Read, Listen

Some worthwhile text:

• Jeff Howe in Wired, Big Champagne is Watching You: "Over the long term, the entertainment industry will never stop worrying and learn to love file-sharing – but Big Champagne will help them learn to live with it." Mary Hodder wrote about Big Champagne on bIPblog earlier this year, and here's a Business Week interview with the company's CEO, Eric Garland.


• Michael Schrage in Technology Review on digital rights managment, The Customer As Enemy: "[T]he business consequences of 'customer-as-criminal' midsets are inevitably perverse."

Some upcoming audio:

• The Baghdad Blogger, Salam Pax, and Ian Katz (who wrote the intro to the forthcoming book), today on NPR's Fresh Air:

Katz is the features editor at the Guardian in London. He traced and verified the identity of the Baghdad blogger, who created an Internet diary about life in Iraq a few months before the recent war began.

The name is a pseudonym, which combines the Arabic and Latin words for peace. Pax's web log is still going on today. Peter Maass of the online magazine Slate said Pax was "the Anne Frank of this war ... and its Elvis." Pax's diary entries have been collected in book form in the forthcoming The Baghdad Blog.

Today's New Blawg

Darren Kaplan writes DarrenKaplan.net: "I'm usually paid to argue, but on DarrenKaplan.net, I'm arguing for free." Darren has a plaintiffs' corporate and security litigation practice in New York City, and blogs about culture and politics; his link to the 72 Virgins Dating Service (just a t-shirt, folks) certainly caught my eye! [Via the Blawg Ring]

Got My Sprite, I Got My Orange Crush*

I'm having a strange, disjointed afternoon dealing with work, construction at the house, and gestational diabetes testing.* Gotta get on the stick and book my travel to Digital ID World too. I can think of several reasons why someone might not be going to this conference, but let's face it—none of them are worth so much as a superannuated snack cake:

1. "It's too expensive." Not necessarily, Norlin's got a fine selection of discount codes under that ubiquitous trenchcoat.


2. "I don't need to worry about digital identity, other folks are looking after all this." Well, that's precisely the point, isn't it? Check out the conference schedule if you need more convincing. Technology and standards coalescing today soon will dictate everything about the way people shop, bank, surf the 'Net, vote, get around, find each other, use their property—y'know, silly little things. You're right, you probably don't need to pay attention at all.


3. "I'm all conferenced out at the moment." See no. 2. See also Doc.


4. "How do you expect me to decide between going to your panel on digital rights management issues [moderated by Cory Doctorow!] and Esther's on DNS, identity, and smart cards?" This is a problem, I know. If you have to scoot back and forth between the rooms, that'll be ok.

As an added bonus, Gary Turner quite probably could be convinced to blog our blogging of his blogging of the whole thing. Again. (Aw, here's more from the then-expectant Dad around the same time last year: "Right now I'm making quiet cooing noises.") Now quit yer whinin', and I'll see you there.

*Part of the test, and a frequently misheard take on the REM classic.

Mary On The Music

bIPblog's Mary Hodder went to Music Wars, and has this report.

Today's New Blawg

Neminem could be a multiplatinum white rapper but I just can't tell. What is more clear is he or she is the New England area law student who writes ignorantia legis neminem excusat. Nem' has more coverage of the California unfair competition lawsuit pending against the RIAA, and this take: "How does the agreement between the 'RIAA' and Joe Downloader affect the ability of a record company official who also works with the RIAA to use the information obtained in the affidavit? If it doesn't, and if the RIAA never intended it to, and if the RIAA tred to lure consumers into this agreement with the hopes they could flush out more file sharers to sue, then this program might qualify as a fraudulent practice under the CA statute." [Via Blawg.org]