Sorry, but this has nothing to do with "the law" as such. It is a legal battle between companies who disagree on the specifics of the contract they have with each other.
Consumers are not protected in any way by this ruling, nor is it a sign that RIAA has a shaky legal foundation for its actions against consumers (although a lot of evidence from other cases seem to point in this direction).
Obviously music of your choosing is more worth to you than music other people choose (ignoring the time spent doing the choosing part). Basically if you can say you would rather have one over the other there is a difference in value to you. Of course this story is about using usage statistics to build playlists, which is something in between "no influence" standard radio and DIY total control music, which you would get for instance from iTunes if you paid for all the songs played.The record industry wants you to pay for this added value, which is not different from any other industry. For instance you are probably paying extra to have HD channels rather than normal channels, or other similar scenarios.
In my opinion this is not a story of an evil, greedy record industry (even though I definitely believe that other news tell this story very well), but rather a normal legal battle over some specific part of a contract between two companies. Yahoo! would rather not pay extra, the record industry would like Yahoo! to do so. The only problem is that the contract is not precise enough to determine who is right without a judge looking it over.
Do you really think, that it would have been better, if Netscape had the sole right to graphical web browseing compared to having MS IE around?
One of the main point against software patents is that it will put small companies and hobby coders in a very bad situation. Any big company with a good lawyer and money to spend could rip off some smaller company's algorithm and keep the guy in court till the end of days (or more likely until he runs out of money to pay his lawyer). As far as I'm concerned this is the single most important problem of software patents: patents require funds to protect, and small software developers simply can't do this. This is a well-known scenario from other patent conflicts, and the outcome almost inevitably is that the one with the more funds wins out.
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Sorry, but this has nothing to do with "the law" as such. It is a legal battle between companies who disagree on the specifics of the contract they have with each other.
Consumers are not protected in any way by this ruling, nor is it a sign that RIAA has a shaky legal foundation for its actions against consumers (although a lot of evidence from other cases seem to point in this direction).
Obviously music of your choosing is more worth to you than music other people choose (ignoring the time spent doing the choosing part). Basically if you can say you would rather have one over the other there is a difference in value to you. Of course this story is about using usage statistics to build playlists, which is something in between "no influence" standard radio and DIY total control music, which you would get for instance from iTunes if you paid for all the songs played.The record industry wants you to pay for this added value, which is not different from any other industry. For instance you are probably paying extra to have HD channels rather than normal channels, or other similar scenarios.
In my opinion this is not a story of an evil, greedy record industry (even though I definitely believe that other news tell this story very well), but rather a normal legal battle over some specific part of a contract between two companies. Yahoo! would rather not pay extra, the record industry would like Yahoo! to do so. The only problem is that the contract is not precise enough to determine who is right without a judge looking it over.
Do you really think, that it would have been better, if Netscape had the sole right to graphical web browseing compared to having MS IE around?
One of the main point against software patents is that it will put small companies and hobby coders in a very bad situation. Any big company with a good lawyer and money to spend could rip off some smaller company's algorithm and keep the guy in court till the end of days (or more likely until he runs out of money to pay his lawyer). As far as I'm concerned this is the single most important problem of software patents: patents require funds to protect, and small software developers simply can't do this. This is a well-known scenario from other patent conflicts, and the outcome almost inevitably is that the one with the more funds wins out.