Arthur Andersen is going to start offering consulting to promising startups in exchange for equity. Of course, if the amount of equity Andersen demands is anything like their rate for paying customers, I can’t imagine that too many startups will be able to afford them.
Declan McCullagh really is a good journalist, but he’s tragically predictable. What begins as an informative article on the history of denial of service attacks ends as an attack on the federal government. In this case, I agree him, but the constant stream of libertarian agitprop in Declan’s articles is a drag.
The RIAA has started a campaign called Soundbyting to tell college students that trading MP3s is illegal. Do these sorts of fancily packaged campaigns ever work? Cable companies have been telling people that stealing cable is illegal for years. Does that make people stop stealing cable? I’m genuinely curious because it seems to me that people who trade MP3s or steal cable already know that their actions are illegal. They just don’t care.
Salon is running an article by C. Scott Ananian today that offers a status report on the legal activity surrounding DeCSS and a manifesto as well! Seriously, though, the actions of the MPAA in the DeCSS case are incredibly frightening. The issue here is clear, the MPAA doesn’t give a damn about anyone’s rights if they believe that those rights stand between them and their profits.
I love unintended consequences. Rodney Smolla, a first amendment scholar, felt so strongly that the book Hit Man should not be sold that he sued Paladin Press and won a multimillion dollar settlement under which Paladin Press also agreed to take the book off the market. Now, it’s available for free download over the Web. Isn’t it funny how things work out?
I had no idea that the Tivo personal TV receivers run Linux. That’s really, really cool. Not to go all Jakob Nielsen on you, but in fact, it bears out a prediction I made awhile back.