joegratz.net

The Streamcast case leaves the record companies with no option but to sue hundreds or thousands of individual file-swappers. So that’s what they’re doing. It’s totally insane, but they’ve got no choice, and they’ll win the cases; there’s no real question in my mind that sharing out a copyrighted file on Kazaa is copyright infringement. I still think it’s a bad idea, since it bears a risk of increasing resentment of the corporations and thus increasing P2P use.

But the point of this post is that the EFF is working on alternatives, and you should all give them money. I did. How could I resist — with Streamcast, they finally won a case! (*grin*)

I started phone service today with Packet8, a voice-over-IP phone company (for which I am not a shill, just a geekily excited customer). This means that my phone is connected to my high-speed internet connection instead of to a regular phone line, through a terminal adapter provided free by Packet8. My voice traffic is transported over the internet to Packet8’s equipment, where it’s connected to the public switched telephone network. The magic is this: Packet8 can put equipment in any geographic location and connect it to the internet. If it has equipment in Tel Aviv and equipment in Minneapolis, and both are connected to the internet, a call from a Packet8 subscriber in Minneapolis to a business in Tel Aviv becomes a local call from Packet8’s equipment in Tel Aviv to the business. All of the transport is done over the Internet; the call doesn’t hit the public switched telephone network until it’s local to the recipient. (That’s how it works in theory; I have no idea how many actual points-of-presence Packet8 has access to. For places they don’t have equipment, they can complete the call from their nearest point of presence.)

I have a real phone number in my area code that people can call, and I can call any phone number. The call quality has been very good, and the price is right: $19.95 per month for unlimited calling in the United States and Canada. The international rates are absurdly low too ($0.05 per minute to any first-world country), though I don’t do much international calling. This definitely beats paying Qwest $14 for a dial tone, plus extra for all sorts of things that come free with Packet8 (local calls, long distance, Caller ID, call forwarding, voice mail, etc.), which would quickly add up to well over $20. The only things I can’t do are call waiting, which is apparently going to be added in a software update next month, and calling 911, which I can do from my cell phone. I may leave an old, deactivated analog cell phone lying around my apartment just for calling 911, which even deactivated cell phones can do for free. And, of course, it requires that you have a broadband connection to the internet, but I find that I’m rarely anywhere for very long without one.

VoIP is neat! And, as John Dvorak mentioned in a recent guestblog post on BoingBoing, there’s an added perk when travelling. When I’m in a hotel with broadband, I can take my home phone with me and make all the calls I’d like, without paying the hotel’s exorbitant telephone charges.

This guy made a flash animation to go with Tom Lehrer’s Elements song. Good job.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that a Texas law banning consensual sex between adult homosexuals was an unconstitutional invasion of privacy. Jack Balkin has a very good analysis. Scalia was absolutely foaming at the mouth in his dissent, which is always a good sign.

I generally find satires of political correctness rather repetitive and unfunny, but this piece in the Guardian was an amusing break from Harry Potter 5.

Eugene Volokh has just uncovered these “lost maxims of equity.”¹

¹ Cf. Maxims of Equity. N.B.: This joke will be rather puzzling if you’re not a lawyer.

Watching TechTV at 2:30 AM (don’t ask), I just saw a commercial for a video called “Hollywood’s Hottest: Body Shots”, a compilation of the nude scenes in various films. I wondered, at first, how this company could possibly have convinced the studios to license these scenes for a compilation of this sort; as I understood it, their contracts with the actors pictured often restrict out-of-context use of nude scenes. Then I looked again — it’s very careful to bill itself as “a review” of the nude scenes, both in the ad and on the box. I haven’t verified this, but it seems possible that this company isn’t licensing the clips at all, but is planning to claim that because they are in the context of a “review”, the use of the clips constitutes criticism and is allowed by the “fair use” defense found in 17 USC 107. Whether or not they could get away with this would depend, I think, on how much evidence of actual critical intent they included in the video itself. I’m not about to spend $19.99 plus $6.95 shipping and handling to find out. Regardless, it’s certainly creative.

I’m generally in favor of gun control and against the destruction of books, but I have to admit, this is kind of satisfying to look at after a long 1L year. Via How Appealing.

So, Rob Campos, the attorney starring in the reality show “For Love or Money,” was apparently dismissed from the JAG Corps after a drunken breast-groping incident. Big shock — another reality show bachelor is less than the white knight he claims to be. The really scandalous thing, in my opinion, is this law firm bio of Campos, riddled with spelling errors and grammatical mistakes. How could a licensed, practicing attorney have such a limited command of the English language? Like millions of reality show viewers, I’d be amused to have a look at this guy’s briefs.

From Maureen Dowd’s column today, a quote from Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry. After noting his love for Frost, Keats, Yeats, Dickinson, Eliot, and Neruda, Kerry says the eleven words that guarantee my vote for him:

“I do a great `Prufrock,’ if you want to hear it,” he offered.

Now, if during a debate he accuses one of his opponents of making “a tedious argument of insidious intent,” or something like that, I’ll really take my hat off to him. Via Crescat Sententia.

I was walking down Washington Avenue SE today on my way to a haircut, and I saw a small group of students standing at the bottom of a traffic light pole. I noticed that one of them, an athletic Asian woman, was trying to climb the pole. A bird was thrashing around, unable to escape, tied up in a string attached to the pole, about 20 feet off the ground. As she climbed higher, a larger and larger group gathered at the bottom of the pole, watching, putting down bags, helping her up, preparing to catch her if she fell. After getting solid footing on the “Walk / Don’t Walk” signal, she reached up with a borrowed pocketknife and cut the bird free. It thrashed and fell into the crowd, unable to fly. I picked up my bag and walked on.

It’s always sort of disappointing when this happens. I was reading Safire’s column today, in which he describes the DARPA LifeLog project as a kind of electronic “commonplace book”. I had that wonderful synapse-firing feeling,¹ and made the connection — a blog is the modern equivalent of the commonplace book! We record the best bits of things we read, thoughts and musings, pithy quotes, and other sparks our brains throw off. Eureka!

Of course, this turned out not to be a new idea at all. Safire himself had made the analogy in a previous column. And among medievalist bloggers at least, it appears to be, well, a commonplace.

The same thing happened with the Memex analogy; this blog was going to be named (brilliantly and originally, I thought) “My Memex” — that is, until I found the multiple other blogs so named.

One of these days, I’ll come up with an original analogy.

¹ Does anyone else know what I’m talking about? It’s the little chemical release you feel when you make a whole bunch of connections between ideas are made all at once, and thoughts reoganize themselves around the new concept. It’s halfway between a thought and a physical feeling, and is utterly pleasant.

What an interesting combination. On my random “arty 60s pop” playlist, I listened to Leonard Cohen’s “Leaving Green Sleeves” — an updated version of a traditional English song — immediately followed by the original demo version of the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs” from the “Peel Slowly and See” box set. That stripped-down version makes it clear that “Venus in Furs” is structured (harmonically, melodically, formally) like a traditional English folk song; he even sings it rather baridically on the demo. So I just experienced an English Folk Song Suite rather different from the Vaughan Williams chestnut so popular with high school bands.

It’s in! The petition is in! Rather good work, I thought. I may have developed an unanticipated footnote fetish, however.

So evidently Salam Pax is not only real, but likes Philip K. Dick. Cool. Via OxBlog.

The House of Lords had debate on Spam yesterday. Unforunately, perhaps because Lord Sainsbury led the debate, some peers thought they were talking about SPAM, not spam. My favorite part:

Will the Minister explain how it is that an inedible tinned food can become an unsolicited email, bearing in mind that some of us wish to be protected from having an email?