The EU decided to retroactively extend copyright from 50 to 75 years, with no evidence that this was needed or useful. There has been very little discussion of the harm this causes, and what discussion there has been has focused on the world of rock and pop music. But it has an even more negative impact on classical music, especially old recordings of classical music. See the theguardian article: the festival bubble and the music copyright extension.

Well I’m not having much luck. Today, I lost a router. The short version is, as a result, the website was down for at least 4 hours that I’m sure of, maybe longer. I think I’ve got things cobbled together and everything appears to be working again, but this is sort of a temporary solution to keep me up and running. I’m going to have to give a long term solution some thought.

Late last week, Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and John Cornyn (R-TX) introduced a bill that would make the unauthorized streaming of copyrighted material a felony. Under current law, “reproducing” and “distributing” copyrighted works are felony charges and covered under peer-to-peer transfers and Web downloads. But streaming has been considered “public performance” rather than “distribution” – and holding a public performance without a proper license is not a felony. This bill, S. 978, adds “public performance” to the list of felonies.  [ Read More ]

So this is a post about William and Kate’s wedding you aren’t likely to see anywhere else. If you saw William and Kate’s wedding (and who didn’t?) you heard some very nice music. One piece you heard was John Rutter’s “This is the Day”, written especially for the service. Fairly traditional, but with some nice little twists that made it just a bit different, just a bit more contemporary. Just what was it that gave it that slightly modern flavor?  [ Read More ]

The music industry thinks LimeWire should pay $75 trillion in damages for their copyright infringement claim. The judge in the case, Judge Kimba Wood, has called this request “absurd”. The current US GDP is about 14 trillion, less than 1/5th the damages requested. In fact, the GDP of the entire world is somewhere between $59 and $62 trillion in US dollars. So the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is, to quote Judge Wood, “suggesting an award that is more  [ Read More ]

I apologize that the music that was here is not restored yet. The free samples will return soon. There will also, shortly, be a new section where you can purchase some of my Christmas carol arrangements for strings. Stay tuned.

Great article on why upload speed matters. While cable companies continue to advertise ever faster download speeds, upload speeds are not keeping pace, are seldom advertised and may be downright difficult to find listed in the fine print. It’s the two-way nature of the internet that is revolutionary, that we can be both content providers as well as content consumers, that keeps the internet from being just another TV/CD player/DVD player. See the article at App Rising.

The internet has been running out of addresses for some time now. Fortunately, IPv6 gives us 10 billion billion billion times as many as we had before. Yup, that’s about 5 X 10 to the 28th power addresses for each of the 6.5 billion people alive today. In practice they won’t all be used, the vast numbers allows more meaningful addresses, specialty address types (like multicast), and other refinements which allow more systematic and efficient routing of network traffic. See  [ Read More ]

“We’re going to need the rest of the world to bail us out.” So says Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor. See the article on Salon.