Slashdot Mirror

VB writes "Boycott-RIAA is running Fred von Lohmann's article which looks like the ideal answer to solving the P2P problem. He suggests setting up a payment system similar to SESAC, ASCAP, and BMI, collecting organizations for songwriters. This seems such an obvious solution and a great way to get artists paid and give listeners the right to listen to their favorite songs cheaply and keep them out of jail. Why wouldn't this work?"

VB writes "Boycott-RIAA is running Fred von Lohmann's article which looks like the ideal answer to solving the P2P problem. He suggests setting up a payment system similar to SESAC, ASCAP, and BMI, collecting organizations for songwriters. This seems such an obvious solution and a great way to get artists paid and give listeners the right to listen to their favorite songs cheaply and keep them out of jail. Why wouldn't this work?"

thumbtack writes "Boycott-RIAA.com is running an analysis of the RIAA sales vs a number of other large corporations. It was compiled by Justin Moore at Duke University. It is really quite interesting, showing the the RIAA sales are pretty much consistent with the rest of the economy. From the analysis: I would assert, however that it does make the case in cold, hard numbers that the RIAA's claim of digital piracy ravaging their sales must be taken with a rather large grain of salt. The CEOs of Eastman-Kodak are in a nearly identical economic situation as the RIAA, yet do not have the luxury of blaming digital piracy."

thumbtack writes "Boycott-RIAA.com is running an analysis of the RIAA sales vs a number of other large corporations. It was compiled by Justin Moore at Duke University. It is really quite interesting, showing the the RIAA sales are pretty much consistent with the rest of the economy. From the analysis: I would assert, however that it does make the case in cold, hard numbers that the RIAA's claim of digital piracy ravaging their sales must be taken with a rather large grain of salt. The CEOs of Eastman-Kodak are in a nearly identical economic situation as the RIAA, yet do not have the luxury of blaming digital piracy."

Slashback with news on ATI drivers for non-ATI branded cards, the viewer-led movement to save Farscape, wearable computing from MIT, text-to-facial-expression software, and more. Read on for the details

Maybe customer service isn't dead. On November 28th, we posted a report that OEM cards using ATI chips had trouble with the official drivers from ATI. Terry Makedon (Senior Product Manager, Software for ATI Technologies) writes "Last week we posted a set of unified Linux drivers. These drivers were only loading up on 'Built by ATI' cards. Through our various feedback mechanisms we have determined that there is a large community of 'Powered by ATI' Linux users that did not benefit from our Linux drivers. At this point we are happy to announce an update to our Linux driver (ver. 2.5.1) which will work on both 'Powered by' and 'Built by.' ATI's driver and software strategy is firmly based on responsiveness and we greatly appreciate the feedback our Linux users have provided. Please use http://apps.ati.com/linuxDfeedback/ for a direct feedback line to ATI.

Thanks again for the feedback."

But what if we put the show into this Interdimensional Fungubulon, and then jumped through this here "wormhole"? xagon7 writes "David Kemper, the producer/writer of Farscape, mentioned that it would be theoretically and legally possible for a group to set up a non-profit organization for fans to donate money to, in order to finance an episode and make Farscape all that much tastier to Sci-Fi for the 5th season. They have done just that. They have $200,000 worth of pledges and only need $800,000 total....I hope this gets Slashdotted. Read the story here and you can pledge here."

You're getting less happy to see me? man_of_mr_e writes "Check out MIThril, the next generation research platform for context aware wearable computing. It's been about 18 months since this was last talked about here on Slashdot, and it's kind of cool to see how far the technology has come since then. For those that aren't aware of what it is, it's essentially a project to prototype human wearable computers, complete with schematics, pictures, and a cvs repository for software. Now you too can be like that guy in the IBM commercials trading stock while feeding the pigeons."

Flattening the slope to entry. Catskul writes "You don't need the libwine hack, mentioned in the previous news entry. Just follow the New QT Howto, download the codecs and start MPlayer."

Don't look at me in that tone of voice! 1010011010 writes "On Nov. 26, you ran a story on SpeechView, 'software that translates the voice on the other side of the line into a three dimensional animated face on the computer.' The North Carolina State University Department of Computer Science's 'Voice IO Group' is also working on that problem. Their software looks like it might be better. Read about it here. Includes quicktime movies of the results."

Victory, or a reprieve? A non moose cow writes "Just noticed that a couple of my favorite "Killed by the RIAA" webcast stations are back... like Soma-FM and Monkey Radio (get the streams at Shoutcast). The saving grace came via the recent passage of HR5469 [PDF] by the US Legislature. Thank you to all that sent letters and/or money to fix this problem. If you have been yearning for the resurrection of your favorite stream, go check, it might be back. If you would like to trace the chronology of this mess, check out the Soma-FM news page."

thumbtack writes: "In a follow up to the /. story "Record Companies Sued Over Charley Pride CD" last fall, Boycott-RIAA is reporting in this story that the case has been settled with Fahrenheit Entertainment, Music City Records, and Sunncomm. They have agreed to a list of 10 items that were the basis of the lawsuit. In addition following the link to the settlement document (pdf) the plaintiffs got a little cash to pay their lawyers as well."

thumbtack writes: "In a follow up to the /. story "Record Companies Sued Over Charley Pride CD" last fall, Boycott-RIAA is reporting in this story that the case has been settled with Fahrenheit Entertainment, Music City Records, and Sunncomm. They have agreed to a list of 10 items that were the basis of the lawsuit. In addition following the link to the settlement document (pdf) the plaintiffs got a little cash to pay their lawyers as well."

There are numerous grassroots efforts coming together to Boycott the RIAA. I've decided that I won't be buying any RIAA CDs for awhile personally (I've already cancelled a couple of orders, and I buy a ton of CDs) but decide for yourself. Should peer-to-peer file sharing be legal or not on the Internet? Should companies like Google and Yahoo be held legally responsible for the content that they index? Meanwhile, the OpenNAP servers and Gnutella are proving that the genie is out of the bottle and while this lawsuit may set a huge legal precedent, it won't help the RIAA in the real world. They should really work with napster since there already is significant market share and potential for revenue. Gnutella and its kin won't have any centralized point.