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1984 Redux

April 30, 2003

It seems I may have struck a nerve with my talks about AAC and it seems that every­one sees it as a ques­tion of theft vs. pay­ing for con­tent. To me, the issue is not about theft. For starters, I do not use file shar­ing net­works. Yes, I did check Nap­ster when it was around but ulti­mately, I aban­doned the Peer […]

Where Are the Digital Rights?

April 29, 2003

I’ve been get­ting con­sid­er­able amounts of email from mac fanat­ics about yesterday’s piece on the new Apple music store. As a result, I’d like to expand on the sub­ject (as I have to a few peo­ple via email today). The prob­lem that I have is not with Apple in par­tic­u­lar but with the approach they are tak­ing. At the current […]

Read the fine print

April 28, 2003

So Apple launches an online music store. It looks very nice when put side by side with the com­pe­ti­tion. For starters, there doesn’t seem to be any monthly fee and all tracks are the same price. This seems like a good idea until you start read­ing the fine print… accord­ing to Apple, the tracks you download […]

The Convergence Game

November 18, 2001

This week, Microsoft launched the Xbox, a new gam­ing sys­tem that takes the Red­mond giant into another mar­ket. Today, Nin­tendo is unveil­ing the Game­Cube, their new entry in a bat­tle they have fought with Sony for many years. With these new gam­ing sta­tions enter­ing the mar­ket, a new war is start­ing and in the end, it is a war […]

Ogg Vorbis: MP3 Contender?

March 12, 2001

With Linux becom­ing a strong alter­na­tive to Microsoft’s oper­at­ing sys­tem, some mem­bers of the open source com­mu­nity are set­ting their sights on a new tar­get: the music indus­try. The group has intro­duced a new sound for­mat called Ogg Vor­bis, which promises to deliver bet­ter sound qual­ity or smaller dig­i­tal music files than the pop­u­lar MP3 file for­mat. Ogg […]

Napster Shut Down

July 27, 2000

It’s offi­cial: it’s cur­tain for Nap­ster for now. The judge in a law­suit filed the Record­ing Indus­try Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­ica ordered the ser­vice to shut its doors by mid­night this Fri­day. The genie is out of the bot­tle Yet, I can’t help but believe that the shut­down of Nap­ster will not do much in terms of limiting […]