EU proposes to change copyright law to allow fair use. [itworld] via Slashdot.

No tougher sanctions are introduced against individuals who download tracks for noncommercial use. Criminal sanctions only apply when copyright infringement is carried out intentionally and for commercial purposes, the Commission said.

Which means Kaaza would be attacked (as it is commercial) but downloading a few songs from a friend (via ICQ, FTP, mIRC, eMail, whatever) wouldn't be followed up. Record companies are pissed.

Space shuttle breaks up on re-entry, killing all seven on board. Australia doesn't wake up to it until Sunday morning. At 2am (when it all happened), Luke blogged the TV coverage...

Channel two is playing 'The Final Countdown' by Europe. Nine has David Letterman telling shitty jokes and channel ten is, as usual, trying to sell me the "California beauty sunless tanning system." SBS is not letting Manchester United's fans down....If only Homer was there with his inanimate rod.

I want to work for these guys... except they're in Canberra and the pay is shit.

Speaking of PVR for FM, this page has links to some nice recording software with timers I might try out. I believe Triple J's "The Club" show is playing an Underworld special (likely to include the Underworld gig from Tuesday at the Metro in Melbourne) from 1am this Sunday morning. It was postponed from last Sunday morning.

More smoke today, more beautiful sunsets, more looking at the dry grass on all the laws around here and the dying trees and wondering how long the hose is.

And on a different note, some advice to the record companies. They're coming at all of this piracy digital downloads stuff from the wrong angle.

Go to war on compression! Sell to the audiophiles out there who hate MP3 and sell SHN (lossless compression) files. If you sell perfect digital copies of the CDs with cover art for a bit less than at the store you'll have me won over.

But they need to do it now while bandwidth for your average user (including broadband users) is low. It is much easier to download an MP3 that's 2Mb compared to a 30Mb SHN file and so they're (SHN) are much less likely to be shared. In fact, the hope would be that people would share and try-before-you-buy MP3 files and then buy the perfect digital unDRMed SHN files from the offical high-bandwidth record company sponsored website. At the moment there is no incentive to purchase online, the files being offered are not only not much better quality and made difficult to listen to thanks to DRM restrictions.

Although I already poke holes in my idea... your average album worth of SHN files would be 300-400Mb. That's costs your average Australian a fair bit of money to download. You'd need to make the download fairly cheap to make it worth the effort... and this amount of download would take hours, who would bother? Audiophiles yes, especially if you're offering music that is unavailable elsewhere. See Phish's idea to sell concerts (DAT recorded by them and put online 2 days after the gig) for $13 in SHN or $10 in MP3. Maybe offer MP3 for cheaper?

hmmm... damn... i guess they're all screwed arn't they?