David Akin’s On The Hill

I never thought I'd be quoting Pravda back to anyone, but here I am, with a pointer to a Pravda article on the 10 best April Fool's Jokes perpetrated by the media.. I liked the one where an Irish newspaper wrote that Disney was looking to buy Lenin so it do its own version of Lenin's tomb in Disneyland!

The Canadian Recording Industry Association plans to appeal a Federal Court of Canada ruling yesterday that not only denied CRIA's request to force ISPs to turn over some customer records of alleged file-swappers but also said downloading and uploading in Canada do not infringe copyright. The link to my report on last night's CTV National News report on this is here. You can also check out my colleague Keith Damsell's report in this morning's Globe and Mail.

In addition to the appeal, look for the record industry in Canada to engage in some serious lobbying and public relations work with the goal of convincing Ottawa lawmakers to change copyright laws to be, perhaps, more like those in the U.S., where record companies have had great success suing what it calls music pirates.

CRIA's issued a short statement yesterday, vowing to continue to fight against free download.
I interviewed lots of people about this yesterday (some of which is in the CTV news item), but I will try to add more comments from those I talked to later today.
I'll also try to post links from the blogosphere as I come across reaction to his story;

• Here's Tim Bray: “I would just totally love if it I could post the occasional excellent piece of music here, and I bet it would drive business to the artists and their published works; and I?d love it if some of the other people whom I?ve gotten close to via their writing were able to share some of their faves with me, too.”
• Here's Mark Evans: “To be perfectly blunt, the music industry was badly spanked yesterday….”
• The inevitable Slashdot free-for-all
• Michael O'Connor Clarke: “…Another example of the Canadian judiciary demonstrating less willingness to roll over at the request of the big entertainment industry concerns…”
• Here's Wendy Seltzer: “…Congrats to the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, whose intervention helped the court get there..”
• Here's Ernest Miller: “…Now, the CRIA obviously did a terrible job putting together their case. But if the court basically ruled that they can't put together any case for a large number of filesharers, copyright is in serious trouble. ”
• Here's David Weinberger: “… a Canadian judge has made, in a nutshell, all the right decisions about file sharing and copyright…”

At CTV, we move video across the country and around the world on high-capacity fibre links — a kind of souped-up Internet. This system is relatively new — less than two years old. We call it the Gateway.

It lets me, for example, look at video on my desktop from CNN, APTN, or affiliates anywhere in the CTV system. It's how we move video between bureaus. I think it's a remarkable innovation.

 In my print capacity, I'm used to seeing wires full of great content which helps me do my job. Gateway does something similar for us video journalists. I can see raw news clips and images which helps me tell better stories.

And all of this has largely been developed in-house at CTV. I bring all this up because today the Globe and Mail describes this system and its development:

CTV's Gateway opens door to a TV news revolution
The broadband evolution has sparked a broadcast revolution.
TV newsrooms across Canada are shunning traditional satellite and fibre-line feeds in favour of Internet protocol (IP) technology to move their video . . .

 

Forrester Research makes what is surely a controversial conclusion: Microsoft's Windows platform is a more secure computing platform than various Linux computing platforms. Forrester's counts the number of flaws in each platform over a given period of time and then analyzes how long it took for that flaw to be corrected. I've not got a link to the Forrester study but Computer Business Review reports that Forrester says Windows had fewer flaws than the Red Hat, Mandrake, or Debian distribution of Linux and Microsoft posted patches more quickly than the communities that develop those Linux distribution.

Interesting points which, if nothing else, may spur the development communities behind those Linux distributions to look at ways to speed up reaction time to security problems. On the other hand, I'm not so sure that you can make the blanket statement that one platform is more secure than the others without doing a qualitative analysis of the kind of flaws typical on each platform. Is one Windows flaw equal to one Red Hat flaw?

Much more on this later — I'm putting together items for tonight's newscast on this — but the Canadian Recording Industry Association's attempt to force ISPs to turn over customer information that would help CRIA sue what it alleges are illegal music downloaders has failed. A Federal Court of Canada judge handed CRIA a shutout, in a ruling which says CRIA provided no evidence that what Kazaa users and others are doing is illegal. Read for yourself here. It's fascinating. 

 

A very nice piece
by CNET's David Becker on the relationship between Apple Computer and Adobe Systems Inc.. Both companies are
richer because of each other's existence. Adobe committed early to the
Macintosh platform and always made sure that updates of applications
like Photoshop were out on the Mac platform before they were on
Windows. When Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that that Apple would make
the big jump from Mac OS 9 to the Mac OS X, a lot of observers wondered
if that was such a good idea. That's because the code base for OS X,
based as it is on a Linux kernel, was so radically different from OS 9
that Apple would be asking all its developer partners to re-code, at
great expense, its Apple applications.
Luckily for Apple, Adobe was right there as an early adopter and backer
of OS X and other developers took their cue from Adobe.
Similarly, Apple built machines that exploited all the great software
innovations pioneered by Adobe co-founder John Warnock, notably the
early adoption of the PostScript printing language. Apple's computers,
displays, and printers were among the earliest and best to render
digital typefaces the way Warnock conceived of them. Apple's commitment
to help realize Warnock's vision helped Adobe.
But now, to use Becker's metaphor, the relationship between Apple and
Adobe is like any marriage that's lasted 20 years:

They share an area code, a customer segment and a history dating back
to the early days of personal computing. But Apple Computer and Adobe
Systems, like many in long-term relationships, have seen the
20-years-and-counting bond between them run hot and cold.
Right now, it's in a colder period. Signs of frost have been
accumulating for the past couple of years, with Adobe dropping
Macintosh support for several software products and introducing others
as Microsoft Windows-only applications. At the same time, Apple has
quietly pushed Adobe out of a few markets by selling its own
applications or bundling them into its OS X operating system.

Clay Shirky describes a new term —
situated software— in his latest
essay, released to the Net this evening.
Shirky says “situated
software” is “designed in and for a particular social situation or
context. This way of making software is in contrast with what I'll call
the Web School (the paradigm I learned to program in), where
scalability, generality, and completeness were the key virtues . . .
The biggest difference this creates relative to classic web
applications is that it becomes easy to build applications to be used
by dozens of users, an absurd target population in current design
practice.”
It's a neat essay. Clay describes some applications created by some of
the students he teaches under this 'situated software' paradigm.

Professors at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina conclude in a new study released today that music downloads do not seem to have any impact on music industry sales. Their study concludes “downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates, moreover, these estimates are of moderate economic significance and are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales”
Sharman Networks, the company behind the file-trading service Kazaa, was happy to hear about this. This comes, incidentally, as file sharers in Canada await a key ruling from the Federal Court of Canada that will determine if the music industry can force ISPs to turn over customer data so that the record industry can more easily sue those it believes are guilty of copyright infringement.

Meanwhile, The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry is suing 247 file sharers in Canada, Italy, Germay, and Denmark, and Canada.

Finally, market researchers Ipsos-Reid report that use of legal music download services exploded last year.

The latest NADBANK survey is out. NADBANK, in Canada, is to the folks in the newspaper business what Nielsen is to the folks in the TV business. It's an independent research firm that provides a semi-annual scorecard to newspaper publishers that lets them and their advertisers know how many people are reading the papers. It is not the same thing as circulation numbers, which indicate how many people are buying a given paper.

The bottom line for this survey, which tracked readership last fall, seems to be that most papers are losing readers, particularly readers who are 18-34. A free subway paper in Toronto, though, is doing very well with a big jump in readership. In Vancouver, The Province and The Sun switch places as the most-read paper in that city.

Every paper, of course, as their own take on these numbers. Here's a selection:

The Globe and Mail: Free Toronto daily's readership surges
Subway handout Metro jumps 22% as stability reigns in newspaper marketplace
Metro, the free tabloid handed out in Toronto's subway system, has seen substantial year-over-year growth in readership in a national newspaper
marketplace that has otherwise shown remarkable stability . . .
[The Globe also issued a press release.]

The Toronto Star: Star dominates rivals in fight for Toronto readers
Industry survey confirms huge lead
Other papers lost readers in 2003
The newspaper war still rages, but the Toronto Star remains by far the dominant newspaper in greater Toronto while its three major rivals have all lost readers, an industry report shows. A survey released yesterday by Newspaper Audience Databank Inc. shows that in 2003 an average 1,036,800 people read the Star the previous weekday, unchanged from 2002 . . ..
[The Star also issued a press release]

National Post: I could find no story online from the National Post but that paper did put out a a press release.

Calgary Sun: Sun tops with families
Your Calgary Sun is rising faster than ever. So fast, in fact, that it's now the most read daily paper among 18-49-year-old Calgarians. And we're also the leading daily newspaper through the week and on Sundays for city families …

OK, now this whole blog thing is really going mainstream. Noam Chomsky has a blog:

This blog will include brief comments on diverse topics of concern in our time. They will sometimes come from the ZNet sustainer forum system where Noam interacts through a forum of his own, sometimes from direct submissions, sometimes culled from mail and other outlets — always from Noam Chomsky.

That's what he wrote on March 24. I'd provide a link to it but the link that should point to it: http://blog.zmag.org/archives/ttt/000017.html – is broken.
You can also get an RSS feed off his blog (he's using Moveable Type. He must be smart.)
The good news is that, while some of Chomsky's books require your undivided attention because they can be a bit tricky from an intellectual point-of-view, his blog posts are like coffee-shop chats — informal, still full of insight, and short enough that you don't need an entire morning to digest them.