In the past, we've wondered about the business logic of various music performance societies suing restaurants and bars for playing a music without a license. However, we never denied that it was well within their legal rights to go after these places for not getting a license for performance rights. It just didn't seem very smart from the business side of things. Still, it's not hard to go from the question of whether or not restaurants should pay for performance rights when playing music to rather ridiculous situations. Take, for example, the case that reader El Nege points us to in the UK, where a car repair firm is being sued because its mechanics listened to their personal radios too loud.

It's not difficult at all to figure out what's going on here. The mechanics working out in the garage have radios playing while they work, and there's plenty of noise in the garage, so they're likely to turn those radios up. Customers in the enclosed area next to the garage are certainly likely to hear that music... but is it really a public performance? The Performing Rights Society in the UK certainly thinks so, which is why they're suing. The repair firm, Kwik-Fit, has a pretty weak response, saying that it's banned personal radios for ten years. Instead, it should be fighting back on the idea that this is a public performance in any way. Otherwise, you get into all sorts of trouble. If you have the windows open in your home and are listening to your legally owned music (or your TV!) and your neighbor can hear it, is that a public performance? What if you live in an apartment building with thin walls? What about when you're driving with the radio on and the windows open? What if you're in your cubicle and the folks in the cubicles around you can hear the music? At which point do we realize how silly this becomes? It's difficult to see how, with a straight face, anyone in the music industry can claim that any of these situations represents harm done to them.

An anonymous reader writes "The Chris Harrison project has created a series of maps that show the geographical structure and distribution of the Internet. At the site you can view a global, geo-spatial map of the global internet. The visualizations were put together using data from the Dimes project. One visualization shows the density of Internet connections worldwide while the other displays how international cities are connected. Detailed Maps of Europe and North America are included as well. It's amazing how skewed the distribution is — beyond Australia, New Zealand, and parts of South-East Asia, the southern hemisphere has only a peppering of connectivity."

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Earlier this year, we wrote about how suddenly a bunch of "free" calling services were popping up that all seemed to use phone numbers in Iowa. This included a service that would let you call an Iowa number and from there call anywhere in the world for free as well as a variety of "free conference calling" services. All of these systems were actually exploiting some legacy telco regulations, that were officially designed to help rural telcos get extra money to build out more rural service. Basically, the government allowed rural telcos to charge high termination fees to other telcos when calls from their lines terminated on one of the rural telco's lines. So, if you had AT&T and called your cousin in Iowa who had some small rural telco, AT&T would actually have to pay that telco some charge per minute, with the idea being that the telcos would use that money to invest in infrastructure. Of course, the infrastructure they invested in wasn't exactly building more lines to wire up others in the town, but in VoIP systems so they could reroute calls in to anywhere else, and then team up with various online sites to get as many calls as possible routed through those systems. Then they could just sit back and collect the millions of dollars rolling in from telcos. Broadband Reports points us to an article at the Wall Street Journal going into more details about how this happened -- and how the FCC is now scrambling a bit to see if there's a way they can stop it. In the meantime, the WSJ piece notes that while the telcos have been told by the FCC that they have to keep connecting these calls, they've simply stopped paying any of the termination fees as they await the results of the various lawsuits. Of course, all that's done for now is made the various free conference call services switch to other rural telcos in other states. Eventually, though, they'll run out of other states to go to (or the regulators will finally realize how their regulations are being exploited) and the little regulatory exploit will go away.

FixedSpelling writes "Whether you're impressed with it or not, the XO-1 could have a major impact on notebook design. The concept behind the OLPC's development brings outside-the-box thinking and cost-consciousness to a level that we rarely see in portable computing. There are a number of lessons that can be learned the from its unique design and we can already see that some of these concepts have been noticed by manufacturers. 'The biggest attraction to the OLPC project has always been the price of the system. You don't have to be a cynic to understand that the impact of a $100 notebook could be huge and the price has generated the majority of the interest in the project. Notebooks break, they get lost, and they are replaced frequently, so the cheaper, the better. The low price was originally important so that the XO-1 could be produced in large quantities without putting too much of a burden on the buyer but the low cost appeals to everyone.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A story about flaws in two new Blu-Ray discs illustrates an important problem with digital rights management technologies beyond the fundamental flaw of treating customers like criminals. Ordinary open standards are designed to be as easy to implement as possible, and when hardware or software in an open platform detects a possible error, it makes a good-faith effort to recover from it gracefully. As a result, if one manufacturer makes a minor mistake in implementing a standard, the other components can often adapt and prevent it from bringing the entire system to a halt. Digital rights management turns this attitude on its head. The fundamental goal of a DRM scheme is to prevent unauthorized devices from working properly, which means DRM providers are required to react to any discrepancy as evidence of hacking and refuse to work with it at all. That's how we get Blu-Ray players manufactured by well-known consumer electronics companies refusing to play legitimate Blu-Ray discs from well-known Hollywood studios. And this problem is only going to get worse as Hollywood pushes for ever-more-elaborate DRM formats. Every new layer of "security" features that are added to consumer electronics devices increases the cost and complexity of the devices, and more complexity means lower performance and more ways the system can break. As we've noted before, Windows Vista has a particularly severe case of DRM bloat, as Microsoft has added "security" features demanded by Hollywood at the cost of degrading the performance of the entire operating system. Needless to say, this is a lousy business strategy. It raises the costs of products, necessitates costly recalls/firmware updates when somebody screws up, and needlessly irritates customers. Oh, and have we mentioned that DRM doesn't stop piracy?

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

You can congratulate her on Flickr or Twitter.

Japan Probe has a news video about a Chinese restaurant called MFC that borrows the look and feel of McDonald's and KFC, mashing them together. The video is in Japanese, but it's fun to watch even for non-Japanese speakers.

Main Points:

• A fast food restaurant called MFC combines the Chinese characters for McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken, crudely combining the menus of both chains.

• Our brave reporter tries a chicken burger and determines it is less tasty than what he could eat at McDonald’s.

• MFC’s homepage states it was started in America during the 1960s. However, when their reporter calls the company they are told it was founded in China 7 years ago.

• There is something that looks like a Beijing Olympics logo on their menu. However, their phone interview finds that MFC is not an official sponsor of the Olympic games.

• The best part of the report? MFC’s spokeswoman responds to their questioning with something along the lines of, “We don’t have any stores in Japan, so what’s your problem?”

Link

Tim O'Reilly has released the results of a fascinating study of Facebook as an application platform. He's got good news and bad news.

The good news has already been widely disseminated: there are nearly 5000 Facebook applications, and the top applications have tens of millions of installs and millions of active users. The bad news, alas, is in our report: 87% of the usage goes to only 84 applications! Only 45 applications have more than 100,000 active users. This is a long tail marketplace with a vengeance -- but unfortunately, the economic models (for developers at least, though not for Facebook itself) all rely on getting into the very short head. Here's the distribution of active users among the top 200 developers. (Some developers have multiple popular applications.) As you can see, the drop-off is extremely steep.

Link

John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren and Stimpy, has uploaded a new episode of Mighty Mouse to his blog.

Insanity is a common theme in my cartoons, as I said in my last post. Here's a whole lineup dedicated to the insane, with the main feature another Mighty Mouse brought to you by Ralph Bakshi.

This is the first time I ever got to do a cartoon about an insane character. When Ralph read the script he rejected it. (He rejected 2 out of every 3 stories we wrote, I think just to keep us on our toes. I said let me record the voices first. After he heard the cassette of Patrick Pinney playing a chemically deranged Petey Pate, Ralph said "I get it now. Make the Goddamn cahtoon. You're f*****in' crazy Johnny. You'll get us all fired. I love ya,"

Link

In the past, we've joked about Wall Street's amazing ability to convince companies that they need to acquire each other and merge to bring out "synergies" and then convince those same firms to later break themselves up into separate companies to "release shareholder value." It's all part of the shell game, where the investment bankers on Wall Street get to take out their huge fees whether a company is being built up or broken apart. It looks like the latest such target may be Yahoo, as an analyst at Sanford Bernstein has kicked off the discussion by noting that the company could release shareholder value by breaking itself up into three companies. Which companies? Well, it would want to split up the search and the advertising parts of the business... you know, the same parts of the business that folks convinced Yahoo it needed to buy four years ago if it was going to successfully take on Google. Now, of course, the only way for it to successfully take on Google is to get rid of those businesses. Luckily, the folks on Wall Street will happily help with both ends of the transaction for a small significant fee. Sometimes I think I'm in the wrong business.

willatnewscientist writes "Scientists from the University of Oxford have recorded New Caledonian crows using tools in the wild for first time. The footage was captured by attaching tiny cameras to their tail feathers. The wireless cameras weigh just 14 grammes and can be worn by the crows without disturbing their natural behavior. The trick has provided the first direct evidence of the birds' using tools in the wild and may represent an important development in animal behavior studies. 'The camera also contains a simple radio transmitter that reveals the crows' location. This lets the researchers track them at a distance of few hundred metres, so that they can catch the camera's video signal with a portable receiving dish. Up to 70 minutes of footage can be broadcast by the camera's chip, and the camera is shed once the bird moults its tail feathers.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pump and dump spam scams have been quite successful for scammers, but the SEC is apparently increasingly successful in stopping the practice. It's now suspending trading on certain stocks that appear susceptible to pump and dump scams -- and that's more than cut in half the number of complaints its received in the last few months. What still isn't clear, however, is why it's so difficult to track down those responsible for pump and dump scams. You just need to follow the money and look at who bought the stock right before the scam started and who sold out immediately afterwards and you probably have a pretty short list of suspects.

Robert Ullman just published Vol. 5 of Atom Bomb Bikini, a wonderful anthology of his illustrations for The Stranger, Spin, The Washington City Paper, and other magazines and newspapers. He's also making a line of stickers, as shown here.

It's 56 pages (eight of them color!) of sketches, spots and girlie art goodness, sandwiched between hand-silkscreened covers. It'll cost you just ten bucks.

Link

Dr. Eggman writes "Ars Technica is featuring an article summarizing an interesting and perhaps controversial paper which finds links between spontaneous brain activity and human behavior. Spontaneous, yet organized brain activity has been observed without stimulation and even in humans under anesthesia. This paper attempts to link this activity to the observed variability of human performance in even simple, repeated tasks, hoping to establish a new avenue of research into alternative brain processing theories. 'The subtraction provided a much cleaner connection between the button press and brain activity in the left SMC. Once spontaneous activity was accounted for, noise was down by 60 percent, and the signal to noise ratio in the experiments doubled. Putting this another way, spontaneous activity accounted for about 60 percent of the variation between tests. The authors say that these results show that spontaneous brain activity is more than simply a physiological artifact; it helps account for some of the variability in human behavior. In that sense, they argue for a greater acceptance of the view that our brain may have some intrinsic activity that's somewhat independent of sensory input.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roland Piquepaille writes "A new composite plastic built layer by layer has been created by engineers at the University of Michigan. This plastic is as strong as steel. It has been built the same way as mother-of-pearl, and shows similar strength. Interestingly, this 300-layer plastic has been built with 'strong' nanosheets of clay and a 'fragile' polymer called polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), commonly used in paints and glue, which acts as 'Velcro' to envelop the nanoparticles. This new plastic could soon be used to design light but strong armors for soldiers or police officers. The researchers also think this material could be used in biomedical sensors and unmanned aircraft."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.