Stories on filesharing in the salaried press usually mention a drop in recorded music sales during 2001. The size of the drop, though, varies wildly -- I have seen numbers as low as 2% and as high as 10% -- but most mentions are high rather than low. Record Sales, MP3 Downloads, and the Annihilation Hypothesis by Stan Liebowitz explains the variation.

A friendnet is a network topology where every TCP/IP connection is backed up by a meatspace connection.

I've started a blog to capture developments related to DMCA, copyright, patents/open source, etc. I call it public.net because it's about the Net as a public resource. Input, etc: rkoman@attbi.com.

Today, I got a press release from FatWallet's lawyers, announcing that Wal-Mart has dropped the demand for a name, and that FatWallet was asking for damages for Wal-Mart's knowingly false invocation of DMCA.

If you accept Jack Valenti's arguments, you believe that no creative work will ever be produced in this country unless copyright protection is a couple of generations long. But not even Jack would argue that a bunch of post-turkey sale information constitutes "creative expression."

Lawrence Lessig was named one of Scientific American's Top 50 Visionaries for arguing "against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online."

"You can almost do this as an exercise. Look at some program and see if there's some duplication. Then, without really thinking about what it is you're trying to achieve, just pigheadedly try to remove that duplication. Time and time again, I've found that by simply removing duplication I accidentally stumble onto a really nice elegant pattern. It's quite remarkable how often that is the case. I often find that a nice design can come from just being really anal about getting rid of duplicated code," says Martin Fowler in this Artima.com interview.

Venture capitalists are investing in Wi-Fi companies; Intel is pushing 802.11, new PCs are coming with Wi-Fi antennas, even Tablet PC is WiFi ready. Another victory for a bazaar, grass roots mentality over CathedralThink.

Related link: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-964908.html?tag=fd_top...

"Reliability is one story that hasn't been told about extreme programming (XP), which focuses heavily on testing. People talk a lot about its responsiveness and its light weight, but I hear more stories about XP's staggeringly high reliability. A couple weeks ago I chatted with Rich Garzaniti, an old colleague from the C3 project. The C3 project is often referred to as the birth project of XP at Chrysler where Kent first really put the various practices together coherently. Rich talked about this system he was developing using XP with testing and refactoring -- drinking the whole XP Kool-Aid completely through the system. He's had one bug so far this year," says Martin Fowler in this Artima.com interview: