See the full post on the DRM Blog, here.

“Non-competes put the brakes on innovation and job creation, and the effects are felt far beyond the VC community … Employer non-compete agreements are literally handcuffs. We need to ask whether their impediments to innovation serve a greater good by protecting employers’ legitimate rights.”

Bijan Sabet has some interesting thoughts on non-competition agreements. While I can see his logic, I would be concerned that corporate espionage could almost become the standard if employees were allowed to start directly competing companies as soon as they leave their old employers. Article on GigaOM, here. Via Bijan Sabet’s tumblelog, here, and Rojo, here.

This is great news for open source, with the formats not only being natively supported but Microsoft also adding the ability to set them to be the default. While DOC and DOCX won’t disappear any time soon, this little sliver of openness is at least progress for a company which is famously closed-source.

The full blog post is here.

Boing Boing post is here. Rufus Pollock’s blog post is here. Via BOL, here.

Article from the Machinist, here, via Buzz Out Loud, here.

BBC News article here. Via Twitter, here.

“It looks as if a serious class-action lawsuit is brewing against Google, as a music trade association joins a growing list of unsettled copyright owners looking for reprieve from YouTube’s copyright-violatin’ ways.”

When Google bought YouTube, it was widely expected that copyright holders would eye the tech company’s massive cash reserves and start suing. However, the scale of the lawsuits - including many from many big names - is possibly surprising. Ars Technica article here, via BOL, here.

“The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed the suits in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles against YouTVpc.com and Peekvid.com on behalf of the studios, the first such case where MPAA is going after link sites.”

The MPAA is suing sites which only link to pirated content, rather than actually hosting it. Trying to censor what people link to online is a slippery slope, and if this is successful it will have worrying consequences. If the studios wish to stop piracy, they should make those hosting the files delete them. Removing links won’t remove the content. From paidContent, here. Via BOL, here.

The article is here. Found via Buzz Out Loud, here.

The full article is here.

“Early sales indicate that DRM-free music is noticeably more popular than DRMed music, EMI senior VP Lauren Berkowitz recently told Bloomberg.”

Who would have guessed? Users prefer it when they aren’t told how they can use the songs they’ve paid for. From Ars Technica, here, via BOL, here.

Slashdot post, here, links to Natch.net, here. Found via BOL, here.

From New Music Strategies blog, here. Via Boing Boing, here and BOL, here.

BOL episode 493 is here, with my call around ¾ of the way in.

“Some of the privacy problems, in light of this, is that anyone who steals an iPod that includes purchased iTunes music will now have the name and e-mail address of its rightful owner.”

The US Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is crying foul at Apple’s inclusion of customer details in DRM-free tracks now available in its iTunes store. While Apple refuses to explain, I hardly see major privacy implications in including this information as the only people it will significantly affect are those pirating music. As for the “danger” of thieves finding out the e-mail address of their victim, the EFF appears to be grasping at straws… Wired article here.

From News.com, here. Digg blog post here. Via BOL, here.

From the LA Times, here. Linked on Slashdot, here, via BOL, here.

“It seems that some students in Virginia are not happy with the anti-plagiarism service Turnitin. The company checks prose submitted by its customers for signs that it has been copied in whole or part by comparing it to a large database of works that it maintains. Trouble is, it also adds the submitted prose to its files and stores it for use by the company in future scans, which the students feel is illegal use of their copyrighted materials.”

I meant to post this a while back. From Slashdot, here.

“An online petition set up by Microsoft to fast-track the standardisation of its Office Open XML document format masks Redmond’s concern over the procedure, according to a leading open-source advocate … Pointing out that the specifications for Open XML run to 6,000 pages, he [a different expert] suggested that a fast-track would be inappropriate as there were ‘a lot of concerns about what might be in there’, such as patents.”

From ZDNet UK, here.

“If more labels follow EMI’s lead, and the other online music stores of the world are offered the same conditions on DRM-free music as Apple, Microsoft will have completely failed to corner the digital-music market, and by this time next year, there will be talk of it pulling the plug on its WMA-based efforts entirely.”

Has Apple’s choice to sell unprotected music as AAC started a format war? Arik Hesseldahl makes some great points in Business Week, here. Article found via Slashdot, here, via BOL, here.