(Betos - before Iodynamics partner meeting)

It's really starting to warm up. It's a little annoying, though, that the weeds are coming up green sooner than the grass and quite a bit sooner than the leaves on the trees come out.

(I wonder how often I start out an entry with commentary on the weather. Seems a bit silly.)

Checked out LiveJournal

Today, I spent some time looking at LiveJournal - a site which hosts people's journals online. It's a pretty impressive site and very well thought out. It's interesting to me they have LiveJournal clients - standalone applications which let you compose your journal entries without using your web browser. That's nice because it gives you a more flexible environment. I'll have to download one of the clients and see how it works.

For now, I've got the Fozzolog.

Limewire and political bologna

Not long ago, I downloaded Limewire for the first time. Like most people who have been on the Net for any significant amount of time, I dabbled with Napster in its heyday, but didn't really jump at the chance to play with Gnutella or other P2P clients for a long time.

I think the reason I checked out Limewire in the first place was because my buddy Frank told me he downloaded a cracked copy of Ulead MediaStudio Pro over Limewire. Since I've been using an old version of MediaStudio Pro VE for all my video editing, I asked him for a copy of it. If I was making any money off my video editing, I'd pay for the software, but since I've mostly just goofing off, I didn't feel any guilt not paying for it.

The first thing I noticed with Limewire was just how much porn there was out there. You didn't even have to look for it- almost anything you search for returns some porn hits. Definitely not a place for kids (Note: It seems Limewire does have a configuration option for restricting adult material. I'm not sure how reliable it is.)

For example, I looked for video files of X Files episodes. The results of the search were totally useless. 99.5% porn (I realize this was a bad idea in the first place). Unfortunately, the closest thing I could find to the X Files that was not porn was a Simpsons episode that spoofed The X Files.

What I did find on Limewire was MPEG files of Star Trek: Enterprise episodes. These are commercial-free video captures people have created with their computer (or DVR) and put out on a P2P network. I've got the first 17 episodes already. I never seem to manage to catch the show when it's on TV, it's nice that I'm able to watch it.

I'm sure the companies that paid top dollar for the advertising rights to Enterprise hate me for not watching the show when it's aired on television and subjecting myself to their advertisements, but, let's face it: the business is changing. The entertainment industry doesn't want anything to change and that's not surprising.

Michael Eisner of Disney recently wrote an op-ed piece claiming that the current state of intellectual property laws is holding back the full-scale deployment of broadband Internet access in America. I say, "Bullshit!"

One critic of Eisner's piece recently wrote the laws are already in place to protect copyrighted material. All Disney has to do if they don't like what people are doing with copyrighted material is go after the infringers of the law. Apparently, the critic writes, "it is cheaper for Disney to pay off Senators than it is for Disney to go after individual infringers."

My opinion is that the entertainment industry is so scared of change they are looking for government protection instead of investigating new business models under a new economy of entertainment.

For example, how can a record company make money on musical artists when its trivial to get the music off an artist's latest album for free? Well, if CDs are your bread and butter, then you have to add value to the CDs. The people buying the CDs should get more than the people who aren't buying the CDs.

"Ahhh, but those people who are downloading music for free off the Internet are infringing on copyright law!" one might say. Technically, that's true, but, in this case, the enforceability of the law has become a big question. It's kind of like sodomy laws in that respect.

Well, that's all for now. You can finally doze off.