No Such Weblog

Tim Berners-Lee’s New top level domains considered harmful (Karl Auerbach’s response here) makes a number of points of varying quality.

Verisign’s case against ICANN basically was thrown out of federal court on Tuesday, with two weeks for Verisign to amend its claims. Part of the suit may end up in California state courts.Bret Fausett lives in the right time zone, and has all the news on this.

Writes Kurt Pritz: The ICANN Proposed Budget for fiscal year 2004-05 is being posted today at 4 PM Pacific time.

The absurdities and chilling effects of today’s intellectual property environment: Let’s assume you buy a CD (say, “feels like home” by Norah Jones) online, but it turns out to be a non-CD that you can’t listen to (you missed the fine print). Let’s assume you rip it on some old PC, and then copy the MP3s to your laptop — so you can actually listen to the music you paid for. Because the technology put in place by the control freaks at IFPI is much more effective at keeping people from playing the music (in particular on modern devices) than it is at keeping them from copying it.Just assume all this. Could you do and blog it, without risking legal trouble? Could you discuss the software you used for ripping the CD?To stay out of this kind of questions, stay away from copy-controlled CDs. Also, spend at least as much money on funding the excellent people at EFF as you spend on funding an incredibly arrogant cartel that happily takes your money, but delivers crap.

I had earlier blogged the Bonn Books Outdoor project. The public bookshelf is alive and well, after some mechanical problems with the doors were fixed.In Buxtehude, there’s a similar, but slightly different project (photo here): Instead of setting up a dedicated bookshelf, they are reusing abandoned phone booths, with bookshelves installed inside.

From: majordomo@gnso.icann.org
To: roessler@does-not-exist.org
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 05:52:54 -0700
Subject: Majordomo results

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>>>> unsubscribe ga
Succeeded.

Kristian Kntopp points to an interesting decision of a court in Aachen, Germany.Plaintiff has bought a new car, including CD player, in 2002. The car’s CD player is unable to play copy-protected CDs. Plaintiff sues for abatement of purchase price, claiming that the CD player is defective, and for damages, claiming that he should have been notified about the player’s inability to play copy-protected CDs.The court finds that the CD player is not defective.Buyers of a new CD player can assume that a CD player is able to play Compact Discs that comply with the Philipps and Sony specifications. Buyers can’t assume that a CD player is able to play “any medium that resembles a Compact Disc.” The court doubts that copy-protected CDs can even be legitimately called “CD”.A different conclusion could be possible if the actual market for CDs consisted mostly of non-standard media. This is not the case: Less than 10% of all CDs sold in Germany between 2001 and 2003 were copy protected.Plaintiff also doesn’t get damages for lack of notice: Given the small portion of non-compliant CDs in the marketplace, playing copy-protected CDs can’t be considered the usual purpose of a CD player. Hence, vendors are not held to notify buyers that their compliant devices are unable to play certain (or all) non-compliant CD media.

From my spam box today: Facts Disc Price Blowout!!These guys offer (essentially) the zone files of .com/.net/.org/.edu plus alleged 700,000 WHOIS records for $199.95. That’s 0.03 cents per record.

Today, (presumably) the second instance of Mahler’s Beethoven’s 9th arrived here. It’s the first one I ordered, also at Amazon marketplace. That particular merchant first sent a confirmation for the wrong CD, and — upon my complaint — notified me that the CD was not available; the money was returned. Two weeks later — I had now ordered elsewhere, and their delivery was underway –, I received a “status message”. I responded that I considered the contract voided by the merchant, and would return any delivery from them. No response.Today, a shipping confirmation was in my e-mail, and another CD in my physical mailbox. This particular merchant will now have to pay the return postage back to them.Oh, just in case you’re wondering: I’m talking about www.germanmusicexpress.com.

Susan Crawford has — in late February — blogged what must have been an ear-opener concerto: Slatkin conducted Mahler’s retouche of Beethoven’s 9th, and before that gave a lecture explaining the various versions of the symphony. I have now finally got hold of a recording of this particular variant of the 9th: Gerhard Samuel conducting the Cincinnati Philharmonia Orchestra; the recording is available from Centaur Records.It’s quite an interesting recording that demands more time and concentration — in particular since my mental image of the 9th is dominated by a 1963 Karajan recording of the symphony. But, as usual, the more versions of the music one has listened to, the more interesting it becomes to listen to any and all of them.Speaking of ear-opening interpretations, here are some more (almost random) recommendations: The excellent Rubinstein-Reiner interpretation of Brahms’ first piano concerto (available on CD); Edwin Fischer’s dark cadenzas in Mozart’s D minor piano concerto K 466 (I have not been able to track down a CD version of the HMV record with the Philharmonia orchestra that I have in mind); Furtw舅gler’s version of Schumann’s 4th with the Berlin Philharmonics (in particular the extremely slow beginning of the final movement is fascinating; this recording may be available on CD).