Category: Stories
-
Twitter’s Jam Festival
by
Andrew Orlowski
–
Writing about Twitter is the journalistic equivalent of eating the fluff from your navel. The posh papers love it. Menopausal middle-aged hacks love it. The BBC is obsessed with it. Instead of telling us something we didn’t know before, Twitter makes churnalism so easy, it practically automates the entire job. The rest of the world,…
-
Virgin puts legal P2P plans on ice
by
Andrew Orlowski
–
Big label pressure has forced British cable ISP Virgin Media to suspend plans to introduce a legal music sharing service for its subscribers, just weeks ahead of its launch, The Register has learned. The radical initiative, tentatively branded as “Virgin Music Unlimited”, represented a major investment for the ISP, and would have been the first…
-
Manx P2P for €1 a year?
by
Andrew Orlowski
–
The Isle of Man’s e-commerce minister says he wants to legalise P2P music file sharing – taking just one Euro a year from broadband subscribers. Tim Craine told us today that such a scheme would be voluntary. The Manx government is hopeful that blanket P2P schemes would be rolled out in other countries – including…
-
Why animals shouldn’t be able to sue you
by
Andrew Orlowski
–
Obama’s “regulation czar” Professor Cass Sunstein wants animals to be able to sue. Animals can’t reason or express themselves, naturally, so the litigation would be handled by human lawyers, acting as ventriloquists on behalf of the animal kingdom. Think Mister Ed the talking horse, crossed with Eliot Spitzer. “Any animals that are entitled to bring…
-
Google cranks up the Consensus Engine
by
Andrew Orlowski
–
Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It’s a historic statement – and nobody has yet grasped its significance. Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on…
-
Jim Griffin’s Choruss
by
Andrew Orlowski
–
The plan to provide US students with compulsory flat-fee music finally has a name, it emerged this week. Choruss LLC will provide participating universities with a replacement for their current subscription services such as Rhapsody, and has the backing of the the EFF and the tacit support of the RIAA. That alone indicates the magnitude…