The Onion reports:

The Recording Industry Association of America announced Tuesday that it will be taking legal action against anyone discovered telling friends, acquaintances, or associates about new songs, artists, or albums. “We are merely exercising our right to defend our intellectual properties from unauthorized peer-to-peer notification of the existence of copyrighted material…”

Honestly, I wouldn’t put [...]

Unreasonable, but not surprising—Microsoft’s draft license for Office 12 is not that cool. Despite this news, Massachusetts may be hopping back on the bandwagon. Boo!

Forbes
eWeek

Santa, Idaho will become SecretSanta.com, Idaho as part of a publicity deal with the website of the same name. SecretSanta.com (the website) plans to shoot a documentary about the town’s name change in an attempt to attract potential new customers. Idaho’s WFMY News points to a developing trend among small American towns – [...]

A little while back, bywndr wrote about Massachusetts’ threat to stop using Microsoft Office because of fears that storing public documents in the suite’s proprietary file formats could lead to trouble down the road. With a bit of muscle, Massachusetts worked out a deal with Big Papa whereby Word and Excel documents were guaranteed [...]

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has filed suit against Sony BMG over the rootkit discovered recently on many of the company’s audio CDs. From the Attorney General’s press release:

“Sony has engaged in a technological version of cloak and dagger deceit against consumers by hiding secret files on their computers,” said Attorney General Abbott. [...]

Lots of people (including, rumor has it, her bosses) have poignant things to say in criticizing Maureen Dowd’s latest, to be honest just plain embarassing, publicity stunts, some of them reasonable but most of them spending a bit too much time on something witty and influential but ultimately not so substantive. Us reasonable people [...]

This is not new, it’s perpetual. Actually, perpetuity is part of its nature.

Con Edison has, for years, been running a large advertising campaign, buying up and maintaining billboards and full-car subway ads in NYC with ads like the one above. Con Ed also has a state-stipulated monopoly on power distribution in New York [...]

For any reason whatsoever! This makes me queasy!