Christmas kitty pics

Musical stuff: Walking on Air and Unicron's Theme

We will be away on vacation in Britain on the 7th through the 14th. Before leaving, let me draw the reader's attention to two new things posted on my music page, that came together over the Christmas break: Unicron's Theme is a fun little production I did of the Vince DiCola piece of that name, and Walking on Air is a new song by myself (I'm not going to talk about what inspired it until I've finished writing the words). More details at the link.

Musical new year's resolutions: work on my vibrato (guitar), and try to work more on creating original material (thus giving me the chance to come up with fun bass parts, as in Walking on Air) rather than just soloing over backing tracks. Finish writing The Balance of Judgement (sketched out almost a year ago, and §3 of which posted below).

OCILLA, ISPs and Contributory Infringement

This is technically the last post of 2006, rather than the first of 2007, delayed while I got my citations in order.

I wrote an internal memo dissecting a sabre-rattling email from a copyright holder warning that ISPs (like the one I work) for may be subject to legal and equitable liabilities if we don't immediately put the beat down on users that are doing file sharing. We don't like file sharers either, but this email seemed a little too ornery, so I did some research to see what the courts have had to say about contributory infringement, ISPs, and the Title II of DMCA. Since it proved interesting and valuable information, and since there are plenty of other service providers out there who may be nervous about this stuff, I have re-written it in somewhat broader terms for a wider readership.

• OCILLA, ISPs and Contributory Infringement