MP3.com was bloodied Friday. As of this writing, the online music service is trying to negotiate a settlement with RIAA. A U.S. District Court ruled Friday that the site's My.MP3.com storage service violated copyright law. But the music-user rebellion sparked by this landmark technology is by no means over. The manner in which music is disseminated has been changed for good, whether record labels acknowledge it or not (and over the weekend, a few executives actually did). Without a settlement, the recording industry is in danger of blowing a historic opportunity to protect artists, make money, and capitalize on, rather than shun, the information distribution tools of the future. P.S. Who are the pirates? A record exec e-mails me this a.m. that it cost about 50 cents to make a CD, for which consumers pay $16.95. (Read more).

The General Public License is a powerful license with a powerful ideology. The GPL forbids use of GPL'ed code in closed-source, proprietary software. The model has already proven itself, but sometimes mistakes happen. GPL'ed code found its way into a closed-source kernel module; NVIDIA's proprietary beta Xfree86 driver. This is the story about how mistakes happen, and how they can be fixed with polite communication.

Last week, Metallica became the first major rock group (quickly followed by Dr Dre) to file suit against a music-sharing Web site, in this case Napster. They claim they're protecting their art, but they're also putting a big chill on the very notion of free software, open source, and the free movement of information and ideas on the Net. Prior to this, the battle -- currently in the federal courts -- was between the recording industry and so-called music "pirate" sites. Metallica managed to instantly spook Harvard, Yale and scores of other colleges into booting Napster off their servers. Whatever you think of the Napster flap, this is bad news for the idea of a barrier-free Internet. (Read More)

Net scholar Mark Stefik has written The Internet Edge, Social, Technical and Legal Challenges for a Networked World, an effort to put in perspective and historical context this amazing, unnerving moment in human and technological history. Happily or not, we are all now living on the Internet Edge. The real change is just beginning. First of a series discussing some of the ideas raised in the book. (Read More).

The great thing about new media is the ability to bend the rules. Hundreds of movies that have been around for years are being released on DVD with new material. So, we get to take some of our favorite movies and 'review' them in their new format. This particular film is a wonderful excuse. 'Read More' for a review of Terry Gilliam's Brazil by Jamie and Emmett.

A discussion follows on why the messages in "Voices From The Hellmouth" should be published as they are, and why they were chosen. These messages were meant to be heard. They are the right ones. They shouldn't be edited, excluded or silenced, especially not here. (By JonKatz & CmdrTaco)

Linux is always a little bigger than you think. Every day, people are working on porting Linux to new platforms to achieve more with what they have. In the case of LinuxPPC and Terra Soft Solutions, they're working with community spirit and the PowerPC architecture to create insanely great solutions with a touch of Tux.

ESR ^[?] sent a feature about the Microsoft Web Server Backdoor - interesting stuff, and makes some good points about Open Source.

Thursday, I flew to Charlotte to ask executives of the Pinkerton Special Services Group to scrap or modify WAVE America, a "school safety" Web site that encourages schoolkids to anonymously turn in classmates they consider dangerous. We brawled politely for hours over chicken salad, iced tea and fries about school safety, oddball profiling, privacy and reality. Although righteously armed with some amazing and eloquent e-mailed screeds, reports, quotes, studies and pleas from Slashdotters, my expectations were low. I returned with a penetrating glimpse into the corporatist soul. (Read more).

Young women between the ages of 13 and 30 are pouring online. They're at the heart of the rapidly growing movement of women onto the Net. Political correctness aside, men and women are not alike, at least not online. They may have equal skills, but they choose to do very different things. Along with open source, younger women may trigger another political, media and social transformation in cyberspace.

Several friends turned us on to this article at the Online Journalism Review [OJR] that says the combination of AOL and Time-Warner may lead to an information monopoly more dangerous than Microsoft's desktop OS monopoly. The article focuses on political power, but I believe another big danger of the AOL/Time-Warner merger is that it will stifle development of innovative, non-mainstream Web sites. (continued)

Serving a community that prides itself on solidarity and free thinking, Outcast magazine has been the center of a censorship issue that has gone from a virtual push to a very real shove. With the advent of British libel litigation that borders on the unbelievable, I spoke to Outcast's editor and publisher Chris Morris about the magazine, ISPs, and free speech under the digital union jack. Update: 04/06 06:48 by E : NetBenefit has written in with their side of the story, and well met. How long until we hear from the Pink Papers?

The chairman of the Pinkerton Corp. has agreed to meet with me Wednesday about the more than 1,000 objections posted last week on Slashdot to the company's WAVE America so-called school-safety program. The program, kicking off in North Carolina, offers schoolkids cash, caps and other incentives to turn in "depressed and dangerous" classmates to an anonymous toll-free number. Pinkerton brass say they have read each of the Slashdot comments and want to talk. (Read more about the meeting, and post any questions you have for Pinkerton here.)

For those of you who've spent years battling and cursing the rapacious, insatiable Microsoft, there had to be a belated satisfaction in seeing a judge brand Bill Gates a monopolistic law-breaker. For everybody else, it's hard to see what, if anything, will change as a result of this surreal conflict between 18th-century laws and institutions and 21st-century economic realities. Truth is, we already live in a post-Microsoft World. (Read more.)

Stephen Fear's High Fidelity is as good a movie as the l995 Nick Hornsby novel on which it is based. The movie brilliantly evokes the overheated life of the urban single, and gives us a nostalgic period piece for the long-ago-and-far-away age of vinyl records, along with the obsessive music geeks who loved and collected them. (Read More)

csy writes, "I've just returned from the symposium on Spiritual Machines hosted by Douglas Hofstadter as previously publicized on /., and I thought I'd write Slashdot a quick summary of the events from my recollection (other posters will no doubt correct the errors I make here, and I don't summarize all the speakers, only those I consider more interesting)."

Well, since Jon is apparently stuck in an airport trying to get to the Geek Pride thing in Boston (this is true, by the way), we here at slashdot thought we'd run some of his old columns again. So, we present Katz's reviews of The Beach and Scream 3, in true Katz style.

In our third and final part of the 'Making Music with Linux' trilogy, we try to make sense of the alphabet soup of the Linux sound world by exploring OSS and ALSA, and we investigate musical notation systems and software available for Linux.

W.A.V.E., a profit-making program ramping up in the southern U.S. and soon to go national, will use Web sites, toll-free numbers, T-shirts and cash to encourage students to anonymously turn in classmates they consider depressed, dangerous or potentially violent. This horrifically stupid Geek Profiling would be blatantly unconstitutional if applied to adults.

visionik writes: "Today I received a charge on my credit card for Netpliance i-opener service, even though I called them prior to ordering and verified that monthly service charges would not be put on that card. According to Netpliance, they will be charging monthly service on the cards of everyone who ordered an i-opener since March 1st, even though their Web site and support people indicated otherwise. I'm contesting the charges immediately, but thought this should be brought to the attention of everyone else who ordered an i-opener directly from Netpliance." visionik kept a small diary of his dealings with Netpliance. In part, it reads thus: (more)