opportunity
OiNK Admin Found Not Guilty, Walks Free
After a very long wait of more than two years, last week the OiNK trial got underway with the prosecution making their case against Alan Ellis. This week it was the turn of the defense and yesterday both sides had the opportunity to summarize their positions by submitting their closing arguments to the jury at Teesside Crown Court. Peter Makepeace, prosecuting, naturally painted an extremely negative picture, labeling the Pink Palace as a place designed from the ground up as a personal money-making machine for Ellis.
Continue reading »Nirvana Bassist: I Agree with Bono, Need to Fight P2P
Says “content needs to be worth something if anybody is going to care about it,” and that “free content will ultimately resemble, well, free content.” Last I week I mentioned how U2 frontman Bono had amazingly cited our fight against child pornography and China’s success in suppressing online dissent as examples that filtering content, specifically copyrighted material, is possible. Added to his rant was a criticism of ISPs whom he says have gotten rich from P2P, that they’re “swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.” UK ISP Talk Talk, that country’s largest broadband provider, later responded by calling Bono “seriously misguided.” It countered that not only does P2P “ incur some marginal cost due to the extra bandwidth required ,” but that it’s quite amazing that a comparison would be made between the “ need to protect minors from the evils of child pornography with the need to protect copyright owners.” Now Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, who readily admits that he’s “not up to speed on having ISPs regulate copyrighted material,” has written an article in the alternative newspaper Seattle Weekly defending Bono’s stance on illegal file-sharing. “Content needs to be worth something if anybody is going to care about it,” he writes.
Continue reading »Iconic Pirate Bay Ship Logo Hijacked By Private Company
The Internet has many great and well-known trademarks. There can hardly be a web user anywhere in the world who has never seen the red, yellow, blue and green of Google’s logo, and millions every day skip past the same-colored staggered lettering of auction site, eBay. Those very same colors are used in the window representation used by Microsoft.
Continue reading »Energy Agency: financial crisis an unprecedented opportunity
Each year, the International Energy Agency prepares a report on the current state and likely future of the global energy economy. In recent decades, there’s been a bit of monotony: energy use has grown and, as large areas of the developing world are developing rapidly, future energy demand is likely to stretch our abilities to obtain new sources of fossil fuels. This year has turned out to be a significant exception, with the economic crisis having cut into both the amount of energy used around the globe and the carbon dioxide emissions associated with them.
Continue reading »Free All Media Launches Ad-Supported Music Downloading Service
Between lawsuits music industry fills against illegal music downloaders, the undeniable demands of music fans who want to get stuff on their own terms and the opportunity for legitimate business that arises here (when flexibility occurs), ad-supported music downloading services find more and more their place in today’s digital era. Such a service comes from Free All Media, a company that according to CNET “hopes to differentiate itself from flameouts like SpiralFrog with a unique advertising model that asks users to participate more directly in choosing the ads they'll see.” This is how the service, called Free All Music , is thought-out: when you choose an MP3 you wish to download you also select a sponsor you'd like to ‘support’ your download. Then you will be presented with a video ad (between 15 and 18 seconds in length) from the sponsor you have chosen which once finished allows you to go on with downloading the file, a 256kbps MP3 with no copy restrictions (or further ads).
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