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The United States intellectual property policy is so far out of whack to be almost laughable, unless of course you were sentenced to jail for downloading a song - not funny at all then. Sound far fetched? It’s not, that’s what S.B. 3021 was all about - and it was passed by the U.S. Senate on November 20, 2004.

Luckily procedural problems that kept it from becoming law, but you can bet it will be back - and then even first time offenders can be sent of to prison with murderers and rapist for 5 years!

Does anyone one except big media and politicians influenced by big media think that downloading a file from the Internet is as serious a crime as rape? Of course not, but the United States Senate passed a bill that would make those two crimes equal in terms of prison sentences.

Okay, so you don’t download music from peer to peer networks and think that artists should get money for their music. So do we, so do most people. In fact the RIAA/MPAA use various strawman arguments to try and make anyone that is for sensible IP policy look like a thieving pinko maniac - when the fact is that they are the ones that have the extremists views on this issue.

How about this - you buy a DVD and want to let your kids use it, but want to make a backup of it in case they scratch it. The software is available to back it up, hardware too, and if you read the fair use provisions of our current laws you are well within you rights to do so. But guess what - if you make that copy, of a DVD that you legally purchased, you are a criminal in the eyes of these big media moguls and their lobbyist.

How about if you use your legal Tivo to skip commercials? According to former Turner Broadcasting CEO Jamie Kellner, “Because of the ad skips…. It’s theft” and you are a criminal.

If you are a long time reader of OMB you know that we are not in favor of wholesale file swapping, have never endorsed a P2P app, and only feature free, legal downloads on the site. We love music and want artists to get paid for it.

But this is not about music. It’s about big media producers trying to maintain their monopoly on the content distribution industries and to continue producing mostly crappy music and movies while screwing ( all but the biggest ) artists that actually create the content that we all love.

Throughout history business haved tried to stifle new technologies - from the indroduction of player pianos to terrestrial radio to VCR’s - the content companies claimed each time that these technological advanced would put them out of business and “ruin music”. Of course we all know that in each case the opposite happened. Radio feeds CD and concert ticket sales. VCR’s launched a revolution in legal home video viewing making the movie companies more money then their “theatrical” releases.

So while are not advocating “stealing” content, we do think that you should download all of the free, legal music you can get your hands on - as well as standing up for your fair use rights.

Click on over to Jailed for a Song and then to IPac and do what you can to make sure that this country returns to some semblance of a sensible intellectual property policy. Join us in trying to help ensure that our fair use rights are protected and that the U.S. is not left out of the next era of technological advances just to please the current monopolizers of content distribution and their cronies in Washington.

So, I was talking to JD and Paulie the other day and, as it sometimes does, the topic turned to media and how our current system is still so 20th Century. I mean TV channels are an antiquated notion, no? Why do I need some suit at NBC deciding what I get to watch.

Why do we need the suits at all any more?

Bare with me here - what if there was a distributed ( think torrent ) IP based “broadcasting” system where content creators could release their work and have people subscribe to their “channel”. If this were the case I could subscribe to the Nip Tuck feed and get to watch it each week by finding a torrent, downloading, and decrypting it with my membership key - the money would be paid to the content creators and not to FX or my cable provider.

I can see folks subscribing to the Prince channel and downloading music, concerts, video’s, etc. Prince would make more money than with traditional distribution as he would not need a record label, retail outlets, iTunes, or anyone else that would take as big a cut of his profits - and he wouldn’t have a huge bandwidth bill as the content would be distributed across all of his other subscribers hard disks. How about a Coen brothers subscription, a Kevin Smith media membership?

Of course this would take more sophisticated file sharing networks then are currently in place ( a another reason not to outlaw P2P ), as well as a centralized system for managing subscriptions, but none of this is more complicated then web services that are being written today. And there would be some costs associated with releasing the initial files and running the centralized server - but these would be negligible compared to the costs currently associated with media distribution.

And if the content creators wanted complete control they could buy a turn key solution ( or download an open source one ) and setup their own shop. As long as there was a standard in place there would be a very small barrier to entry. Couple this service with the media center pc’s and myth boxes that are starting to spring up and you have the beginnings of the convergence of tv’s and pc’s that I have been hearing about for years.

As it turns out technology companies are a lot like media superstars, or maybe it is just a truism that nothing can sustain popularity at the highest level, or maybe it is as simple as power corrupts. I don’t know, but I do know that what Google is going through right now is very similar to the once beloved media darling that the public has turned on.

And the tide is turning against Google on a number of fronts.

First there was the whole Autolink controversy, I still say it is a bad move for the precedent it sets as well as the ill will that it is creating. And the collective good will of Netizens is really the only thing that keeps Google afloat, I mean if a search engine searches the web and nobody uses it is it really a search engine?

Add to that ill will a growing numbers of webmaster that have had bad experiences with Google’s Ad Sense program. A number of the webmaster that have received “the notice” swear that they did nothing against the TOS but were banned anyway. I have no idea if that is true or not - but again, ill will. And then there is the coming competition to Ad Sense. Possibly the biggest problem with adsense is that it just doesn’t work for a number of webmasters. Competition is good so maybe Yahoo’s entry ( and maybe even M$’s ) in the field will help.

And now there is a huge stink about Google News. It looks like they have removed the Nazi “news source” but the critics are now demanding more transparency ( not one of Google’s long suits ) and want to know what sites Google uses for sources.

Growing pains.

And one of the most alarming trends is the shirking percentage of users that use Google for their search results - its down to like 35% with Yahoo closing at 32%.

And that’s a shame because at it’s core Google is a great search engine. Really the best available solution we have today for finding semi-relevant web pages on the interweb.

Just saw this, pretty neat - I was surfing the new Yahoo Creative Commons Search and it looks like slashreview has been using some of my music that was originally published over on open-songs that is now part of copacetix - for its PODcast torrents - and give me credit a couple of places.

How cool is that? The interweb is awesome. But it would be cool if they could update their links to where the music now lives.

So I whipped up a new design for Online Music Blog and had Steve cut it up and make it cssalicious. Check it out - http://www.onlinemusicblog.com.

The new design celebrates a new chapter in OMB’s existence as I have entered a partnership and even have a small budget to help run it.

Don’t worry Charlie, Beitz worked on this after hours from home

There’s lots of press these days about Firefox, enough evidently to convince Microsoft that they needed to release an updated version of IE before the eventual release of the next version of windows. Seems that Longhorn is due out sometime in 2006, and that the browser will be part of the OS - so that looking at a website will be just like looking at files locally in My Computer for example.

While that might seem like a good idea on the surface just think what trouble script kiddie can cause when the browser is the OS. I don’t think that I am going to expose my data like that - in fact like millions of others I have already reduced my exposure to malicious web pages by using an alternative browser - Firefox.

I haven’t used IE for anything other then Windows updates and the ( more and more rarely occurring ) occasional site that does not work with Firefox since 2003 when Mr. Swan browbeated me into using Mozilla. With a couple of slight detours ( Konqueror, Opera ) I have been using a Gecko based browser ever since. Ever since Phoenix and through Firebird, the standalone browser from Mozilla.org has been my weapon of choice - a not because its open source ( although that it certainly nice, and fosters a good community cranking out extentions, more on that later ) but because it is faster, safer, is more standards compliant, and just better.

Even if you think that the security improvements from using Firefox are temporary and ephemeral ( even though the time to fix bugs w/ Firefox is an order of magnitude faster then with Microsoft - and lets not even get started about Active X ) there are a number of other reasons to choose Firefox: tabbed browsing, pop up blocker, its a it is a cross-platform application, and of course all of the extentions.

The community that has sprung up to write extentions is awesome. You can control iTunes or Winamp with Foxy Tunes, enhance and modify how tabbed browsing works, or even add a tool bar with various web developer tools. There are literally hundreds of extentions that, well, extend the functionality of Firefox - a fellow firefox user scratching an itch that he had as it were.

How much better IE 7 will be than 6 is still to be determined, but it not encouraging that Microsoft has decided to hold off on full CSS2 support saying that it is a flawed standard. Personally I think that is a flawed excuse.

I admit that when I first heard of Google’s Autolink dealio the first thing that crossed my mind was the evil Microsoft Smart Tags Fiasco - and in the context of Google’s Do No Evil moto it seemed contradictory to say the least.

Upod further review it’s not quite as evil. Unlike smart tags it has to be initiated by the user which to me is the biggest difference.

That is not to say that I don’t think that it is somewhat evil, especially for a company with the offical policy of Do No Evil and further more sets a very bad precident.

Hell, even Microsoft gave you a way to add tags to your page to disable the smart tags, Google hasn’t even provided that - fortunately third party developers have developed tools for web publishers that do not want Google re-writing their pages. Additionally unlike smart tags auto links look exactly like the other links on the page, visually nothing is different between Google’s inserted links and the original page authors links.

Personally it’s the slippery slope that I find the most troubling. If Google is willing to re-write web page content with this feature does it mean that they are willing to do similar things with other features? How about some sort of combination of the cached versions of their search results and ad words? I would hope not, but this Auto Link feature make me wonder anyway.

I have been a huge Google fan since jump, but this unilateral, dubious move is at least making me re-examine how I look at Google.

Over at Davenetics there was a post about the greatest sitcom characters ever and while I don’t consider myself avid tv watcher I read every damn comment ( and therefore everybody’s top 3 ) to the post. I’m not sure why this particular piece of pop culture fascinated me, but it did.

Here were mine:

Bill McNeal - could have been Jimmy James, or even the yummy Lisa Miller - News Radio was my favorite sitcom ever even though it lost its mojo with the tragic death of Phil Hartman.

Latka Gravas - Andy Kaufman was a genius, and I was in on the joke.

Arthur Dietrich - Barney Miller was one of the best sitcoms ever produced even though it is ralery talked about as such. Could have picked Fish or even Wojciehowicz, but Steve Landesberg cerebral conterpoint was as good as it gets for me.

On a lark I launched a new site tonight - Important Sites - it’s a fun site that lists all of the sites Furled by all of the fellas.

While all of the sites listed are not really important, I had the domain name, and they are all good sites in one way or another.

One of the strangest mutations of pop culture is the cover band that only covers songs by a single band - yes I am talking about the tribute band.

From Neil Deal ( a Neil Young and Crazy Horse tribute band ) to Mini Kiss ( YOU wanted the littlest, you got the littlest… ) the world is replete with musicians so obsessed with their heros that they cover them day in and day out. You’ve got 2U, Achtung Babies, and U2Zoo.

Led Zepagain, Led Zepplica, and Fred Zeppelin.

Even acts as obscure as BoDeans and Wishbone Ash have tribute bands.

If you’ve just got to have more tribute band info check out Tribute City or Tribute Band.