ORG COMM

Cringely Predicts Video iPod by Xmas

If nothing else, Cringely is a great read. Forget the "retinal scan" device, but everything else seems plausible.

iTunes 4.9 is Compatible with Video Blogs (Vodcasts)

Am I the only one who noticed this? Maybe it's too obvious, but, wow. Something cool about watching RocketBoom episodes show up in my iTunes Podcast playlist, and then being able to play them right in iTunes.

Technorati Tags: podcasting | iTunes | vodcasting | videoblogging |

Is Verizon on the wrong side of the Grokster ruling? (Via engadget)

And here come the absurdities resulting from a sloppy legal decision:

Is Verizon on the wrong side of the Grokster ruling?:

Reader JPF asks a really great question: Would Verizon’s advertisement for its new Fios fibre optic broadband service, which talks about how you’ll be “downloading full feature films in no time,” violate the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on Grokster, which prohibits technology companies from promoting their services as facilitating piracy? Technically they’re not encouraging people to download copyrighted materials, since it is possible to legally download feature films online, but if you visit old Grokster pages on the Wayback Machine you don’t see anything on the site about how you can use their software to download movies or music (copyrighted or not), and they specifically ask users to comply with all copyright laws. How exactly is this any different from Verizon encouraging people to sign up for Fios in order to get faster downloads? Yeah, we know that Grokster was being a little two-faced about it, but does anyone seriously think that five years ago the telcos were all that upset that people were signing up for DSL so they could get faster Napster downloads? The point is that it’s a gray area, and we suspect that it’s going to start getting really difficult to determine with any accuracy when exactly a company with a product that facilitates file-sharing is promoting piracy and when it is not, which is why a lot more of these cases are going to end up in court.

(Via engadget.com)