[This is a work in progress, expect updates, feel free to have your say]

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the outcome of this legal challenge to the extension of copyright by the US Congress. Of course Eldred should have taken the case and of course Lessig should have prosecuted it and of course we should be aghast at their failure, but we should also stand back and consider what this is about.

If you don't want to read the rest of the rant, quite a lot of it is summed up here.

Zimran Ahmed thinks that Digital Rights Management is closer to suicide for music industry incumbents.

I think that as labels make some progress towards implementing DRM technology, they'll start to see the content equivalent of open source software start to become more popular. Ultimately, they'll be relegated to a small, uninteresting corner of the content market.

In a world where convenience is king, DRM is the road to serfdom for the companies that rely on it.

In this story in the Guardian, appears this quote

Crispin Evans, senior legal officer of the main publishers' organisation, the International Confederation of Music Publishers, said yesterday at the launch of the campaign at the Midem music market in Cannes, that in Britain you could buy a biography of Beethoven or his sheet music without having to pay VAT, but to listen to it, you would pay an extra 17.5% in tax.

The guardian has a good column from Jackie Ashley on Mayor Ken Livingstone's attempt to halt the march of the motor vehicle before it chokes his city completely. Starting in February London will start congestion charging, with fees, prosecutions and confiscations for scofflaws.

If nothing else we'll get to see whether the "great man" theory of history and some determined, if politically dangerous leadership can stand in the way of unthinking and unsustainable behaviour before it kills us all. Expect massive anti-publicity from the vested interests in the motor industry and all those who believe that government has no place in any activity that has to do with money.

As predicted by the piece, all hell is breaking loose as public sector unions vow to strike rather than enforce the legislation. Interestingly, the process is being orchestrated by Class Law which helped Railtrack holders force the Government into bailing out their failed investment in the rail monopoly. Class law? Or Class war? The issue remains, whether London will be more damaged by a congestion charge, orsimply waiting in despair till the system grinds to a halt. Maybe they could learn something from cities like Bogota, a city of 7 million and therefore nearly as big as London, is heading steadily towards freedom from cars

And Just to show what happens if you can't get your legilative and social conscience act together, Milan Bans Private Vehicles To Fight Pollution. Rule number one, the environment is not fragile and does not need protecting, we are fragile and if the environment shifts too far from where it has been the last 2,000 years, it will not support us and we will die. That's a good enough reason to get sensible.

Someone trying to do that, and invoking the network is Jean-François Rischard, the author of High Noon: 20 global problems, 20 years to solve them, who talks to openDemocracy about his proposal for a new way of addressing the most intractable questions about the way the world is ruled. Frankly, if his solution is what is needed, and I would bet that it would work, the only problem we have to ocvercome is very powerful, unbelievable selfish and deeply stupid vested interests, so that'll be a snip then.

What I'd really like is for someone to pull together under a single, integrated interface, all the text based communications tools that I use. I want something that gives me e-mail, IM [multiple sessions turning up as tabbed windows - Thanks Lisa Rein I think], blog, Syndirella and a standard text editor like word pad all tabbed on one screen and able to transfer content from one interface easily to the other, shipping a blog entry to an e-mail or linking from the blog to a news story or dumping some content from any source into the word pad and saving it as needed.

For more Lazy Web ideas, go here

Looks like HEP is well on the way, although it is a server based tool and I suspect I want something that runs on my system rather than having to route traffic via an extra server.

Once upon a time, writing identical letter supporting or opposing a public position on any topic, putting it over different names and mailing a copy to every newspaper in the country might have been a clever move. But when half of those papers have a website, and publish the letter in full, and Google gets hold of it, you just look silly.