internet radio - broadcast without incurring royalty fees

[Major Variola (ret)]

At 02:37 AM 10/25/02 +0100, Adam Back wrote:
>Seems to me this would pass current IP laws because it is like a radio
>station which broadcast the name of a song and the user is expected to
>insert the CD in his player and play along to keep up with the
>commentary, only automated and with open APIs for the "load and play
>this CD track" instructions so people can hook it up to whatever is
>convenient to them.

Such a station resembles an editor who suggests articles by giving a
pointer, e.g., ISBN, Journal cite, or URL.
Some editors (like talk-free radio stations) may not even provide
commentary, but their
subscribers value the information implicit in their choices.

[One listens to radio, follows editors' pointers, etc. because one
desires fresh bits...
and a "good" Editor increases the probability that you will encounter
fresh bits you like.

Even unintentional Editors are valuable: Using KaZaa, one can scan all
of other nodes' shared files;
finding a user with content you like (tastes like yours) via a regular
search often
yields a cache of good content.]

Version 2 of the BackBox should handle video, with DVD/TiVo++ URIs, too.