RIAA Sues Radio Stations [Onion]

Timely, eviscerating satire:

RIAA Sues Radio Stations For Giving Away Free Music [The Onion]

"It's criminal," RIAA president Hilary Rosen said. "Anyone at any time can simply turn on a radio and hear a copyrighted song. Making matters worse, these radio stations often play the best, catchiest song off the album over and over until people get sick of it. Where is the incentive for people to go out and buy the album? ... This has to be stopped before the music industry's entire economic infrastructure collapses."

Especially distressing to the RIAA are radio stations' "all-request hours," when listeners call in to ask radio announcers, or "disc jockeys," to play a certain song.

 

 thescoop: word frequency

Derek Willis is such a geek. And I mean that in the nicest way.

Torch's Talk [thescoop.org]

Just for fun, I ran Bob Torricelli's retirement speech through Georgetown's Web Frequency Indexer ... "I" (105)/ "my" (34)/"me" (14)... "apologize," "credibility," and "mistakes" were uttered twice each...

 

 Carol Lay, "Victory of the Loud Little Handful"

Carol Lay puts together Mark Twain and Bruegel the Elder for an interestingly anti-war comic: "Victory of the Loud Little Handful" [Story Minute at Salon].  

 Gillmor vs Valenti

Dan Gillmor rebuts the the movie industry (personified by Jack Valenti):

Studios' copyright goal is total control [Mercury News]

The major media/entertainment companies believe that control of information -- absolute control over how it can be used -- belongs to the owner of the copyright. They insist, moreover, that copyrights should be able to last indefinitely.

This is not a compromise, no matter what Valenti calls it. This is a radical agenda, one that overturns tradition and would ultimately wipe out the public domain, without which our culture would be vastly poorer...

Not content to have total control over copyrighted material, the cartel has persuaded Congress to keep extending copyright terms. The companies that wail about "stealing" have themselves hijacked billions of dollars worth of literature, music and film from you and me. The public domain hasn't grown lately, and that's a betrayal of everyone but the tiny group of mega-companies that owns copyrights to old classics.

We have copyright laws so that creation of useful things will take place -- useful knowledge that will belong to all of us after a limited time, so we can all get fuller use of it. To get this valuable result, we give authors and inventors certain -- but not absolute -- rights and we do so for limited periods.

The Supreme Court will hear a crucial case early next month... One issue is whether Congress can extend copyright terms for works that have already been created; why does an author need further incentive if he or she has already created the work in question?

You go Dan.