Subject URL: You created this monster, you figure it out

"You created this monster, you figure it out", Judge Patel hearing the Napster case said today. She stopped short of shutting it down, waiting on expert advice.

I quote Patel and say to the music industry... "You created this monster, you figure it out"... but it's not me making the decisions.

I'm over the whole 'music should be free' deal. What I'm not over is stupid market forces. The biggest issue with digital music sales today is different contracts in different countries. The new RealMedia streaming service I mentioned a few days ago is VERY likely to be USA only. They will not be able to sell music to anyone but someone in the US.

WiredRecords.com when it finally opens for business will be Australia only. You must be in Australia or New Zealand to purchase a track.

We are bending technology around their ancient idea of separate countries with separate markets. An idea that just doesn't work on the net... and barely works in the real world. So many of the really good uses for digital music sales will be wasted because of silly rules like this... especially when they're most likely to pump most of their money into the US based services...

Subject URL: History via WWW

An article in Slashdot I found interesting discussing history. We know so much of what we know now about ancient cultures because of the history they left behind in paper, stone, wall paintings. Much of what we have learned isn't from the 'official' documents (such as war talies, who ruled when etc.) but from random uninteresting-at-the-time documents found under piles of junk...

CDs will decay, old disks from 10 years ago are unaccessable now and that data is lost forever. How much of it really matters though? Do we need to know everything that happened ever? Do we need backups of every piece of music ever recorded? We have certainly lost a lot of recordings since recordings began and we will lose a lot more...

Which ofcourse brings up weblogs. Will my random ranting be read in 20 years time by history buffs? I havn't really said anything that interesting about my daily life. I've mentioned my band, recording methods, getting gigs. I've ranted about the current massive issue with music copyrights and my desires for the future. Depending on what actually happens, I'm sure these rants would be interesting to someone in the future...

Talk above also makes the whole Deja newgroup post histoy project seem a little less useless. (not that I ever thought it was...)

It got me thinking for a few minutes anyway.

Subject URL: Fake Encores

Cute little rant about fake encores and their history thanks to Dave.