I started the day reading an article about file sharing.

This is the money quote:

The CDs that have content protection say so in a label on the disc. If consumers try to get around it, they should know that their actions are illegal, said Thomas Hesse, president of global digital business for Sony BMG.

"If you go over a speed bump, you know you went over a speed bump," Hesse said. "They know that when they do so, it might be dangerous and it is illegal."

Annnnd, he's wrong. Sorry, would you like to play again Mr Hesse? Putting protection on songs that violate a person's right to "fair use" is illegal. So is it illegal to circumvent an illegal technology? I don't think it is, and if I went to trial before a competant judge, hopefully he would agree.

The thing that gets me is that I can buy an apple (the fruit, not the PC) and eat it. Or I can feed it to my dog. Or I can cut it up into 12 slices and give each of my friends a slice. Or, I can eat it, take the seeds, plant them in my backyard wait for a tree to grow and never buy apples again. But, it's more convenient to go to the store and let other people do the work of growing and harvesting them. And it takes less time. That's why the music industry is failing. They don't get that it's about convenience and price. If something is free but requires investment of time, versus something is cheap enough and easier to get, more will choose the easier to get ones - even if it costs money. It's all the more true if the apple tree is the neighbor's. You'd rather pay your neighbor than steal from him, unless his apples are overpriced on the market.

What the RIAA does is the equivalent of selling apples with razorblades in them, on the open market. They give you a defective product, one that limits your legal use of the product you purchased.

"Unless I'm, totally missing something."

EDIT: This just in: Proof that a decent business model works.

The study by Entertainment Media Research follows another report, released by The NPD Group in early June, which noted that Apple's iTunes music store is becoming more popular than some peer-to-peer file-sharing services.

That report stated that iTunes was currently drawing as many users as LimeWire, a service that lets users swap music without paying any type of copyright or license fees. The NPD Group predicted that iTunes might even surpass LimeWire's popularity in the future, as legal downloads become more attractive to consumers.

"These digital download stores appear to have created a compelling and economically viable alternative to illegal file sharing," said Russ Crupnick, president of the NPD Group's music and movies division, in a statement.

So it seems the crazy environmentalists came out in force to protest the pollution caused by Eddie Bauer's "nano pants," pants with the added benefit of nanotechnology. The cotton is treated with chemicals that keep them from staining and wrinkling. Anyway, enough about the technical aspects.

I want a pair of these pants now. Well done environmentalists - you took something I wasn't going to buy because I had no idea they existed, and made it widely known. You accomplished your goals. And you got naked in the process. Maybe people wouldn't laugh at you if you used better tactics.

If they weren't naked, they wouldn't have gotten any press, and they probably would've been more effective as opposed to being laughed at. Well, at least I'm laughing. See the link here.