antti.vilpponen.net

Teosto (the Finnish RIAA) has independently decided to raise prices for restaurants playing music to their customers. The raise is pretty significant as for a restaurant for 800 customers open 5 days a week the price for to pay for Teosto rises from 4000Ç«® a year to 40 000Ç«® a year (HS). A 10-fold increase – that’s ridiculous.

The Finnish Hotel and Restaurant union (SHR) has told their members not to abide by the price increases and pay the smaller increases that were suggested by the union for Teosto. The talks between Teosto and SHR ended without results earlier and Teosto decided to go ahead with the price increase nevertheless. The CEO of one of the most famous Finnish restaurants in Helsinki, Juhani Merimaa of Tavastia, has said that, “their methods are questionable as they do have a monopoly in the business”.

Running a restaurant is very regulated by the government and thus it is already very difficult to keep the businesses profitable (in smaller towns at least). Raising prices for music like this is pretty ridiculous by any standards. When do we see the first bar that decides to play Teosto free music and thus save 40 000Ç«® a year?

I recently took part in an open source presentation with Pirkka Aunola and some other people. Pirkka (blogs at Digikko) is going to give a presentation on how the digital landscape is changing the media and marketing world. Pirkka blogged about this and later on asked interested people in joining in and helping her out with the presentation. The idea of open source presentation is build on the sharability of the presentation among those who helped create it.

I have to say that I could have put in a lot more effort, but Pirkka was still kind enough to send me the presentation – looks good and definitely a very interesting way to distribute work and create a lot richer presentation than you probably could do by yourself.

(src)

Dan Kaminsky did some detective work with the Sony rootkit. The rootkit calls home to Sony to let them know where the CDs have been listened to. These leave a trail on the DNS servers. Dan was able to narrow down the correct data and if the data is believable, this is pretty damn alerting. Take a look at how many machines have been infected with the Sony rootkit; Europe, USA, Asia.

ps. Check out EFF’s open letter to Sony.

ǃ?P2P is like stealing a CD from a shop!ǃ? ǃ?We have to protect artists who are being robbed by consumers on the Internetǃ?. Big music and film companies are continuously feeding us claims like this on television, on the street and in the newspapers – painting private consumers as pirates and criminal. The same companies publish guides telling consumers what they cannot do in the digital world. For these companies, consumers have no rights in buying CDs, DVDs or other digital material – apart from a few generously bestowed exceptions!

Sound familiar? To me it does. You can support the campaign by signing the petition.