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…Not making life easier, Robertson has just launched a new music store that doesn’t have songs from any major artists, doesn’t have the DRM infection demanded by the RIAA and doesn’t have serious profit prospects.

“You don’t do an online music store to make money,” he said. “You can’t even think about making money until you have a massive scale and even then it isn’t a high margin business.”

MP3tunes charges 88 cents a song or $8.88 per album and sends 65 cents per song or $6.50 per album back to the artists. Companies like Apple and Napster also manage just a few pennies per song sale from their online stores.

“But I think backing the MP3 format is the right thing to do for consumers,” Robertson said. “Today, desktop Linux is locked out of almost all of the online music stores. That’s because we don’t support DRM, and I think DRM is the biggest threat to open source, no question about it.”

Source:The Register

The online music store in question is MP3tunes.com. In a world where the online stores are being asphyxiated due to the legal idiocy of the RIAA, its nice to finally see a company like this that is not afraid to bring a much needed breath of fresh air to the sector. That said, anyone up for bets as to how long it will take the RIAA to sue MP3tunes for not enforcing a DRM system?

Most of you know about Wardriving, but how many of you know about Warbussing?

Feeling like being a Wifi Pioneer (or just cheap, you pick), I decided to go out and ‘warbus’ today in the city center of my city using a specially outfitted Sony Clié PDA. I used the device to detect local APs (Access Points, ie. Wireless Routers), and initiated scans whilst on the bus during during its route in the city core.

The bus was travelling relatively fast, so every Wifi sweep that I did in search of APs yielded a different set of results every few seconds as I entered and left the zones of each point. I then got off the vehicle and proceeded to backtrack on foot to see what I had initially missed:

Interestingly enough, each scan still yielded different results from any one spot. In one instance it picked up a router that was inside a restaurant a very distant block away (the SSID of the AP was of the same name as the eatery). It should be noted that pretty much all of these APs were WEP enabled.

Those who visit lokitorrent.com will be pleasantly surprised to be informed that the site has been taken over by the MPAA, and all the personal information stored on its server given away to this organization. That’s like me joining Hotmail, Hotmail being sued, and then Hotmail giving away all my information to complete strangers.

Anywho, here’s the “warning” they put on the site:

…and my satirical take on the issue:

I do find it interesting though that the MPAA admits on their manifesto that Lokitorrent themselves carried nothing illegal, and rather that they facilitated illegal actions. I guess the Internet itself is their next target, as it facilitiates illegal actions too! If the person that ran Loki had to pay $1,000,000, I guess that means the people that created the Internet should be charged $1,000,000,000,000? Or would the MPAA still not be satisified?

Tecmo, which has published Ninja Gaiden, the Dead or Alive series, are suing fans for making custom skins for the characters ingame. I wish I was slanting this article in some way or other to excuse how absurd this lawsuit is, but I am not. There is no illegal gamecopying involved. You have to purchase and own the Tecmo titles to make this work. What is involved are a bunch of blokes who reversed engineered the title and figured out how to make extra content for the game.

I equate this with someone purchasing a book, and then being sued because he/she highlighted portions of the text (thus modifying the looks of its contents). To its defense, Tecmo is using the DMCA act whereby breathing is illegal, and to sway the courts is making use of the nefarious term “hacker”, as per the following statement: “Hacking of this kind will not be tolerated and we intend to take all necessary measures to protect our intellectual property.”

“Most of the skins posted on the Message Board by defendants show Tecmo Characters with appearances that are different from the original Tecmo designs,” the complaint further notes; “Several… are designed to make Tecmo Characters appear naked.”

To add insult to injury, Tecmo’s Pfeiffer says the company is seeking $1,000 to $100,000 in damages for every custom skin swapped over the website. So continuing with the highlighted book analogy, that’s like demanding $1,000 to $100,000 in compensation for every time I highlighted the book, EVEN THOUGH NOT DOING SO WOULDN’T AFFECT THE PLAINTIFF AT ALL. What does Tecmo gain by suing these folks? There are no lost sales due to the actions of the defendants (no piracy involved), why if anything, the sales go up! (The prospect of having attractive naked girls in a video game is enough to make any male want to purchase it.)

Another analogy: someone figures out how to integrate a GPS system in his car. But because he modified the car he owns, Ford sues him. Even though he bought the car, and modified it himself. He is demanded to pay incredible fees on the basis of how many modifications he made.

The full article can be read here.

Microsoft seeks to patent “Methods are disclosed for encoding latitude/longitude coordinates within a URL in a relatively compact form.” I’m not even going to tell you the grandiosse repercussions of such actions… actually I am.

So Microsoft seeks to patent latitude/longitude coordinates. If this were to pass, the repercussions would be enormous: weather information websites, basic geography websites, GIS datum information, online navigation maps, GPS datasets would all be liable for lawsuits. Honestly, this is a prime example of why I’m against software patents in its current form: because the system is being abused to the point of insanity. If this passes, it will be illegal to have any content on the Internet that pertains to geography and locations.

But this extends beyond the reaches of the Internet. I am a Physical Geography student. I put alot of my work online so that I can access and work on it regardless of where I am physically situated. With such laws in place, it means that I am legally liable to be sued because my homework contains Lat/Long data in its filename. This homework that so happens to be online. Utterly ridiculous.