"Entertainment content complementary to a musical recording is delivered to a user's computer by means of a computer network link. The user employs a browser to access the computer network. A plug-in for the browser is able to control an audio CD or other device for playing the musical recording. A script stored on the remote computer accessed over the network is downloaded. The script synchronizes the delivery of the complementary entertainment content with the play of the musical recording."
They go on to talk about what they are really claiming to have invented, which is basically a way to simulate (via the internet) a group of people in a room with a stereo. And multimedia content. (Glorified karaoke.)
Reading the "Summary of the Invention" section of the patent application, here's how I interpret it:
1. Contolling a CD player remotely (there was a Winamp plugin that did this a few years ago.)
2. Linking multimeida contet via internet
3. Assigning a unique identifier to a musical track. (Windows' CD player did this. Was that after CDDB?)
4. Adding background music to a chat room. (There are dozens of scripts for mIRC that do this. No doubt a few 10 year olds are now guilty of "stealing" their invention.)
Not only am I not a lawyer, I have no idea how lawyers' minds work. When they talk about things like a web browser, IRC, and HTML documents, are they effectively restricting the scope of the patent, or are they just giving examples?
To prevent borrowing of CDs, you'll have to reinsert CDs at random and periodic intervals to prove ownership.
Guilty until proven innocent?
MP3.com: Your music collection has expired. Please re-insert CD 1 of 2046.
In a few years, this service won't be that special anyway. We'll all be carrying pager-sized MP3 players that hold 20 hours of music. And we'll all have high-speed connections that let us stream our music ourselves. (Okay, maybe a little bit more than a few years.)
>If SDMI comes out like this, people won't buy players for it
... assuming people know/care about that part. Many manufacturers and retailers are advertising SDMI support as a feature that will let you do cool things like "play music from major labels."
It's all about marketing. (and being able to get the mass media to take your side). I read about something called DataPlay today. 500 MB in a $5 recordable disc the size of a Canadian toonie. Support already announced by Eiger and Diamond. I thought this would be the ultimate flash-killer, until I read their corporate overview, detailing their vision of essentially making digital rights management part of the filesystem. (Note "digital rights management" always means "corporate rights management") It's an entirely proprietary system. Any content stored on the disc may require a key to access. Keys can be purchased online and can timeout after a given interval. You can transfer data to your friends, but they will require their own key. If all music was distribured this way, Napster wouldn't exist.
(They go on to claim that they essentially invented the CD-R.)
The thing is, they manage to make the whole system sound like it's the best thing since TCP/IP. Do I not put enough faith in people's ability to spot evil? (I always thought DIVX failed in large part because it required a phone line.)
I thought SDMI wasn't a file format, but some sort of watermarking (or "whatever we can do to stop those darn geeks") scheme. So even if you encode all of your music in MP3 (or OOG or whatever), if the music has a SDMI watermark buried in it and you try to copy it to your SDMI-restricted player, it's not going to work.
So if the music industry didn't exist, all of the artists would just vanish?
Tell me, what was Mozart's record label?
Re:PeerToPeer will live on the backs of the Horadr
on
Scour is Dead
·
· Score: 1
> Gnutella is unusable. Have you considered why its unusable?
> I would say it's unusable because the leeches outnumber the altruists.
It also has something to do with the fact that in order to share files with Gnutella, you have to manually configure it. Napster etc have that nifty setup wizard that asks you where your files are, and even offers to scan your disk for you. Sharing still isn't required, but more people do it because it's easy. Others (was it CuteMX?) won't let you download files unless you're sharing something.
While I absolutely despise ratio systems on FTP servers (I never have anything they need, they're not reliable, etc), I think a ratio system might work on something like Napster. Start every new account off with 5 credits to get them started. Have the server track the balance between connections. A ratio as low as 3 to 1 would probably be generous enough. That's the basic idea... once you have that, all sorts of other possibilities start emerging. You could make things easier on people whose accounts are running low by ranking them higher in the search results. You could adjust the ratio based on any number of things. And so on...
.dot looks to me like a vanity name many people will register just to be cute. Why do they love this one so much? Lots of money for registrars.
.biz seems to have pretty much the same meaning as.com. Every.com will want their.biz. Everyone whose.com is already taken will try to grab a.biz. It will be a field day for cybersquatters trying to register the next business.biz. And again, lots of money for registrars. Similar to.web, etc. The main purpose seems to be to increase the number of names available to register, not make the web more organized.
Just slower to catch on, compared to, say, DVD
on
Is MiniDisc Dead?
·
· Score: 1
From the rumours I've heard, MD is big in other parts of the world, especially Asia. Just because it's slow to catch on in North America doesn't mean it's dead -- most new formats do take a while, and MD is only 8 or 9 years old. Actually, I've been starting to hear a lot more about MD in the past few months.
MP3 players seem like more of a "geek" think, at least for now. (I even wonder if the general public is starting to think that MP3==evil as a result of all the negative publicity Napster gets on the news.) You hear alot more about MP3 in a place like this, but taking a look at "Real Life", I know 4 people with MD players, but don't know anyone with an MP3 player. (Of course, that's hardly a representative sample.)
I do agree that Sony doesn't seem to be acting as if they want the format to succeed...
On the other hand, maybe Bill Gates is a Slashdot regular. Seriously, the guy who wrote DOS must be a pretty big geek himself. And what better way to get to know his competition!
The phrase that comes to mind is "there's no such thing as bad publicity". With their cute interfaces and free trial discs, AOL tends to appeal to the internet newbie. Having someone like Justin Frankel run wild within their company makes the rest of us think, "maybe those execs at AOL are actually okay". As long as it doesn't impact their bottom line, they're cool with it. For the publicity it gets them, stripping ads from a few AIM clients is no big deal. (Considering the Time-Warner merger, they obviously couldn't let Gnutella go so easily, though.)
For what it's worth, my ears aren't that sensitive. How many people out there are saying, "the audio quality of these CDs is really driving me to insanity, when oh when will someone come up with a better format?"
>Of course, the big challenge for the RIAA is to
>get SDMI enabled devices to be the accepted
>norm - to displace MP3s as the format of choice.
I don't know how, but they seem to be doing a good job with that, at least when it comes to purtable MP3 player hardware. The major players (Rio, Nomad, etc) all have little statements on their web sites/press releases/etc saying "Our device is SDMI-ready" I'm sure most of the people around here would be more likely to buy a device that says "not SDMI compliant and never will be", but they're trying to market it at us as if it's a selling point.
Back in the days of Windows 3.0, I read an article in some magazine (PC World, I'm pretty sure), that said it takes an average of 8 minutes for a newbie to figure out how to start Write with the mouse, without assistance. This was attributed to the double-click -- one of the least intuitive user interface designs ever invented. Offhand, I can't think of any non-computer application that requires one to quickly press a button twice in order to get a response.
Those against Napster state that downloading an MP3 is equivalent to stealing the CD. Proponents of Napster (as well as some artists and record label execs) have said that downloaded MP3s serve as a promotional sample, resulting in even higher CD sales. What hard evidence do you have to support your belief that Napster hurts record sales? Isn't it possible that by attempting to shut down a potentially valuable promotional tool and by threatening thousands of your fans, you are shooting yourselves in the foot?
I have to wonder why the record industry assumes everyone is immoral. If you think it's necessary to point out that "artists deserve to be paid", does that mean you think we're all sitting in front of Napster saying "screw you, unworthy artists"? I think most people above the age of 5 already realize that stealing is wrong. So why do you assume that your fans are out to get you?
So most of you are okay with hurting the company, whether or not you think it's technically stealing?
I'm sure they didn't expect someone would be able to take apart the box and add Linux to it. Being a proprietary piece of hardware, there was no reason to expect people would cancel the service unless they simply didn't like it. Thus, it seemed perfectly reasonable to use the business model they did. Can you blame them for trying to do things the simple way? Why make people sign their life away on some scary legal documents when in all likelihood, it will be unnecessary?
I applaud the company for being so consumer-friendly, unlike many others out there. Congratulations for showing all other like-minded companies out there that they shouldn't trust the consumer.
Most DVDs have the distributor's logo, and a bit of animation as the main menu is drawn. That's fine. Some of them, as others have mentioned, also force you to watch the FBI warning. Not so nice. But, as could be expected of large corporations, they're now starting to realize that they can put ads there too. Disney decided to stick 4 minutes of ads at the beginning of the Tarzan DVD. Not surprisingly, some people complained. Disney responded by saying that the ads are "a benefit for consumers."
Myself, I like trailers. I just don't want to be told when to watch them. Many DVDs include a "trailers" item on the main menu, and I always watch them, just to see if there is anything interesting. But forcing me to watch them every time I put the DVD in the player? That's a bit much. In Disney's A Bug's Life, they had screen where they showed the boxes of other Disney titles, but no trailers. It seems like Disney hasn't realized that one of the selling points of DVD is that it is interactive, not linear. Perhaps ads are a benefit to consumers; however, forcing us to watch 4 minutes of them every time we use the DVD is just annoying.
It seems to say a lot about trademarks there... but is all cybersquatting trademark-related? Remember a few months ago when they started allowing domain names longer than 22 characters? From the news stories, it sounded like many people locked themselves in their basement that day and registered hundreds of generic domains -- anything they could think of between 23 and 63 characters in length. Their intention was clearly to get rich -- but not off of trademarks. Unfortunately, these rules don't seem to discourage this sort of behaviour. So if I want to set up a legitimate service under the name workerscompensation.com, I'm still going to have to pay some loser a million dollars for it, even though all they ever did with the site is put up a "This domain is for sale" notice. (Note: there is no such notice at workerscompensation.com; this was just an example.)
I've seen a lot of those "this domain is for sale" notices. Entire companies seem to be based around domain squatting. What about generic domain names that redirect you to other completely unrelated sites? (One day I was looking for information on printers, so I typed in printers.com, just for fun. No, it's not porn.)
I don't know why so many people claim to have such problems with Windows crashing... I have owned 4 different Windows 9x machines (2 OEM, 2 of the whatever-cheap-parts-I-could-find variety). All of them have been quite stable. I've had buggy software crash for sure, but BSODs are rare. If I find a program is causing BSODs, I switch to a different program.
When I reboot, 95% of the time it's beacuse I installed some new hardware, software, or changed some settings. (Of course, a good operating system wouldn't make you reboot for a software change.) But I've had uptime of over a month in Windows 98, and would probably get it regularly if I didn't install new software so often.
With only one application at a time to worry about, consoles are much simpler. Does Dreamcast crash? It's running WinCE. The X box probably will have some form of WinCE too. I'm skeptical of Microsoft's ability to overcome their competition in this case, but I don't think crashing will be the problem. Are they serious about this market, or do they just trying to diversify, in case their current cash cows start losing ground. Or maybe they believe this "the PC is dead" stuff.
A long time ago when news of this movie first started appearing, this comment came up. Sure, there are other CG movies, and more will come out before this one is released. The Final Fantasy movie does something that no other photorealistic CG movie does -- humans. It's probably much easier to animate toys or bugs or dinosaurs than it is to render humans, especially realistic-looking ones.
And this Dinosaurs movie... to me, it seems a bit too... Disney.
The bathroom is the one place I don't really mind ads. It's more interesting than staring at a wall.
Whenever new technology is created, someone will come up with a way to put ads on it. The internet is covered in them, many freeware programs are starting to come with a built-in ad window, and now cell phones. Here are two more examples:
"Tarzan" DVD forces viewers through a jungle of previews -- First Disney makes you watch the FBI warning before enabling the Menu button, now they're putting 4 minutes of ads at the beginning. (I wonder if you could hack a software DVD player to disallow the disabling of the menu button.)
Ads Take Aim at Online Music -- How would you like to have banner ads embedded in your downloaded music files, and have them displayed in an "always on top" window while the music is playing. (They're trying to get it integrated into Winamp, etc.) Oh yeah, DoubleClick supplies the ads.
Hmmm... Isn't Canada's national animal is the beaver? It's on the nickels, too.
I just don't like the idea that if they change their name because of it, it's almost like giving up on the word "beaver" to mean anything other than the negative things mentioned here.
It turns out they had intended to pay for their content through the copyright board of Canada. There is also a mention of plans to "sell a subscription-based service in partnership with pay channels like CNN and MTV." It almost sounds like he's planning to start it up again if they can find a way to reliably block people from outside of Canada, or if someone with more money takes the networks to court over the same thing. (The article mentions Yahoo and AOL.)
Slashdot Mirror
"Entertainment content complementary to a musical recording is delivered to a user's computer by means of a computer network link. The user employs a browser to access the computer network. A plug-in for the browser is able to control an audio CD or other device for playing the musical recording. A script stored on the remote computer accessed over the network is downloaded. The script synchronizes the delivery of the complementary entertainment content with the play of the musical recording."
They go on to talk about what they are really claiming to have invented, which is basically a way to simulate (via the internet) a group of people in a room with a stereo. And multimedia content. (Glorified karaoke.)
Reading the "Summary of the Invention" section of the patent application, here's how I interpret it:
1. Contolling a CD player remotely (there was a Winamp plugin that did this a few years ago.)
2. Linking multimeida contet via internet
3. Assigning a unique identifier to a musical track. (Windows' CD player did this. Was that after CDDB?)
4. Adding background music to a chat room. (There are dozens of scripts for mIRC that do this. No doubt a few 10 year olds are now guilty of "stealing" their invention.)
Not only am I not a lawyer, I have no idea how lawyers' minds work. When they talk about things like a web browser, IRC, and HTML documents, are they effectively restricting the scope of the patent, or are they just giving examples?
MP3.com: Your music collection has expired. Please re-insert CD 1 of 2046.
In a few years, this service won't be that special anyway. We'll all be carrying pager-sized MP3 players that hold 20 hours of music. And we'll all have high-speed connections that let us stream our music ourselves. (Okay, maybe a little bit more than a few years.)
>If SDMI comes out like this, people won't buy players for it
... assuming people know/care about that part. Many manufacturers and retailers are advertising SDMI support as a feature that will let you do cool things like "play music from major labels."
It's all about marketing. (and being able to get the mass media to take your side). I read about something called DataPlay today. 500 MB in a $5 recordable disc the size of a Canadian toonie. Support already announced by Eiger and Diamond. I thought this would be the ultimate flash-killer, until I read their corporate overview, detailing their vision of essentially making digital rights management part of the filesystem. (Note "digital rights management" always means "corporate rights management") It's an entirely proprietary system. Any content stored on the disc may require a key to access. Keys can be purchased online and can timeout after a given interval. You can transfer data to your friends, but they will require their own key. If all music was distribured this way, Napster wouldn't exist.
(They go on to claim that they essentially invented the CD-R.)
The thing is, they manage to make the whole system sound like it's the best thing since TCP/IP. Do I not put enough faith in people's ability to spot evil? (I always thought DIVX failed in large part because it required a phone line.)
I thought SDMI wasn't a file format, but some sort of watermarking (or "whatever we can do to stop those darn geeks") scheme. So even if you encode all of your music in MP3 (or OOG or whatever), if the music has a SDMI watermark buried in it and you try to copy it to your SDMI-restricted player, it's not going to work.
So if the music industry didn't exist, all of the artists would just vanish?
Tell me, what was Mozart's record label?
> Gnutella is unusable. Have you considered why its unusable?
> I would say it's unusable because the leeches outnumber the altruists.
It also has something to do with the fact that in order to share files with Gnutella, you have to manually configure it. Napster etc have that nifty setup wizard that asks you where your files are, and even offers to scan your disk for you. Sharing still isn't required, but more people do it because it's easy. Others (was it CuteMX?) won't let you download files unless you're sharing something.
While I absolutely despise ratio systems on FTP servers (I never have anything they need, they're not reliable, etc), I think a ratio system might work on something like Napster. Start every new account off with 5 credits to get them started. Have the server track the balance between connections. A ratio as low as 3 to 1 would probably be generous enough. That's the basic idea... once you have that, all sorts of other possibilities start emerging. You could make things easier on people whose accounts are running low by ranking them higher in the search results. You could adjust the ratio based on any number of things. And so on...
Maybe I'm just being cynical today, but...
.dot looks to me like a vanity name many people will register just to be cute. Why do they love this one so much? Lots of money for registrars.
.biz seems to have pretty much the same meaning as .com. Every .com will want their .biz. Everyone whose .com is already taken will try to grab a .biz. It will be a field day for cybersquatters trying to register the next business.biz. And again, lots of money for registrars. Similar to .web, etc. The main purpose seems to be to increase the number of names available to register, not make the web more organized.
There was a story about this on CBC, which includes a small picture.
voila
From the rumours I've heard, MD is big in other parts of the world, especially Asia. Just because it's slow to catch on in North America doesn't mean it's dead -- most new formats do take a while, and MD is only 8 or 9 years old. Actually, I've been starting to hear a lot more about MD in the past few months.
MP3 players seem like more of a "geek" think, at least for now. (I even wonder if the general public is starting to think that MP3==evil as a result of all the negative publicity Napster gets on the news.) You hear alot more about MP3 in a place like this, but taking a look at "Real Life", I know 4 people with MD players, but don't know anyone with an MP3 player. (Of course, that's hardly a representative sample.)
I do agree that Sony doesn't seem to be acting as if they want the format to succeed...
>Too many Linux community in-jokes
On the other hand, maybe Bill Gates is a Slashdot regular. Seriously, the guy who wrote DOS must be a pretty big geek himself. And what better way to get to know his competition!
So, which one of you is he?
The phrase that comes to mind is "there's no such thing as bad publicity". With their cute interfaces and free trial discs, AOL tends to appeal to the internet newbie. Having someone like Justin Frankel run wild within their company makes the rest of us think, "maybe those execs at AOL are actually okay". As long as it doesn't impact their bottom line, they're cool with it. For the publicity it gets them, stripping ads from a few AIM clients is no big deal. (Considering the Time-Warner merger, they obviously couldn't let Gnutella go so easily, though.)
How is their Minidisc crippled? I hadn't heard of that.
Of course, that this is the same company that brought us the Music Clip MP3 player... one of those nifty devices that asks you to convert all of your MP3s to some "secure" format. Their PlayStation uses specially-formatted CDs that can't be copied. Aren't they a member of SDMI too?
For what it's worth, my ears aren't that sensitive. How many people out there are saying, "the audio quality of these CDs is really driving me to insanity, when oh when will someone come up with a better format?"
>Of course, the big challenge for the RIAA is to >get SDMI enabled devices to be the accepted >norm - to displace MP3s as the format of choice. I don't know how, but they seem to be doing a good job with that, at least when it comes to purtable MP3 player hardware. The major players (Rio, Nomad, etc) all have little statements on their web sites/press releases/etc saying "Our device is SDMI-ready" I'm sure most of the people around here would be more likely to buy a device that says "not SDMI compliant and never will be", but they're trying to market it at us as if it's a selling point.
Back in the days of Windows 3.0, I read an article in some magazine (PC World, I'm pretty sure), that said it takes an average of 8 minutes for a newbie to figure out how to start Write with the mouse, without assistance. This was attributed to the double-click -- one of the least intuitive user interface designs ever invented. Offhand, I can't think of any non-computer application that requires one to quickly press a button twice in order to get a response.
Those against Napster state that downloading an MP3 is equivalent to stealing the CD. Proponents of Napster (as well as some artists and record label execs) have said that downloaded MP3s serve as a promotional sample, resulting in even higher CD sales. What hard evidence do you have to support your belief that Napster hurts record sales? Isn't it possible that by attempting to shut down a potentially valuable promotional tool and by threatening thousands of your fans, you are shooting yourselves in the foot?
I have to wonder why the record industry assumes everyone is immoral. If you think it's necessary to point out that "artists deserve to be paid", does that mean you think we're all sitting in front of Napster saying "screw you, unworthy artists"? I think most people above the age of 5 already realize that stealing is wrong. So why do you assume that your fans are out to get you?
These are very approximate figures (Canadian $ based on recent purchases), but I believe they illustrate the point:
PlayStation/PC Games (eg Final Fantasy VII)
- Duration: 60+ hours of gameplay
- Cost: $60
- Cost per hour: $1.00
Movie ticket or rental:
- Duration: 2 hours
- Cost: $2 to $6
- Cost per hour: $1 to $3
DVD purchase:
- Duration: 2 hours
- Cost: $28 (Canadian prices, remember)
- Cost per hour: $14
CD:
- Duration: 10 minutes average
- Cost: $20
- Cost per hour: $120.
Replay/re-view/re-listen value not included.
So most of you are okay with hurting the company, whether or not you think it's technically stealing?
I'm sure they didn't expect someone would be able to take apart the box and add Linux to it. Being a proprietary piece of hardware, there was no reason to expect people would cancel the service unless they simply didn't like it. Thus, it seemed perfectly reasonable to use the business model they did. Can you blame them for trying to do things the simple way? Why make people sign their life away on some scary legal documents when in all likelihood, it will be unnecessary?
I applaud the company for being so consumer-friendly, unlike many others out there. Congratulations for showing all other like-minded companies out there that they shouldn't trust the consumer.
Most DVDs have the distributor's logo, and a bit of animation as the main menu is drawn. That's fine. Some of them, as others have mentioned, also force you to watch the FBI warning. Not so nice. But, as could be expected of large corporations, they're now starting to realize that they can put ads there too. Disney decided to stick 4 minutes of ads at the beginning of the Tarzan DVD. Not surprisingly, some people complained. Disney responded by saying that the ads are "a benefit for consumers."
Myself, I like trailers. I just don't want to be told when to watch them. Many DVDs include a "trailers" item on the main menu, and I always watch them, just to see if there is anything interesting. But forcing me to watch them every time I put the DVD in the player? That's a bit much. In Disney's A Bug's Life, they had screen where they showed the boxes of other Disney titles, but no trailers. It seems like Disney hasn't realized that one of the selling points of DVD is that it is interactive, not linear. Perhaps ads are a benefit to consumers; however, forcing us to watch 4 minutes of them every time we use the DVD is just annoying.
"Tarzan" DVD forces viewers through a jungle of previews
It seems to say a lot about trademarks there... but is all cybersquatting trademark-related? Remember a few months ago when they started allowing domain names longer than 22 characters? From the news stories, it sounded like many people locked themselves in their basement that day and registered hundreds of generic domains -- anything they could think of between 23 and 63 characters in length. Their intention was clearly to get rich -- but not off of trademarks. Unfortunately, these rules don't seem to discourage this sort of behaviour. So if I want to set up a legitimate service under the name workerscompensation.com, I'm still going to have to pay some loser a million dollars for it, even though all they ever did with the site is put up a "This domain is for sale" notice. (Note: there is no such notice at workerscompensation.com; this was just an example.)
I've seen a lot of those "this domain is for sale" notices. Entire companies seem to be based around domain squatting. What about generic domain names that redirect you to other completely unrelated sites? (One day I was looking for information on printers, so I typed in printers.com, just for fun. No, it's not porn.)
Here are some photos from the launch
:)
If the final product looks something like the picture with the caption "X-Box", it almost makes the PS2 look boring.
I don't know why so many people claim to have such problems with Windows crashing... I have owned 4 different Windows 9x machines (2 OEM, 2 of the whatever-cheap-parts-I-could-find variety). All of them have been quite stable. I've had buggy software crash for sure, but BSODs are rare. If I find a program is causing BSODs, I switch to a different program.
When I reboot, 95% of the time it's beacuse I installed some new hardware, software, or changed some settings. (Of course, a good operating system wouldn't make you reboot for a software change.) But I've had uptime of over a month in Windows 98, and would probably get it regularly if I didn't install new software so often.
With only one application at a time to worry about, consoles are much simpler. Does Dreamcast crash? It's running WinCE. The X box probably will have some form of WinCE too. I'm skeptical of Microsoft's ability to overcome their competition in this case, but I don't think crashing will be the problem. Are they serious about this market, or do they just trying to diversify, in case their current cash cows start losing ground. Or maybe they believe this "the PC is dead" stuff.
A long time ago when news of this movie first started appearing, this comment came up. Sure, there are other CG movies, and more will come out before this one is released. The Final Fantasy movie does something that no other photorealistic CG movie does -- humans. It's probably much easier to animate toys or bugs or dinosaurs than it is to render humans, especially realistic-looking ones.
And this Dinosaurs movie... to me, it seems a bit too... Disney.
The bathroom is the one place I don't really mind ads. It's more interesting than staring at a wall.
Whenever new technology is created, someone will come up with a way to put ads on it. The internet is covered in them, many freeware programs are starting to come with a built-in ad window, and now cell phones. Here are two more examples:
"Tarzan" DVD forces viewers through a jungle of previews -- First Disney makes you watch the FBI warning before enabling the Menu button, now they're putting 4 minutes of ads at the beginning. (I wonder if you could hack a software DVD player to disallow the disabling of the menu button.)
Ads Take Aim at Online Music -- How would you like to have banner ads embedded in your downloaded music files, and have them displayed in an "always on top" window while the music is playing. (They're trying to get it integrated into Winamp, etc.) Oh yeah, DoubleClick supplies the ads.
Hmmm... Isn't Canada's national animal is the beaver? It's on the nickels, too.
I just don't like the idea that if they change their name because of it, it's almost like giving up on the word "beaver" to mean anything other than the negative things mentioned here.
CNet has an interesting interview with iCraveTV's Bill Craig.
iCraveTV.com exec discusses his start-up's short life
It turns out they had intended to pay for their content through the copyright board of Canada. There is also a mention of plans to "sell a subscription-based service in partnership with pay channels like CNN and MTV." It almost sounds like he's planning to start it up again if they can find a way to reliably block people from outside of Canada, or if someone with more money takes the networks to court over the same thing. (The article mentions Yahoo and AOL.)