Recently there has been some great news for the file-sharing community:  Three of the major music labels are looking to set up a collective licensing system with universities so that students can share music without being sued and expelled from their schools.  The project, named Choruss, could have a huge effect on file-sharing, hopefully paving the way for collective licensing with ISPs for the regular home user.  The idea behind collective licensing is that everyone pays in a small fee, probably less than $5 per person.  This money is split between labels and artists based on relative popularity.  People can then share content however they want, with whatever program or provider they want, without the fear of being sued by one of the big labels.  Of course, Choruss only applies to three of the four big labels (Warner, Sony-BMG, and EMI, but not Universal), but if these labels start a collective licensing system how long is it until movie and software producers catch on? 

In other news, yet another Governor of Illinois is set up to be indicted and likely convicted of corruption charges.  Gov. Blagojevich has been conspiring to sell President-Elect Barack Obama’s Senate seat to the highest bidder.  The idea was that Gov. Blagojevich would take bids such as high paying jobs for him or his wife, and if nothing acceptable was offered he would appoint himself.  This is a man who ran on the platform of reform in Illinois, something we have still not seen to this day, as this arrest clearly shows.

Posted by Wes Mueller on 12/10 at 01:09 PM  •   •  permalink

A couple of interesting articles I’d like to talk about.  The first of the two is regarding a recent add-on that was created for the Firefox browser.  This plug-in adds a option when you are browsing Amazon to download the content you are looking at for free.  When clicked, it takes you to The Pirate Bay, my favorite torrent tracker.  Outrage and threats of litigation quickly got the add-on removed, but you can still find it all over the web to download. 

The second interesting piece of news is the litigation that Tiffany and Co. is bringing against eBay to try to force them to find and stop counterfeiters.  If Tiffany get’s their wish, it would force eBay to handle all goods that are sold through them to verify whether or not the goods are counterfeit.  Currently eBay does not handle any merchandise, and this extra step in the selling process would likely bring new fees and increase handling time, causing a serious lack of profitability.  This would be a serious detriment to social retail all over the internet.  The EFF is defending eBay, who is also being backed by Google, Yahoo!, and others.

Posted by Wes Mueller on 12/05 at 03:36 PM  •   •  permalink

It’s an amazing thing to me when the person who is soon to be the highest level elected official in the nations is taking a progressive approach to copyright.  Change.gov, the President-Elect’s transition website has been published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.  This means that anything published on the site is sharable and remixable under the condition that you give credit to the website for the original works.

This is an example of the progressive views I’m looking forward to seeing when the new administration takes its place in the White House.  Hopefully amid the wars and financial turmoil we will have time for reforming all of these things that Obama mentioned while on the campaign trail.  While copyright law certainly isn’t going to be one of the first reforms it’d be nice to see it happen down the road.

Posted by Wes Mueller on 12/01 at 02:01 PM  •   •  permalink

This is why I don’t leave the house on Black Friday.

Save a life.  Observe Buy Nothing Day.

Posted by Wes Mueller on 11/28 at 10:52 PM  •   •  permalink

A complaint was recently filed against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints due to their understated involvment in the passing of Proposition 8 in California.  The Mormon Church reported about $5000, which does not take into account expenses for things like phone banks and websites the Mormon Church organized and sponsored.  California’s law requires that these expense be filed as though they were direct contributions to the passing of the bill.

What I think is interesting in all this is that a Church can openly support and endorse a proposition such as this, but if they endorse a candidate for office they can be fined and for repeat offenses have their nonprofit status revoked.  Why is it that in a system that is supposed to stay secular the religions are even allowed to affect an outcome in state or national elections?  Our government is supposed to be secular, so let’s keep it that way by putting pressure on religious organizations that are caught abusing the system.

Posted by Wes Mueller on 11/26 at 03:16 PM  •   •  permalink