Month: October 2002
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Dead Dataplay
While the idea may sound good on paper, I think it was clear the thing was doomed from the start. What they were trying to sell was portability and convenience, but Dataplay didn’t offer significantly more portability or convenience than CD-Rs or minidiscs.
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(Supreme) Courting Favor
Lawrence Lessig has posted his own lucid thoughts about how things went arguing the Eldred case in front of the Supreme Court. His best hint for the interpretive exercise known as “Supreme Watching” is this: “Lots of people have made tons of noise about what the court asked questions about and what it did not…
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What a Red Herring — the AP asks: Is “anything goes” radio all but gone?
Let me be very, very clear. Not at this time, nor at any time in the last twenty years, has commercial radio seen anything approaching “anything goes” radio. Never. Yes, with the rise of the co-called “shock jock” we have seen a suffocating tidal wave of no-talent frat-boys turn morning radio into a barnyard cesspool…
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More Coverage of IBOC Debacle
John Anderson’s put together a special report on yesterday’s IBOC decision, picking through the video from the FCC’s meeting for the choice bits uttered by the commissioners and bureaucrats.
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Digital Radio: A Spectrum Giveaway in Disguise
Markedly absent from news reports on this or in the FCC’s own announcement is that IBOC doubles the bandwidth used by a station, taking up the space on the dial between stations that has been historically used to prevent interference.
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Illegal Art
A exhibition of “illegal art” that appropriates other art and cultural clutter, like corporate logos, is coming to NYC and Chicago. Illegal Art: Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age is sponsored by Stay Free, an excellent zine-cum-magazine that focuses on issues of intellectual and artistic freedom within a hyper-private-corporatized society. Wired News has an…
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Keeping Up on Larry and the Supremes
Today is the day that Larry Lessig, Eric Eldred and co. make arguments in front the Supreme Court in favor of hacking back the most recent extention of copyright law that keeps the very first appearance of Mickey Mouse (amongst millions of works) out of the public domain. At stake is the future of our…
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bookmobiles kick ass
Salon has a nice little article on “Riding along with the Internet Bookmobile.” This is the project that has thousands of public domain books on-line and ready to be printed in book form all in the back of a 1992 Windstar minivan. According to this article the Bookmobile made a stop here in Urbana to…
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FCC Releases Loaded Reports on Media Ownership
Last week the FCC released a series of research reports it commissioned on the topic of media ownership and regulation. For the most part, these reports are heavily econometric, relying on supposed “hard data” that mostly amounts to things they can count without too much effort. No surprise, then, that the bulk of these studies…
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House Approves Small Webcasters Bill – What Does It Mean?
According to USA Today, on Monday the House of Representatives approved the deal hammered out between small webcasters and the music industry. The arrangement is basically unchanged, except for a last minute addition specifying that musicians will be “paid directly” for their share of royalties. Since the bill was introduced into the House and passed…