BlogOfTheMoon

According to a recent story on Slashdot, Sony and EMI have been sued by a man in Brazil over corrupt CDs – and won! Hopefully this will be the start of a trend.

Okay, so this is incredibly geeky and only makes sense if you know about the SCO/IBM ongoing lawsuit (see this Register article for background) but this article at LiveJournal is great.

RFID tags have the potential to be really quite useful, but they also have the potential to be abused an awful lot, as discussed in this article at The Register.

The EU is the middle of implementing a worrying directive on software patenting. On Tuesday, they passed a report that some groups claim allows for unlimited software patenting. The Greens press release is interesting reading on this. Last week, Arlene McCarthy MEP published an article in the Guardian about why this is a Good Thing™. This provoked a long thread and many replying letters to the Guardian on the UKCDR mailing list about why it's not. Those are all better argued than McCarthy's article and make for interesting reading.

TBD43 is out the door! Printed and distributed yesterday, this one was more hectic than usual (!!) due to me being a week behind real time and Other Issues™.

I went to see an RSC production of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children at the King's Theatre this evening. It was an absolutely amazing performance. Poignant and moving, with a streak of humour all the way through it. Highly recommended! Next step is to read the novel, methinks.

We've all heard what the RIAA has to say about "music piracy", but what about the people that they claim to represent? Miriam Rainsford is a composer who gives us an artist's view of file sharing and DRM, which is rather interesting.

Bill Thompson has written an interesting piece at BBC News about the power that the record companies and the RIAA have over what people do with songs. Interestingly, at the end of the article there is a "talkback" section and, unlike most of these debates, at time of writing there wasn't a single person standing up in favour of the RIAA. I think that speaks volumes.