(entry last updated: 2003-05-04 14:35:44)

With my RedHat going out of service, I had to go about updating and making sure that I could get Win4Lin back to work - so a lot of time spent today to get it working on the home machine before committing to the work machine. A flew glitches, but I got it working, and the transition from 7 to 9 makes for a much nicer-looking system at least. Still workng through the mechanics, though…..

• An ironic insight from Jon Pareles in today’s New York Times piece: Madonna’s Album: Saved by the D.J.’s?
  

  MADONNA REMIXED (downloadable at http://boycott.dmusic.com) Despite the joyless narcissism of Madonna’s album “American Life,” she still provides entertainment value, perhaps inadvertently. She seeded file-sharing networks with decoy titles that consisted of her sneering, “What the [expletive] do you think you’re doing?” It was a perfect vocal hook for remixers, who have added rhythm tracks and other tomfoolery, making techno, trance, house and more abstracts tracks with it. Planned or not, it’s the kind of free-range collaboration the Internet was made for. [emphasis added]

• The Register has a couple of pertinent pieces today

  • RIAA attacking our culture, the American Mind: a response to the RIAA actions to poison the P2P system with malicious programs (see yesterday’s Furdlog) - good background from Wired News’ Hitting P2P Users Where It Hurts - and the SK Industries newsletter announcing the launch of Overpeer.

  • RIAA flames Sun: The RIAA takes on Sun and their P2P-using employees.

  • Letters to the editor on Apple’s music venture and DRM

  • And a look at some thinking on infringement in music

    And now I am using the Internet to assemble an MP3 collection of all the tunes on all those LPs, cassette tapes and CD’s that I’ve been buying since 1959.

    I’ll be damned in hell before I accept the notion that I and my ancestors who love to listen to the audio arts are in any sense guilty of anything that is illegal, wrong, evil, immoral or improper.