TeledyN

Priced applications are currently only available to users in the following countries:

• Australia
• Austria
• France
• Germany
• Italy
• Japan
• Netherlands
• New Zealand
• Spain
• Switzerland
• United Kingdom
• United States

Notice any obvious omissions?

On reading this list a big flashing light of Obviousness went up and here is my guess, and I'll bet I'm right: Rogers.ca likely does not like the idea of allowing other people to make money from 'their' phones, and thus there are no 'paid' applications in the Android Market. Not, at least, until they 'negotiate' some deal whereby Rogers gets a cut of the pie. This is the same basic reason why Bell dis-allows Skype from purchasing bulk Canadian telephone numbers to allow Skype subscribers the incoming call feature, thereby ensuring that none of their subscribers will have any option to dump their landline in favour of a free USB Skype phone.

I wondered why this great new phone was only optioned to run largely quite amateur software, although much of it is still better than the RIM proprietary, nonetheless, a lot of it appears written by students, by kids, miminally functional just to get their name in the game. Naive fool that I am, I thought, "oh, that's just because the Android is 'new' and it always takes a while before people really find their way around any new computing platform." but that's not true, is it. Android 2.0 may be new and uncharted, but we Canadians only get the dregs from the wealthy industrial nations: Our 'latest' Android is only 1.6, maybe even 1.5.

Oh well ... patience is a virtue!

The LA Examiner has some news up about a contest put on by la-based RamenKlub. ... The contest is fairly simple, make your own original "How to make Ramen Video.” Once you make it, post it on Youtube and send the link to the folks at RamenKlub and you’re entered.

Gee, they make it sound like so much fun, but what are they doing? They are attempting to boost their inbound links and inflate an illusion that folks are hyper keen on their wares/festival/whatever when in fact the entries are stuffing your search engine results with irrelevent and effectively paid-for advertising that dilutes the Internet Collection. Are they asking kids to upload their vid to their own hard-drives, showing the entries at their own expense? Or are they making a ploy to hijack a free public resource and slant it to their own product-line shareholder needs?

Gets me ire up, it does.

Is this any different than paying people to write stories about medical dysfunctions and then tag each with the brand name and like that conveniently sells the associated pharmaceutical and then blast them across random blogs as 'comments'? If I tell a thousand people to write glowing Wikipedia reviews of my shows on the chance they might will a $500 prize, does that mean my shows are great? Or have I committed a sinister kind of payola. Even if it isn't soliciting positive product endorsements, it doesn't matter to the search engine ranking algorithms. As Andy Warhol said, you measure your reviews not by the like or dislike, you measure your reviews in inches.

You may feel differently, but what this tells me is that these advertisers (and their clients) think so little of the Internet, they don't see it as the great information salvation for humanity, but as an endless free 'unmonitized' fence-space that deserves no more respect than to be plastered with their crowdsourced marketing handbills.

While the major record labels were dragging file-sharers and BitTorrent sites to court for copyright infringement, they were themselves being sued by a conglomerate of artists for exactly the same offenses. Warner, Sony BMG, EMI and Universal face up to $60 billion in damages for pirating a massive 300,000 tracks.

It is no secret that the major record labels have a double standard when it comes to copyright. On the one hand they try to put operators of BitTorrent sites in jail and ruin the lives of single mothers and students by demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, and on the other they sell CDs containing music for which they haven’t obtained copyright permission.

In the past we’ve covered many disputes between artists and labels, where the latter is being accused or even sued for using songs without permission. Just a few months ago Latin America’s biggest artist, Alejandro Fernández, sent the police to a Sony Music office to confiscate over 6,000 CDs that the label refused to return, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The labels have made a habit of using songs from a wide variety of artists for compilation CDs without securing the rights. They simply use the recording and make note of it on “pending list” so they can deal with it later. This has been going on since the 1980s and since then the list of unpaid tracks (or copyright infringements) has grown to 300,000.

Growing tired of the label’s piracy, a group of artists have filed a class-action lawsuit in Canada against four major labels connected to the CRIA, the local equivalent of the RIAA. In October last year Warner Music, Sony BMG Music, EMI Music and Universal Music were sued for illegal use of thousands of tracks and at present the case is still underway.

How and why this blatant copyright infringement could go on for years is a mystery, but the label’s double standard has been picked up by the plaintiffs as well. “The conduct of the defendant record companies is aggravated by their strict and unremitting approach to the enforcement of their copyright interests against consumers,” the artists argue in their claim for damages.

The suit is still ongoing but already the labels have admitted to owing at least $50 million for infringing the rights of artists, and this figure could grow as high as 60 billion. So who are the real pirates here?
(torrentfreak)

I mean, y'know, now and then, in moments of weakness, I do really try to see their point of view in these matters and show a little sympathy to their cause and all they've done to for us over the years, and then along comes something like this.