Blackhacker

BetaNews | iTunes may finally get The Beatles
United Press International posted a report on Saturday stating that a $400 million agreement had been reached between ex-Beatle Paul McCartney and Apple’s iTunes over the distribution of The Beatles’ back catalog.

Profits made from the deal and subsequent sales will be split between McCartney, Ringo Starr, the estates of George Harrison and John Lennon, Sony, EMI, and pop star Michael Jackson, each of whom owns some form of rights to the songs, be it in publishing, recording, or reproduction.

The battle between “Apple Computers” now called Apple Inc. and Paul McCartney’s Apple Corps Ltd., of the trademark “Apple” was the STUPIDEST feuds in the history of Intellectual Property. At the time, the two Apples where no where NEAR each other core businesses, and and all it did was cause bad blood between the two organizations that delayed the largest distributor of digital music from providing to the public one of the most recognizable and sough after collection of music.

I’m not much of a Beatles fan, I just hate stupidity. I’m sure there are many people who want to buy their music. I’m also sure iTunes wants to sell it to them and it would make Paul, Ringo and the Estates of the John, and George a a lot of money. That’s why its stupid. It’s an obvious win for everybody, so why can’t they just get together to make a few million dollars. I guess when you are a billionaire, you don’t bother stoop down to pick a few million dollars, when you don’t have too.

A lack of peers leads AllPeers to close up shop
P2P startup AllPeers announced today that it would be closing its doors due to insufficient growth. “We are tremendously proud of the product that our team has built, and we remain convinced of the potential of adding social features like file-sharing to the web browser,” the company wrote on its blog today. “However, we have not achieved the kind of growth in our user base that our investors were expecting, and as a result we are not able to continue operating the service.”

I had high hopes for this when it started but fell out of love pretty soon after it launched. Oh well “Allpeers! We barely knew thee !!”

US seizes domain name of Spanish company selling Cuba trips
If the US intends to continue presenting itself as the guardian of Internet rights, situations like this require a bit more delicacy. By effectively shutting down Marshall’s business, the United States has committed the censorship it condemns in other nations. Even worse, the Department of Treasury effectively shut down an international business without any type of due process. Both France and Germany followed a court process when investigating Yahoo for alleged improprieties, and the company in question (Yahoo) had the opportunity to respond to the charges in a court of law. Marshall was afforded no such luxury.

While the Internet may be global in nature, foreign companies may very well limit their use of US registrars and hosting services out of concern that activities targeted at other countries could be shut down here.

Couple of points:

Cuba is not a threat and as not been since the fall of the USSR. I also think that our policy towards Cuba, only plays in to keeping the ‘Castos’ (I see that the Raul Castro as an extension of the Fidel regime) staying in power. If we established relations and lift the embargo, and softened our policy to a nation that is NO military threat to us what so ever, Castro’s supporters would quickly see what a raw deal they where getting, and would inspire there own revolt. The hard line only supplies a villain for Castro rhetoric for propaganda.

While the Internet was born in the US it is a GLOBAL entity. If it is to remain global it cannot be used as instrument of US policy. There is no medium MORE capable of giving voice to the concerns of ALL people without respect of person than the Internet. Not only that we put at risk the very reason why the Internet is so successful as a platform for innovation, it’s openess.