There were nice articles about Bohemian Carnival in both The Examiner and The Guardian in the last couple weeks.
Also we have some New Wave City photos from this weekend.
Here's some great news: our esteemed Senator and former Mayor Dianne Feinstein is still bought and paid for by Hollywood, as evidenced by the fact that she has just re-introduced the PERFORM Act, which would ban MP3 streaming. Really.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation says:
Satellite and digital radio stations as well as Internet webcasters would have to adopt digital rights management (DRM) restrictions or lose the statutory license for broadcasting music. Letters from constituents like you helped beat this dangerous proposal last year -- take action now to block it again.This bill aims to hobble TiVo-like devices for satellite and digital radio. [...]
This bill would also mess with Internet radio. Today, Live365, Shoutcast, streaming radio stations included in iTunes, and myriad other smaller webcasters rely on MP3 streaming. PERFORM would in effect force them to use DRM-laden, proprietary formats, so you can say goodbye to software tools like Streamripper that let you record programming to listen to it later.
They also have a longer analysis of it here.
If this bill becomes law, we'd be forced to abandon our MP3 streams and archives. The only alternative would be to offer them in DRM-laden forms by licensing proprietary software from Real or Microsoft, and even if I didn't think that was an unacceptable idea for myriad reasons, I'm certainly not going to spend even more money on the free webcasts than I already do. So that would be the end of them.
So if you'd like us to be allowed to continue doing what we've been doing for the last six years, please write your Senator and ask them to oppose the PERFORM Act. You can do this by going to EFF's page and filling out the form.
You may also be interested in Steve Jobs's recent change-of-heart about DRM. I trust him about as far as I could throw Feinstein, but his words sound good... We'll see if he stands behind them. Others are skeptical as well, obviously.
One Response:
Your DNA Lounge update has a link to http://www.dnalounge.com/audio/archives/ instead of http://www.dnalounge.com/audio/archive/.