Music wants to be free

Database News - Wednesday December 19, 2007

INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Music wants to be free

Executives of Wal-Mart told executives of Warner Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment to start putting their music in unprotected, MP3 format or not bother trying to sell their music in Wal-Mart, America's biggest music seller. Pepsi Cola told executives of Warner Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment it is going to give away 5 billion soda bottle caps; get five and get a download of an unprotected MP3 song starting next February.

Two of the world's biggest video game companies announced a merger, and also revealed just how big games are; the companies behind Call of Duty and World of Warcraft - Activision and Vivendi unit Blizzard, both of America although Vivendi is French - signed a deal to join forces, worth $18 billion, yes with a "b". The National Institute on Media and the Family of America announced its 12th annual video game report card for the holiday season; it complained that many video games are violent, not exactly a new development; to guide kids to the really good stuff, they published their list of "Ten Games to Avoid" at http://www.mediafamily.org.

The world's only court-designated abusive monopoly bragged early in 2007 it was going to turn off computers with pirated versions of Windows Vista; now just a teensy bit humbler after screwing up and turning off a lot of quite legal Vistas of very annoyed, full-payment customers, Microsoft said it is turning off the kill switch instead; from now on, detected Vista pirates will get a flock of pop-ups warning them to get a real version, but they will not have Vista turned off again.

Malaysian police lit out after a team of music CD pirates trying to flee a raid, and started a rare high-speed car chase through the streets of Kuala Lumpur; when the law finally pulled over the would-be escapees, officers were surprised to arrest a 24-year-old man - and his 52-year-old mother; back at their home, police seized almost 20,000 pirated CDs and nine high-speed writers worth 900,000 ringgit, or almost exactly 9 million baht in real money.

he German court took two weeks to deal with troublesome consumers who simply did not know how to obey orders; the upstarts sued for the right to buy and use Apple Inc iPhones with any service they wanted, and not just T-Mobile, the service appointed by Steve "President for Life" Jobs as official iPhone network; the judge was dismayed, and ordered the consumers to do their duty for the Fatherland and accept the Apple monopoly; after all, Germany isn't France. US inventor Judah Klausner of Texas sued Apple Inc for $360 million; he told the judge he invented the visual voicemail feature on the iPhone and Apple stole it; it's not a frivolous claim, because he has done such business with Apple and other companies in the past.

AT&T announced it was pulling the plug of its remaining pay phones in America by next year, and selling off the Bell version of a buggy whip factory; that raised serious questions for the US such as, America still has pay phones?; it turns out that there are one million of them, down from 2.6 million in 1998.

Five of the Japanese top 10 best selling novels of 2007 were written on mobile phones; 21-year-old nursery school teacher "Rin" whose pseudonymous novel about her fight with Aids (Moshimo Kimiga, or If You...) says it just came naturally; "I started writing novels on my mobile when I was in junior high school and I got really quick with my thumbs, so after a while it didn't take so long;" her hard-cover novel is 142 pages and has sold more than 400,000 copies.

BMW researchers put simple Internet Protocol (IPv6) under the hood of new cars; attached to a rather ordinary built-in PC, the protocol operated as well as any of the proprietary gear that specialists have been selling to auto companies, and it looks like Germany's ace manufacturer may opt for the same standards you use for online chats in order to make its fly-by-wire throttles talk to the BMW engines.

US Internauts watched 9 billion videos in September, 27.6 per cent of them on YouTube; if you think that's not too impressive, consider that there was no one in second place to the Google company, really; next not-worst was Fox Interactive Media (MySpace, news and so on) with 4.2 per cent and Yahoo was right behind with 4.1 per cent; YouTube had 71.6 million unique visitors, while Fox had 41.2 million.

The International Air Transport Association surveyed airlines and 10,000 active travellers, and reported a sea change towards acceptance of pretty well all technology at the airport; according to IATA, 89 per cent of travellers now prefer e-tickets to paper, 54 per cent use and actually want more self-service check-in and similar services; the single most popular online feature is the ability to choose seats, and the happiest event at the departure gate is the ability to suddenly upgrade to better service.

Bangkok Post