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Vol. 7, No. 16
4-19-07
1 College life, and death
2 RIP
3 XBox at the arcade, VT and the Internet, biased royalties, BBC archives
4 The monkey on iTune’s back
5 Quatro Pro files in Excel
The much maligned RIAA has launched yet more legal attacks against college campuses around the country, filing hundreds of “John Doe” lawsuits against IP addresses instead of individuals and depending on university IT departments to match those addresses up with student names.
The tactic is familiar; with scads of students receiving settlement offers of $3,000 to stave off further legal action, although I’m unsure of the procedure used to send these offers out to unknown individuals.
There’s a major difference this time, though. One college has refused to cooperate and is advising students to do the same.
NC State Student Legal Services Director Pam Gerace is advising all affected students to remain anonymous and not take the settlement offer. Her strategy appears to involve the threat by the RIAA to use the student’s names in the future in other lawsuits, the fact that the threats involve a constantly changing number of infringing downloads and the mention of a cutoff for a cash settlement which is incorrect if the case is appealed.
Another question Gerace has involves the $750 per song mentioned in the lawsuits. The actual retail value of a song from a CD is around 70¢. Somehow I get the feeling that NC State won’t give up this fight, and if the RIAA continues to pursue it they will receive an enormous smackdown from one court after another.
That would likely solve the RIAA Gestapo tactics once and for all, since they’ve never run up against a victim of their tactics who could afford to actually fight back. Here’s to NCS and Pam Gerace, and I wish them luck in their quest against the RIAA and their criminal activity.
You can read more details at http://media.www.technicianonline.com/media/storage/paper848/news/2007/04/13/News/Riaa-Files.23.Lawsuits.Against.Ncsu-2839394-page2.shtml.
I had fully intended to use this entire article to rail against the ignorant thuggery of the RIAA but the situation up the coast from NC State derailed that.
As all of you surely know by now, Monday brought news of a horrible shooting tragedy at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg broke. At the time of this writing 33 are confirmed dead, including the shooter, and 26 injured.
Little information is available at this time but it appears this incident grew from a possible domestic dispute in a residence hall and two hours later exploded into a full-blown massacre in a classroom building across campus.
My thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and their families in this time of obvious grief and pain, and there are already questions about the actions of the campus police during this fatal occurrence.
Godspeed, Hokies…
Kevin Mefford, Editor
Terry Wise
Tech News of the Week
Do you own an XBox 360?
Are you old enough to remember when playing
Pac-Man at the arcade meant standing in line? Well, there's a contest
for people like you:
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6169296.html
With the recent shootings at Virginia Tech, many people are beginning
to look at the effect of the internet and online communities as
outlets for grief:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/internet/04/17/vatech.online/
In a potential blow to Internet radio services, a federal copyright
panel on Monday largely upheld a contentious decision that would
elevate royalty fees Webcasters must pay to record labels:
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-6176631-7.html
The BBC is to open up its vast archive of video and audio in an
on-demand trial involving more than 20,000 people in the UK:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6568163.stm
Copy us on the good stuff.
Matthew Dattilo
thepcgurus@gmail.com
http://mattstodayinhistory.podshow.com
Download of the Week
With Yahoo's purchase of MusicMatch, I've had
to find another media player for my music collection. While the latest version of Windows Media
Player does a decent job, it's nice to have an alternative available. The free MediaMonkey fills that bill. It's an
excellent tool for playing media, organizing your media library, and ripping
and burning music.
It'll play pretty much every music file
that's out there, will synchronize with your iPod and MP3 player, and includes
a tag editor. It will automatically find album art for the file you're
currently playing as well.
MediaMonkey organizes all your music in
multiple ways, including by artist, title, album, genre, year, rating and so
on. Unlike Windows Media Player it loads fast. Fans of Internet radio will like
this program as well; it automatically connects you to the Shoutcast and
Icecast online radio directories, and plays any stations you want. Get it here:
Art Maley
Email
Question of the Week
Q: I
have a .WB1 spreadsheet file originally from Quattro Pro For Windows
and wish to open it with Excel. It won't and tells me I have to have a
converter. I downoaded a Quattro Pro (did not say QP for Windows but
don;t know if there is a difference) which is a Excel add-in type
file. Still I haven't been able to open the file. I'm not really sure
how to add in the conversion file to Excel and that may be the problem
I have used the conversion file to try to open and I have opened Excel
and then opened the conversion file then tried to open the QP file,
but no success. I need the file for my taxes.
A: MS Office usually has a built in converter to
convert QPro files.
Here are some instructions from Microsoft on Installing the QP
converter and opening the file in Excel.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HA010448731033.aspx
Hope that helps you out.
Hash
hash@ucanweb.com
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