With the Hadron Collider going live, now's the time to share this lovely entertainment. Hliarious! (And the science is accurate, apparently.)

[Hat tip to Lidarman]

That's right. The RIAA lawyers are claiming you cannot legally copy for your own use music you bought and paid for. Via Elisa Camahort, I returned from the holidays to read this:

The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

"I couldn't believe it when I read that," says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who represents six clients who have been sued by the RIAA. "The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation."

Maybe I'm just unique, but I feel that it's this kind of hostility and contempt for the consumer that is doing in the music business.

Elisa writes:

Let me tell you how many CDs I own: somewhere between 1000 and 1500.

Let me tell you how many hours out of the day I listen to my music (my every-single-song-was-legally-acquired music) via my iPod or computer: at least 10 hours a day in my car, at work and at home.

Let me tell you how many of my CDs I would listen to if not for my iPod: probably very VERY few. Even a multi-CD player would be too inconvenient to rely on during the work day. I like being able to turn on Shuffle on my computer or iPod and have music all day without thinking about it or messing with it. Pre-iPod I did not listen to CDs at work ever. I did listen to CDs in my car, but tended to have the same 6 CDs in there for weeks without changing them.

Let me tell you how that would affect my music-buying habits: It would greatly diminish them. I would forget about artists I liked, I would fall into a musical rut, instead of maintaining the really quite broad musical taste I have. And broad taste leads to broad music-buying habits. iTunes has already massively increased my music-buying habits by being so simple and so immediate. By exposing me to more music. And by making it easy for a constant variety of music to accompany my life most of my waking hours.

So, here's what the RIAA is just begging me to do: Never buy another physical CD, ever.

Radiohead just might be onto something.

So says Thomas Hesse, president of global digital business and US sales for Sony BMG. That's right, the company that betrayed such contempt for the consumer by deliberately infecting its music CDs with its Rootkit, before stopping when it faced major PR and legal backlash, still has plenty of contempt for the consumer.

The article on the Forbes website -- itself littered with interstitial and numerous pop-up ads that make you just want to hurry back and experience more -- covers how music industry executives are fretting over life in the digital age.

“No intellectual property business is going to cross the digital divide without figuring out how to protect its content and to ensure that transactions are associated with the acquisition of content,’’ Nash said. “The music industry simply has to solve the content security problem or risk the obsolescence of its business model.’’

So says Warner's senior vice president of digital strategy and business development. In other words, the world must conform to their business model, not the other way around.

At issue is that people who buy and download music might do what they have been able to do for decades: copy it and share it, which is something you still can do if you buy a CD.

Says MacDailyNews:

The horse left the barn decades ago when the music industry opened the doors wide and began selling billions of Compact Discs without DRM. Hence, most of the music sold today is already without DRM and, we can get any new release for free - just like being in a college dorm - on the day of release via P2P. Don't steal music.

Lastly, it doesn't matter what the music labels' agendas are, the only agenda that really matters is Steve Jobs' - and his seems focused like a laser on DRM-free music sales.

DRM-free music is already here via CDs and P2P. There is no logical reason to try to restrict legal online downloads with DRM - all you are doing is turning people towards pirating music and/or turning them off from using legal online stores like Apple's iTunes Store.

It never fails to amazes us how some people in the music industry don't understand the absolute basics of their business model.

We're all criminals. Especially those of us in college. That seems to be the message from the executives. How's that for "business development" strategy?

So Jeremiah Owyang has started a media consumption diet meme, and Marianne Richmond has tagged us BlogHers, so here goes....

• Web: I used to use NetNewsWire Lite for RSS, but I tried Shrook and found it to me easier to use, with some of the features NetNewsWire makes you pay for. Shrook is easy enough, so I'll stick with it for now. Do I need to mention Firefox? For search, I use Google pretty exclusively (I find myself wondering how Yahoo! gets by, what with all the barriers they put up for people to get listed in their index) and if I'm blog-hunting, I go to Technorati. I blog using Drupal for platform and either Performancing or ecto for blogging client (though neither is optimal -- Performancing repeatedly loses my drafts and ecto keeps embedding cruft into my html, even when I define the tags myself). For online video, I find YouTube too useful to ignore. It can be a bit hard to take, though, just browsing at random.
• Music: I've started trying out Pandora, but in some stations they keep trying to push the strangest things -- sorry but how do you get Foreigner or Journey from Led Zeppelin? -- and they limit how many songs I can reject in a given time. (Am I just too persnickety?) I have several of my old CDs burned to mp3 files, which I play on my desktop iTunes, but as I've moved from my nearly-dead PowerBook to two iMacs to my current MacBook Pro, it's been a challenge carrying those 20GB of files along for the migration ride. (It doesn't help that some of the discs were defective bulk coasters.) I haven't signed up for the iTunes Store, though, because the DRM restrictions and poor audio quality make downloads there less than appealing, no matter how appealing and easy-to-use the GUI is. Stop treating me like a criminal guilty until proven innocent, Apple and RIAA, and you'll have my business. Meanwhile, as CD music continues to fade away at the big box stores, I'm finding my music horizons diminishing, and that's a terrible place to be. My whole live is defined by soundtrack.
• TV: I don't have much time to watch television, especially the commercial variety -- I think I'm more and more intolerant of commercials. I will watch the NewsHour if I'm home early enough, the Daily Show if I'm up late enough (and thank goodness for the 9pm rerun of last night's show), Frontline if I stumble across it and (of course) Battlestar Galactica. I don't do cable news -- it strikes me as an entire industry getting excited about the lint in their own navels. However, since getting HDTV on Comcast, I've found that I'm more likely to just watch anything as long as it's high-def. Well, not anything at all, but it's amazing how much more interesting Nova or Discovery (or reruns of Battlestar Galactica and Firefly) are when you can see so much detail on the screen. (Ironic that local news is in high-def, but most network shows are not; the Rose Parade was in high def, but the Macy's parade was not; sports are in high def but arts typically are not; and all HBO seems to play on their single high-def channel is Rome [though it could be worse].)
• Communication: My cell is a Palm Treo 700p, but I hardly ever use it. It comes in handy when I need to keep up on email or check something on the web, but I'm realizing the touchscreen I so wanted (and thus the reason I rejected alternatives like Blackberry or Q) is pretty over-rated. Ah well, live and learn. The phone part is actually great for clarity and reception, but I don't use it as a PDA at all, as the 320x320 screen is just too damned small. Other phonage is Vonage. I haven't had a land-line phone in quite a few years now. --Not that any of this matters, because I really really hate talking on the phone unless it's necessary. For IM, I use Jabber (via Adium), which we have set up on one of our domains, and the sadly unavoidable Skype, which as a relay is an absolute bandwidth hog even when it's just sitting there.
  I don't use Skype much for voice, since so many people seem to have so many problems configuring it to work well. We thought it'd be great for talking to clients overseas to save a few pennies a minute, but all too often it was too much like the Cone of Silence. I use Apple Mail for email, mainly because Thunderbird on Mac is too slooowwwwww (I wish it weren't).
• Movies: Once upon a time, I saw several movies a week, sometimes several in one day, but now that they blast commercials in your face before showing generally sucky movies -- not to mention the overpriced junk food, sticky floors and noisy patrons -- it's just not worth it. It's not fun any more. So I watch movies on DVD, where I'm not limited by the, excuse me, crap selection of the week, and which on an HDTV plasma is an entirely new experience. I tend to buy, not rent, because rented discs always seem to have scratches that make the flick skip or freeze.
• Magazines: I subscribe to Post, HOW, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Macworld and occasionally Wired. I rarely buy a magazine off the rack. It amazes me how many magazines are in print. Do people actually read all these things? Somebody must. I have to say, however, that the supermarket tabloids do keep me informed. I mean, I could've gone for weeks or even months without knowing that Brittney Spears shaved her head or that Brad sent a note to Jen! Eeep!
• Books: I live for novels, but it's hard for me to find writers I like, so I'm stuck with the five or six authors who could write just about anything and I'd read it. Maybe if my life weren't so fast-paced, I'd be able to relax enough to get into a new writer's style, but usually I can't get past the first paragraph, so I do without. Meanwhile I'm reading more non-fiction than any time since I was in college. How She Does It, Blink and Designing Interactions are three of the most recent delights.
• Newspapers: I love reading off paper, but unlike magazines I don't hold the same love of newspapers. I like the print design of the New York Times, but I hate getting newsprint all over my fingers, and at a buck a pop for something I may not even have time to read that day, it becomes a dead-tree guilt and a recycling burden more than a source of news. 15 years ago that wasn't the case -- I loved getting the paper! How life changes in these times! I still read the "newspapers" online, including the NY Times, the Mercury News and the odd site that happens to have the AP wire story I want to read.

So there's my consumption in a nutshell. Now in the tradition of tagging, and because they are such an eclectic group of geeks and artists, I'd like to tag everyone on Planet Drupal.

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