topspeed’s Comments

• Mar 15th, 2010 @ 9:58am

  Re: CRIA = RIAA

  on Record Labels Put Out Report Insisting That Record Labels Do, In Fact, Invest In Musicians
  As far as I know, the levy was introduced in 1997 for:

  the private copying right (the right to make private copies subject to a levy on blank audio recording media intended to compensate performers, owners of sound recordings and the authors and owners of musical works embodied in those sound recordings for royalties for the resulting loss).

  If there is no loss demonstrated, how can they give them any money?

• Mar 15th, 2010 @ 9:22am

  Re: Government Granted Monopoly

  on Record Labels Put Out Report Insisting That Record Labels Do, In Fact, Invest In Musicians
  Interesting you should mention this. Coeur de Pirate (Béatrice Martin) will be in concert at the Olympia in Paris tonight. She has received help from the Canadian government and is now a celebrity in Europe and in French Canada. She is also well known in English Canada, having been on CBC Q3. Disclaimer: I am not a big fan, just a proud Canadian.
• Mar 15th, 2010 @ 9:10am

  But of course they INVEST in new artists

  on Record Labels Put Out Report Insisting That Record Labels Do, In Fact, Invest In Musicians
  For me, an investment is a gamble of time and/or money in a belief associated with an expectation of future returns, monetary or otherwise. So technically speaking, by signing a new artist, they invest in new music.
  The question should be: how much of this investment contributes to the new artist's success and is the administrative overhead actually preventing more investments in talented but not as "mass market" palatable artists?
• Aug 12th, 2009 @ 6:15pm

  Re: xlm

  on Judge Bars Sale Of Microsoft Word For Patent Infringement (Though It Won't Stick)
  MS released a "patch" which allow Office 2003 (Word specifically) to read .DOCX. So if you have applied the patch, you are infringing.
• Aug 12th, 2009 @ 5:46am

  Hate DOCX

  on Judge Bars Sale Of Microsoft Word For Patent Infringement (Though It Won't Stick)
  If this will prevent the use of the DOCX format then I'm all for it. MS tends to force useless file format changes which, in the corporate world, on messes-up the ability to share information. This can be helped with add-ons from MS but the non-MS products which read only DOC formats are useless. This ends-up costing companies many millions.
  
  Well done i4i, I hope this will either shake-up the retarded US patent laws or make Microsoft eat its own dog food.