COPYCENSE

“What if 2006 is the year big media players take aim at Google’s kneecaps? No, not with more lawsuits. Rather, picture this: Walt Disney, News Corp., NBC Universal, and The New York Times, in an odd tableau of unity, join together and say: ‘We are the founding members of the Content Consortium. Next month we launch our free, searchable Web site, which no outside search engines can access. From now on we’ll make our stuff available and sell ads around it and the searches for it, but only on our terms. Who else wants to join us? Membership’s free.’

“A Content Consortium would wreak havoc with the Web as we know it in its bid to restore the role of content owner as gatekeeper. Doing it would require spinal implants for intimidated media barons. But the notion that some pushback is pending is not far-fetched.”

Jon Fine. Putting The Screws To Google. BusinessWeek Online. Jan. 23, 2006.

See also:

Techdirt. How Jealousy Could Destroy The Internet. Jan. 13, 2006.

BNA E-Commerce Law Daily. In Battle Over Use of News Headlines, Court Focuses on Policy Implications for Web. Jan. 12, 2006.

Updates:

Center for Citizen Media Blog. Biting the Hand that Feeds? Feb. 1, 2006.

Greg Sandoval. Newspapers Want Search Engines to Pay. News.com. Jan. 31, 2006.

Adam Pasick. Newspapers Take Aim at Google in Copyright Dispute. Reuters UK. Jan. 31, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“At the top of my wish list for next year’s Consumer Electronics Show is this: the introduction of broadband service across the country that is as up to date as that 103-inch flat-screen monitor just introduced by Panasonic. The digital lifestyle I see portrayed so alluringly in ads is not possible when the Internet plumbing in our homes is as pitiful as it is. The broadband carriers that we have today provide service that attains negative perfection: low speeds at high prices.

“It gets worse. Now these same carriers – led by Verizon Communications and BellSouth – want to create entirely new categories of fees that risk destroying the anyone-can-publish culture of the Internet. And they are lobbying for legislative protection of their meddling with the Internet content that runs through their pipes. These are not good ideas.”

Randall Stross. Hey, Baby Bells: Information Still Wants to Be Free. The New York Times. Jan. 15, 2006.

See also:

Lessig Blog. The Fiction Zone That DC Has Become. Jan 13, 2006.

Between the Lines. The Bandwidth Scarcity Myth. Jan. 11, 2006.

Patrick Barnard. A Two-Tiered Internet in Our Future? TMCnet. Jan. 10, 2006.

Gigaom. Need For Speed… How Real? Dec. 20, 2005.

Philip J. Weiser and Thomas Bleha. Which Broadband Nation? Foreign Affairs. September/October 2005.

Thomas Bleha. Down to the Wire. Foreign Affairs. May/June 2005.

(Editor’s Note: The Times allows free access to their stories on the Web for seven days before sending the stories to the paper’s fee-based Archive.)

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“The entry of satellite and digital radio into the technological mainstream is increasing tension with the record industry, which wants new rules governing how consumers can make digital copies of songs from the airwaves.

“At issue are new devices that can record and save high-quality digital copies of tunes as they’re being broadcast by these new networks. Recording executives are worried that consumers might increasingly opt to make such copies instead of purchasing the music on a commercial CD or from a download store like Apple Computer’s iTunes.”

John Borland. Tension Grows Between Labels and Digital Radio. News.com. Jan. 13, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“Microsoft has officially halted development of its Windows Media Player for the Mac and plans no future Apple Computer versions of its music-playing software.

“The company will continue to offer the current version for download. It also has announced a deal to offer for free the Flip4Mac plug-in from Telestream that will allow Mac OS X users to play Windows Media video and audio directly from Apple’s QuickTime Player software.

“Microsoft has not released a significant update to Windows Media Player for Mac [since] November 2003.”

Ina Fried. Music Stops for Mac Windows Media Player. News.com. Jan. 12, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“Sometime this month, Larry Sanger and several colleagues will launch what they’re calling the PBS of the Web.

“Known as Digital Universe, the project is an attempt to present a diverse collection of information on just about any topic imaginable. Some will be links to other Web resources, while some will be citizen journalism. But the highest-profile part of the project is likely to be its encyclopedia. And while its entries will be written by the general public, the project is distinguishing itself from Wikipedia by having many entries vetted and certified as accurate by subject-area experts.

“Thus, the Digital Universe will attempt to become the largest and–its founders hope–most reliable, source of freely-accessible, publicly-created information on the Web.”

Daniel Terdiman. Newsmaker: Wikipedia’s Co-Founder Eyes A Digital Universe. News.com. Jan. 6, 2006.

See also:

Jon Udell. Wikipedia, Competition, and The Future. InfoWorld. Jan. 4, 2006.

Evan Hansen. Wikipedia Founder Edits Own Bio. Wired News. Dec. 20, 2005.

Daniel Terdiman. Wikipedia Alternative Aims to be ‘PBS of the Web.’ News.com. Dec. 19, 2005.

Larry Sanger. Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism. Kuro5hin. Dec. 31, 2004.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

Dennis Kennedy, a lawyer and technology consultant, recently led a roundtable discussion on technology’s influence on legal practice. Portions of that article are published in this month’s edition of Law Practice Today, a magazine for the Law Practice & Technology division of the American Bar Association.

There has been a lot of discussion in the world of technology in the last few months about “Web 2.0.” Last month, in Law Practice Today, we wrote a roundtable article using an Internet tool called Writely, a free collaborative writing service that allowed all of the authors to work together on the article. We were so enthused with the process that we decided to use it again to write a roundtable article on Web 2.0 to discuss the tools now available and the potential implications for the legal profession.

We wrote the article by putting a draft with the questions up on Writely and inviting people to visit the site and add their comments to create the article in a couple of days.

Law Practice Today. Does Web 2.0 Point Us Toward Law 2.0? January 2006.

IPTAblog. Law 2.0. Dec. 12, 2005.

WiredGC. Web 2.0, Heading West to Law 2.0. Dec. 6, 2005.

Tim O’Reilly. What Is Web 2.0? O’Reilly. Sept. 30, 2005.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“The Orchard is seeking to make money by purchasing music from small independent and foreign labels, and then distributing it to digital music services. In most music stores, CD’s of, say, Chinese or Kenyan pop music would be consigned to the world-music bin as a good will gesture. But the economics of online stores is changing the financial calculations of the music business, making it profitable to sell a relatively small number of copies of a song, as long as a compact disc is not manufactured and distributed.

“So instead of trying to sell millions of copies of hundreds of albums, the standard music industry strategy, the Orchard hopes to sell hundreds of copies of thousands of albums. In that way, the company is anticipating that sales will follow a pattern known as ‘the long tail,’ in which a large number of only marginally popular items can eventually produce significant revenue.”

Robert Levine. Buying Music From Anywhere and Selling It for Play on the Internet. The New York Times. Jan. 9, 2006.

See also:

Organization: Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA) (“IODA is the industry-leading digital distribution company for the global independent music community.”)

Brian Garrity. Digital Music Enjoys a Dream Week. WashingtonPost.com. Jan. 8, 2006. (“There was so much legitimate downloading in the final week of 2005 that it recalled the impossible tallies research firms used in the late 1990s to dazzle venture capitalists and scare the daylights out of major-label executives.”)

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.