that included First4Internet XCP and SunnComm MediaMax software with the same music without digital rights management (DRM).

EFF: Homepage

Sadly, Sony still doesn’t understand the customer’s attitude to DRM – it’s my computer and my music (once I’ve bought it).

Cyberspace August 2006

Cyberspace August 2006

More office

Last month I mentioned how you can almost replace an expensive “office” suite of applications using some of Google’s products. In the same vein, Zoho has produced some very interesting applications, especially Zoho Creator (http://www.zohocreator.com). Have you ever wanted to survey your clients? You can write a survey or many other applications without programming. If you want to get your hands dirty you can also type some script code, but it’s not neccessary. Applications that others have written include a project organiser, issue tracker, donation manager, inventory manager and a mini customer relationship manager. You can copy other people’s applications and then use them privately or publish your application to the public or selected people.Other Zoho applications (http://www.zoho.com) include a “Powerpoint” style presentation writer, word processor, spreadsheet and “virtual office.” You can even write on-line examinations.

A similar suite of tools can be found at Thinkfree (http://www.thinkfree.com), which also gives you 1 GB of storage space.

PDF

One thing missing from these is a way to create PDFs. If you regularly send documents to clients you may prefer to send them as PDFs to provide weak protection against reuse or accidental editing. It also helps avoid sending hidden data along with the document that Word can often do. The full version of Adobe Acrobat is expensive, but PDF creator (http://tinyurl.com/3jqbq) is free and can do most of what you need.You might have noticed a reference to “tinyurl.com” above. Have you ever sent someone a long URL in an email, only to see it break across lines and become unusable? At Tinyurl you can enter that long url and receive a tinyurl similar to the one above. Clicking that tinyurl will take you to the original site (it’s also useful for saving space in a 600 word magazine column!).QuickiesAustLII, our venerable free legal resource, is running training courses on legal research (http://www.austlii.edu.au/training/). The courses are run in Sydney, although they can be run elsewhere if there is sufficient demand.As mentioned last month, if you’re interested in networking with other law and IT enthusiasts, fill out the survey at http://andrewcalvin.com.Saving on software MacOS X is a great alternative to Windows XP, but Linux might finally be coming of age. I’ve tried Linux many times in the past and have dismissed it as simply being way too hard. Too much has gone wrong in the installation, or once I’ve installed it I’ve wondered what to do next, since there was no software installed and no easy way to install software. That has changed and if you can buy your PCs without an operating system pre-installed you can have a business-grade operating system and Office suite (OpenOffice) using one of the flavours of Ubuntu 6.06 (http://ubuntu.com).

The main versions are Ubuntu and Kubuntu. The principal difference is the look and feel of the desktop and the size of the download. I like them both, and they installed flawlessly on three desktops, a laptop and in virtual machines (http://vmware.com).

In fact, if you install VMware player on your PC you can download a preconfigured Ubuntu installation to try it out. Alternatively, you can boot off a Ubuntu CD and trial it while running solely off the CD, or if you have a spare hard disc you can dual boot between Windows and Ubuntu until you feel comfortable. OpenOffice can read and write Microsoft documents (with some limitations), and Ubuntu can see Windows file servers and operate on a Windows or Mac network.

To be fair, with the money you save on, say six copies of Windows and MS Office (perhaps $3,800) you will need to locate a competent Linux support person. You also may be constrained if you are used to using lots of macros or other Office automation.