Consumer content

Yesterday, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a post suggesting that president-elect Obama needs to do more than throw money at ailing industries, but actually needs to "reboot" America by investing in infrastructure and education. In Newsweek, law professor and intellectual property thinker Lawrence Lessig argued for a more narrowly focused reboot of the FCC, which should be encouraging technical innovation but instead tends to favor big incumbents.

But what about the music industry? Yes, the big labels have earned a lot of scorn for their technophobia and suing their customers--a practice which finally ended last week… Read more

As it has for the past four years, Google will be mapping Santa Claus' trek from the icy North Pole to rooftops around the globe on Christmas Eve. But this year, good girls and boys can track their gifts via mobile phones and Twitter, too.

Starting at 3 a.m. PST on Wednesday, a Google Map with Santa's current location will be displayed on the NORAD Santa Web site, operated by Google and the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

Santa fans can also track his movements in 3D in Google Earth (download) by downloading a special NORAD Tracks Santa KML. … Read more

Warner Music Group has been saying since Saturday that it was the one who asked that the label's videos be removed from YouTube after talks to renegotiate its licensing deal with Google's video site stalled.

That's not what happened, say two high-level sources with knowledge of the negotiations.

YouTube began removing videos from its site after Warner came to YouTube with an "11th-hour demand" for better financial terms, according to the sources. All four of the top recording companies are renegotiating their contracts with YouTube for music and music videos.

Managers at the Web's … Read more

This morning I wrote a story about Jerry Scroggin, owner-operator of Bayou Internet and Communications, and why he thinks copyright owners should compensate ISPs if they want help protecting content from piracy.

To give readers an idea of the kind of requests he receives from film and music companies each month, Scroggin forwarded some of his e-mail exchanges. Those are included here.

The first is from Payartists, which according to its Web site "provides a way for copyright infringers to settle their disputes with the copyright owners" and in this case was representing the family of the late … Read more

UPDATE 8:40 a.m. PT: Click here for e-mail correspondence between Jerry Scroggin and copyright owners such as Warner Bros and the family of Frank Zappa.

Jerry Scroggin, owner-operator of Bayou Internet and Communications, wants the music and film industries to know that he's not a cop and he doesn't work for free.

Scroggin, who sells Internet access to between 10,000 and 12,000 customers in Louisiana, heard the news on Friday that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has opted out of suing individuals for pirating music. Instead, the group representing the four largest … Read more

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

We may be about to see the latest frontier of viral marketing--fake students starting groups for the incoming class of 2013 in the name of data collection.

Brad Ward, a recruitment specialist at Butler University, outlined the details on his blog. He became suspicious after talking to a colleague at Winthrop University. Here are the common links:

Class of 2013 groups are being started at a bunch of universities. The people that start the groups aren't registered at those schools. Those same names--Patrick Kelly, Justin Gaither, James Gaither among … Read more

One day after Virginia Tech released thousands of documents solely to families of victims in last year's massacre, the university's student newspaper made them public.

On Thursday, the Collegiate Times posted the documents, which include e-mails sent from the account of gunman Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 fellow students and faculty members and then killed himself on April 16, 2007.

The nearly 14,000 pages also include the police report on the massacre, e-mails from faculty sent to fellow professors and to Cho, a 2005 harassment complaint against Cho, post-massacre clean-up plans, administration plans on how to present … Read more

Negotiations between Warner Music Group and YouTube over renewing the licensing agreement for the record label's music videos broke down Friday. Early Saturday, Warner, the third largest record label, removed videos from the Google-owned video site.

The impasse comes at a time when all four major labels, including Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and EMI, are renegotiating their licensing deals with YouTube.

"We are working actively to find a resolution with YouTube that would enable the return of our artists' content to the site," Warner said in a statement. "Until then, we simply cannot accept terms … Read more

Cary Sherman offers no apologies and won't for a second concede that filing lawsuits against people who pilfered digital music from artists was ineffective. On the contrary, the president of the Recording Industry Association of America makes a case that chasing file sharers into court was the only option in 2003, one of the darkest periods in the music industry's history.

"If you can go back to that time in your mind and remember that file sharing was growing at logarithmic pace," Sherman said referring to 2003, not long after file-sharing service Napster had triggered a … Read more