Michael Fricklas is Viacom’s (VIA) general counsel, and it’s his job to oversee the company’s legal efforts, including its $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube. When people talk about Big Content, they’re talking about people like Fricklas.

So it might be surprising to watch him tell a class of Yale law students this month that suing end users for online copyright infringement is “expensive, and it’s painful, and it feels like bullying.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site ]]> http://voices.allthingsd.com/20091118/viacoms-top-lawyer-suing-p2p-users-felt-like-terrorism/feed/ 0 http://voices.allthingsd.com/20091110/manhunt-2s-ao-re-release-shows-problems-with-highest-rating/ http://voices.allthingsd.com/20091110/manhunt-2s-ao-re-release-shows-problems-with-highest-rating/#comments Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:01:57 +0000 Michael Thompson http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=17624 By Michael Thompson, Blogger, Ars Technica

Read the rest of this post on the original site

If you are Paul Haddad of TapBots, LLC, it isn’t unusual to get requests for contract work. When your applications are as eye-catching and functional as his, you garner attention. So when he received an e-mail earlier this month with a subject line of “I’m interested in Tapbots,” it didn’t really come as much of a surprise.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Faster and dramatically more power-efficient than rotating magnetic media, solid-state disks (SSDs) are one of the longest-awaited and most eagerly anticipated technologies in the past two decades of computing.

The theoretical underpinnings of mass storage with no moving parts have been with us for decades, but the improvements that have put solid-state in economic and technological reach of ever larger segments of the storage market have been slow in coming. As the tipping point draws nearer with ever-increasing momentum, let’s take a look back at the long journey to the practical SSD, and a look forward at the likely future progress of this technology.

Read the rest of the post at the original site.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has mounted a recent push to turn network neutrality “principles” into official regulations–and in doing so has stirred up the net neutrality hornet’s nest once again. The issues involved are thorny when you wade deep into the weeds, but consumer-level support for network neutrality seems largely driven by simple principle: AT&T (ATT) should not be “speeding up” websites with deep pockets, leaving everyone else to languish in the slow lane.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Regional telco TDS Telecommunications (TDS) last week issued a press release announcing a major milestone for the company: 50Mbps service over fiber optic cable to residents of Monticello, Minnesota. The Minneapolis suburb became one of the few non-FiOS communities in the country to experience full fiber-to-the-home deployment, and subscribers will all receive a free upgrade from 25Mbps service to the new 50Mbps tier.

Even better is the price, which starts at $49.95 a month for 50Mbps fiber service without the need to buy other services.

Read the rest of this post at the original site

The ideas may sound like science fiction, but some researchers are seriously considering what it would take to shoot sun-reflecting aerosols into the atmosphere to counter climate change. Fleets of small jet aircraft could fly into the lower stratosphere several times a day and release sulfur gas to produce planet-cooling sulfate aerosols. Or giant balloons made out of plastic could be equipped with long hoses and used to pump sulfur gas upwards into the atmosphere.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

It’s almost a truism in the tech world that copyright owners reflexively oppose new inventions that do (or might) disrupt existing business models. But how many techies actually know what rightsholders have said and written for the last hundred years on the subject?

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The same federal judge who oversaw the Joel Tenenbaum file-sharing trial earlier this year passed out default judgments this week against other file-swappers who never bothered to show up–and they now owe far less than Tenenbaum.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset and Joel Tenenbaum captured the nation’s attention when they were defendants in the RIAA’s first two trials against accused online infringers. But here’s the mind-warping reality: both defendants would have been far better off monetarily if they had simply ignored the complaint altogether and failed to show up in court.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Faced with a shrinking audience of journalists for their press releases, a consortium of universities has launched Futurity, a site that will aggregate edited versions of the best materials produced by university press offices.

In recent years, the economic hardships that have crippled newspapers and hurt other media outlets have taken a disproportionate toll on science journalism. Many news establishments, including CNN, have entirely eliminated their science staff, while others have severely curtailed coverage or handed it off to journalists with no science experience. The net result is that the press officers of major universities, whose job is to help increase the public’s recognition of the research that goes on there, increasingly feel like they’re speaking to an empty room. Their solution has arrived in the form of Futurity.org, a site that aggregates a selection of the releases they used to feed to the press.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

With a new school year in full swing, Ars takes a look at the RIAA’s newly updated copyright curriculum. Your kids could be learning from it–so what does it say?

School kids in America could certainly stand to learn about copyright in the classroom–it’s a fascinating topic that increasingly impacts the life of every “digital native” and intersects with law, history, art, and technology. But should they be exposed to industry-funded materials meant to teach kids:

Read the rest of this post at the original site

There have been a few cases recently that have involved previously-anonymous commenters getting outed by the courts. Where’s the line between free speech and getting unmasked?

You’re anonymous when you post comments online–except when you’re not. Though many Internet users still believe that their identities are as hidden as they choose to make them, online anonymity is not always guaranteed and, in fact, there’s no way to stay truly anonymous. There is always a company somewhere that has information that can be traced back to you, whether it’s Google (GOOG) or your ISP, and judges have shown themselves willing to issue subpoenas to unmask anonymous posters.

Read the rest of this post at the original site

Microsoft (MSFT) has revealed that, for a $1000 PC, it has always charged the OEM about $50, or five percent, for Windows.

At the Jefferies Annual Technology Conference, Charles Songhurst, general manager of Corporate Strategy at Microsoft, answered a rather long onslaught of questions about where Redmond is heading. At one point, Songhurst started talking about how investors were asking Microsoft what its standpoint was on the “skewing PC price point” (i.e. “the netbook effect”). Songhurst explained that it was more interesting to look at “the growth merchandise volume of all PCs sold” despite the “emergence of a lot more segmented SKUs.” In other words, he believes that although the price range for the PC is widening, the market is still growing, and that’s all that matters to Microsoft.

Read the rest of this post at the original site

Hugely popular conservative talker Glenn Beck has sicced his lawyers on a satirical website that’s been up for a week, but the attorneys may have a point on this one. The site, called glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com, toes the line on defamation–and may have stepped across it.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

If there is any subject that optimists and pessimists love to bang heads over, it’s the Internet. To follow the experts, we’re either on the cyber-road to utopia or going to alt-hell in an iPhone app handbasket, depending on what day of the week it is. Read Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks and you’ll learn that the ’Net is taking us to something like the next socio-evolutionary plateau.

Read the rest of this post on the original site