Mark Pilgrim has a great, incisive post about the Amazon Kindle e-reader that sums up almost all of the reasons I won’t be buying it — it spies on you, it has DRM (which means that it has to be designed to prevent you from modding it, lest you mod it to remove the DRM), [...]

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Source for this post is Techcrunch:
Since reporting Monday that Nine Inch Nails had dumped its record label and was to offer future albums direct to the public, Oasis and Jamiroquai have also joined the move away from the record industry, but the biggest announcement of all is news today that Madonna has dumped the record [...]

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The new Amazon MP3 Store looks like no previous iTunes Store rival. The music is completely DRM-free, encoded at a very respectable 256 kbps, includes a ton of songs from major record labels, and offers terrific software support for Mac OS X.When you purchase singles, you can download them directly via your web browser. When [...]

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It’s no secret that the record labels face a chronic inability to innovate in their business models, choosing instead to continually repackage content and seek ways to force people to buy stuff they don’t want in order to get the things they do want. It’s this sort of thinking which has brought about the “ringle”: [...]

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Apple just slapped NBC down hard. Responding to reports NBC was pulling out of the iTunes Store, Apple announced that it was prematurely canceling their partnership — Because NBC wanted $5 per episode of its shows!
Apple® today announced that it will not be selling NBC television shows for the upcoming television season on its online [...]

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Filed under: Portable Audio
It looks like the long, litigious saga of AllofMP3 is about to take yet another turn, with the company is now promising to resume its music download service following a recent Russian court ruling in its favor. While it apparently isn’t quite ready to get all that specific, the company has posted [...]

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Cory Doctorow:
A new crack for the AACS anti-copying system claims it can’t be overcome by updating DVD players and other devices. AACS is the anti-copying system behind Blu-Ray, HD-DVD and other crippled high-def video formats. These systems rely on a “revocation” system that allows new discs to ship with the intelligence to refuse to play [...]

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Xeni Jardin:
Drew from Fark just pointed me to this ABC News web article on the Digg user revolt over the AACS numeric key (previous BB post). Drew says,
The article questions why Digg censors spam and porn, but not the HD-DVD key. I think mainstream media is now going to use this as an excuse [...]

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Cory Doctorow:
Ed Felten has a great rumination on the AACS key debacle in which a copy-prevention software vendor is threatening to sue hundreds of websites for publishing a 16-byte number; Felten points out that it’s not just censorship that’s upsetting the Internet — it’s the absurdity of claiming to own a number:

While it’s obvious why [...]

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Cory Doctorow:

Wired News has a gallery of the lovely photoshops of the notorious AACS “secret key,” a 16-digit number that is illegal to possess and disseminate. AACS is the anti-copying system built into HD-DVDs (and you’re out of your mind if you buy one of these boxes — their future is apparently so fragile that [...]

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