The End of Originality - Or, why Michael Bay's The Island failed at the box office. By Edward Jay Epstein

"It's a terrific idea; too bad it has not been made into a movie already or we could have done the remake."

Weapons of Business Destruction - How a tiny little "patent troll" got BlackBerry in a headlock. By Tim Wu

What would happen if a rogue actor managed to get hold of a powerful patent and threatened to detonate it and destroy e-mail as we know it? You'd have the BlackBerry NTP v. RIM case

TechCrunch » Songbird to Launch Tonight

Songbird, the eagerly anticipated new media browser and web player built on the Mozilla (Firefox) engine, will launch (for Windows) later tonight or this morning (unless it doesn’t, CEO Rob Lord tells me :-) ).

Who Cares About Grammys? He'll Take the Hit Records - New York Times

The Grammys are going to be over in one night. My songs are probably going to be on the radio for the rest of the year.

dailypennsylvanian.com - Academia, via your iPod

Gladney added that intellectual-property concerns pose some issues for open content.

Wired News: Making a Living in Second Life

In a recent contract with the UC Davis Medical Center, Rufer-Bach created virtual clinics in Second Life to train emergency workers who might be called upon to rapidly set up medical facilities in a national crisis.

Wired News: Podfading Takes Its Toll

Then, in a plot twist worthy of the hit TV show itself, the Hawaii-based couple suddenly marooned their audience and shut down.

Wired News: Digital Music Biz Ain't Booming

Plenty of other content online is free, including most news, and editors, writers and publishers are paid for their work, and in some cases, even make a profit. By comparison, the pay up-front business models of the modern digital-music industry seem like losing propositions.

Can You TiVo to See Just the Ads? - New York Times

Madison Avenue is busy figuring out the Web-active afterlife of the more than 50 commercials that appeared during Super Bowl XL on Sunday.

French court rules in favor of private P2P use

For now, the French court appears to be giving the go-ahead not only for downloading music on P2P networks for personal use, but also for sharing files that have been downloaded.

The slow decline of the blockbuster

Blockbusters, the one-time lifeblood of the Hollywood economy, are (like any aging star) losing a bit of their potency.

Slashdot | BitTorrent to Sue Over Trademark

The company will set the lawyers on anyone using the BitTorrent name, and trademark, if they are using it to distribute spyware or adware

Slashdot | BitTorrent and End to End Encryption

As ISPs like Shaw and Rogers throttle their bandwidth to counter the growth of BitTorrent, BitTorrent developers are fighting back with end to end encryption.

--Ari