Open Access News

all this talk by the Baby Bells that Google, Microsoft, Vonage and other successful web companies should pay the telcos extra was simple jealousy. Wilson tells the Bells to "dream on," and while we hope he's right, he may be underestimating the destructive power of jealousy. And, it's not just the Baby Bells who are acting this way -- but plenty of online businesses.

Wired News: Whither the DIY Auteurs of DV?

It's the kind of filmmaker-from-nowhere tale that Sundance and proponents of digital filmmaking have been promising for years, but so far has been relatively rare. Despite the hype, DV hasn't yet revolutionized the industry the way proponents had hoped.

Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » CGMS-A + VEIL = SDMI ?

For example, there could be a way for the copyright owner to signal that the customer was free to copy the video for personal use, or even that the customer was free to retransmit the video without alteration. But our representatives didn’t see fit to support those options, even though there are unused states in their design.

Google Talk goes open federation

Google Talk has implemented the industry standard Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), enabling GTalk servers to talk to any other XMPP-capable service without any setup, plugins, or special multi-protocol clients required.

S2S (that's server to server...)
Napster crosses half million subscriber mark on road to... ?

But the company's ability to harness Napster's once-cool image from the freewheelin' piracy days of its youth turned out to be nonexistent. It's not hard to see why; "cool, I can get this for free, Napster rocks!" doesn't easily morph into "cool, I can pay $10 a month and not be able to put my songs on my iPod or burn CDs!"

The Charleston Gazette - News

State investigators have stumbled onto a basement office in the West Virginia Capitol outfitted with computers, video and audio gear, and software used to pirate movies and music recordings, according to a document obtained by The Associated Press.

Search Engines as Leeches on the Web (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

I worry that search engines are sucking out too much of the Web's value, acting as leeches on companies that create the very source materials the search engines index.

Riight. You could argue this about blogs leeching MSM value, but search engines? You want eyeballs, search is a cheap way to get them.
Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » How Would Two-Tier Internet Work?

ISPs will be driven to a strategy of providing Internet service alongside exclusive, only-on-this-ISP content. That’s a strategy with a poor track record.

Medicine Index

[Cleveland Clinic now has an enormous open-access textbook.]  Via OANews.

A Free Market Model for Content Distribution

This model both preserves profits for the content publishing industry and, paradoxically, serves to reinforce the standard business model. This is accomplished by dispensing entirely with the notion of intellectual property rights and allowing the price of content to be determined naturally by market dynamics.

Via OANews

--Ari