Recording industry greedhead Hillary Rosen showed up to make peace with the P2P community at O’Reilly’s P2P conference this week. The fact of the matter is that the recording industry’s problems aren’t with the P2P community, they’re with their customers. The ongoing attempts by the RIAA to stamp out any P2P service that comes along don’t seem to be dissuading people from pirating music like mad. And furthermore, it doesn’t seem like the pirates are in danger of putting the recording industry out of business. The RIAA’s problem is that people don’t see the value in spending their money on recordings when they can pirate them. Obsessing over FastTrack or Napster or Gnutella is just a distraction, and every time a new DRM scheme is cracked it becomes more obvious that DRM isn’t the solution, either.
In honor of the government’s settlement with Microsoft, a look at an old item I wrote back on October 22, 1997: Why Is Windows So Cheap?
If you’re interested in keeping up with the full details of US military briefings, check out DefenseLINK, the DOD’s official PR site.
The US seems to be taking more serious steps in fighting the propaganda war worldwide. Not only have we set up a media center in Pakistan, we’ve also appointed a former advertising executive to create propaganda favorable to our side in the ongoing war. While I’m averse to getting a snow job from the government, I think that we do have to think hard about how to get our message across in the Muslim world. Certainly the hardcore Islamists don’t care what we have to say, but we should be trying to win over moderates Muslims with a message that says we respect their culture and religious practice, but not at the expense of individual freedom and human rights (one might argue that we don’t have the moral authority to say that given the governments we do support in the Muslim world). One of the bigggest problems we face is that even when we do the right thing, people who blame the US for everything portray it as the wrong thing. We should have an Arabic-speaking Muslim on Al Jazeera every day explaining the US positions on any issue that the journalists want to talk about. I doubt that that’s what Charlotte Beers has in mind as her mission, though.
Bill Gates says that the world has Mircrosoft to thank for open source software. That, my friends, is what we refer to as temerity. Here’s the quote in question (it’s buried pretty far down in the story):
Really, the reason you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that’s identical with millions and millions of machines.