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Music

RIAA Wants Artist Royalties Lowered 399

Posted by Zonk from the why-should-they-get-paid-it-is-not-their-music dept.
laughingcoyote writes "The RIAA has asked the panel of federal government Copyright Royalty Judges to lower royalties paid to publishers and songwriters. They're specifically after digital recordings, and uses like cell phone ringtones. They say that the rates (which were placed in 1981) don't apply the same way to new technologies." From the article: "According to The Hollywood Reporter, the RIAA maintains that in the modern period when piracy began devastating the record industry profits to publishers from sales of ringtones and other 'innovative services' grew dramatically. Record industry executives believe this to be cause to advocate reducing the royalties paid to the artists who wrote the original music."
GNU is Not Unix

RMS transcript on GPLv3, Novell/MS, Tivo and more 255

Posted by Hemos from the years-of-adoption-and-version-battles-predicted dept.
H4x0r Jim Duggan writes "The 5th international GPLv3 conference was held in Tokyo last week. I've made and published a transcript of Stallman's talk where he described the latest on what GPLv3 will do about the MS/Novell deal, Treacherous Computing, patents, Tivo, and the other changes to the licence. While I was at it, I made a transcript of my talk from the next day where I tried to fill in some info that Richard didn't mention."

Metaverse the Next Big Thing? 288

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the gentlemen-start-your-pocketbooks dept.
CrashPanic writes to tell us TCS Daily has an article entitled "The Next Big Thing" which is about Multiverse. It does a good job of making the case for the evolution to a 3D web through the lens of the past history of Netscape. From the article: "Forces are coalescing that will produce a shift comparable at least to the spread of broadband. This change will have enormous financial, cultural and political repercussions, and the most interesting aspect of the coming transformation is that it will not be some new and unexpected thing. Rather, the Web for many will become the cliched 3D virtual reality that has been so overused as a literary and cinematic devise that most of us have forgotten how compelling that vision was when it first appeared."

Music Industry Looking for Lyrics Payoff 205

Posted by Zonk from the those-lyrics-look-unlicensed-there-kid dept.
theodp writes "U.S. digital entertainment company Gracenote has obtained licenses to distribute the lyrics of more than 1 million songs. Music publishers are still mulling legal action against Web sites that provide lyrics without authorization." From the article: "Ralph Peer II, Firth's counterpart at peermusic, said licensing lyrics should boost worldwide music publishing revenues, estimated at about $4 billion annually. Peer said he hopes the unauthorized sites will seek licenses. 'I think we'll see a reasonable increase, as much as a 5 percent increase, in industry music publishing revenues five years out from where we are right now,' Peer said."

VOIP Cell Phones Coming Soon 138

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the it-can-even-cut-through-this-tin-can dept.
prostoalex writes "Associated Press reports on the latest cell phones with WiFi support demoed at this year's CTIA Wireless 2006 conference. New models fall back to WiFi hotspot when the user is at home, at work, or cellular signal gets too weak. Biggest surprise? The cell phone conversation is not dropped when the switch between cellular network and WiFi hotspot takes place."

Larry Wall on Perl 6 265

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-it-would-make-sense-that-he-talks-about-that dept.
Nate writes "Linux Format magazine has an interview with Larry Wall, the eccentric linguist and coder behind Perl. Larry discusses some of the new Perl 6 features ready to rock the world, and if you're not planning to move from Perl 5.8, he has a few musings on that too."

Deriving Semantic Meaning From Google Results 120

Posted by michael from the can-also-use-tea-leaves-if-google-not-available dept.
prostoalex writes "New Scientist talks about Paul Vitanyi and Rudi Cilibrasi of the National Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam and their work to extract meaning of words from Google's index. The pair demonstrates an unsupervised clustering algorithm, which 'distinguish between colours, numbers, different religions and Dutch painters based on the number of hits they return', according to New Scientist."

Tim Berners-Lee and the Semantic Web 250

Posted by michael from the same-old-refrain dept.
An anonymous reader writes "As we all know, Tim Berners-Lee is the hero of the Web's creation story--he conjured up this system and chose not to capitalize on it commercially. It turns out that Sir Tim (he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in July) had a much grander plan in mind all along--a little something he calls the Semantic Web that would enable computers to extract meaning from far-flung information as easily as today's Internet links individual documents. In an interview with Technology Review, the Web-maestro explains his vision of 'a single Web of meaning, about everything and for everyone.'"

The Art of Unix Programming 358

Posted by timothy from the at-long-last-and-for-heather dept.
rjnagle writes "Eric S. Raymond (or ESR) is widely known for the groundbreaking series of essays in his book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. In TCatB, he makes a credible case for why open source sofware works so well, and why community-supported software won't put developers out of a job. (I once attended a delightful talk he gave where, among other things, he gave sartorial advice to open source developers, urging them to avoid formal suits at presentations to CEO's as a way to give off the auras of foreign dignitaries unused to local customs). The arguments presented in Cathedral and the Bazaar were persuasive and original and now regarded as obvious. In his new book, Art of Unix Programming (available for free on the web), ESR stakes an even bolder claim: that initial design decisions make Unix uniquely well-suited to take advantage of open source's power. This book is an attempt to explain why Unix is so...well, Unixy." Read on for the rest of Nagle's review of The Art of Unix Programming.

Is The Semantic Web A Pipe Dream? 16

Posted by Cliff from the stuff-to-think-about dept.
wdebruij asks: "I'm currently writing a small program for sharing information over the internet. For categorizing and indexing this information I want to use RDF and the semantic web as described by the WWW consortium, but since the documentation says nothing about a standard dictionary I seriously doubt we will ever have such a general information index. The Open Directory Project has written it's directory in RDF, but does anyone know of another 'standard' dictionary?" The whole point behind the "semantic web" concept is that data is organized online in such a manner, that a variety of different, independently designed machines can use it without compatibility issues.

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