Blue Chi’s

After a lengthy wait, a US Supreme Court held that providers of P2P services could be held liable for infringement made by the users of these programs. Technology developers are complaining that this will hinder the development of new technologies as they believe that developers should not be held liable for infringements by the users of these technologies as they claim that these technologies are meant to be used in legal ways and they should not be held liable because users choose to use it in an illegal way. The case that developers relied on in the past is the case of Sony’s Betamax, where Sony was not held liable for claimed infringements by the users of the Betamax VCR. Regardless, the court held that the developers of these P2P software actively promoted illegal download of copyright work and they should be held liable.

I think, and hope, that this would not affect BitTorrent, which is a P2P transfer technology that is used to distribute large files. Though it is has become the main method of sharing movies online, it is also being used by companies and developers to share and transfer large files without paying so much for bandwidth. There were recent rumours and Microsoft of using some sort of BitTorrent technology to transfer patches and updates for its coming Longhorn.

Another thing that makes this judgement unlikely to affect BitTorrent is that using the client on its own does not usually give you the opportunity to download files from other computers as BitTorrent clients require an online tracker for each file shared and a .torrent file to initiat the downloading processs by the leaching user from the the seeding.

BitTorrent is NOT an alternative to your regular P2P, but it is another way of sharing files that are usually large. Illegal music websites usually archive torrents for whole music album packages.

Even though the judgement could be held as some precedent for cases all over the world, but it is still very unlikely for record labels to be able to sue companies that are not directly related to the US. We shoudl continue to see clients that are operated from outside the US, but the significant decrease of the number of users might mean the end of this form of file sharing.

LINK

Yes, and that man is Omani. Today, this random person goes to the ministry asking to see the minister, the secretary, or whoever, tells him that the minister is not in his office, the man answers by taking out his gun and shooting at eight (?) officials resulting the death of four and the injury of another four. Two of the attacked officials were females, it is not known of these two are from the former four or the latter four mentioned earlier. The man ran out of the ministry and drove to the Sarooj bridge where he attempted suicide by shooting himself. Word goes that the man was fired from his position (? Teacher) and wished to ‘discuss’ the matter with the minister. I think somewhere on the news they said that the mad man committed whatever he committed for ‘personal’ matters, which obviously does not make sense, how can you shoot at eight random people for a ‘personal’ matter.

EDIT: CORRECT FACTS ARE FOUND HERE.

Not to say that the crime rate in Oman is high, but I find it annoying that we don’t have any facts, numbers, or proper statistics on the crime rate in Oman. Outrageous crimes such as this one and the recent conspiracy against the government makes me really wonder if we are living in a ‘peaceful’ country as we claim. An interesting table of data would be one that relates the variations in the crime rate against the increase in the percentage of Omanisation; Would it go up or down?

She is not the first Omani woman to go on TV, she is not the first Omani woman to sing, she is not the first Omani woman to uncover her hair, so why do the lame Omani people love to diss Laila Bint Naseeb?

I was really disappointed to see threads in Omania.net attacking Laila Bint Naseeb, talking bad about her family and saying that even her grandmother was a drummer. Laila Bint Naseeb is a fighter, she at least has done something and is pursuing a goal, unlike many of the bored ladies that have no dreams and no career and do nothing but make useless threads attacking people like Laila Bint Naseeb.

Laila Bint Naseeb is not a perfect Muslim as some might claim, but she at least is seeking to do something about her life. Laila Bint Naseeb is not the a daughter of a luxurious family that can afford to waste their time on hobbies of leisure or ones of ease of mind. Laila Bint Naseeb is fighting for her own salvation and she is the one that deserves to win the most. The Omani nation is one of great jealous and envious mind, one person wrote in Omania, “We pay 300 Baiza to vote for Laila Bint Naseeb while she gets the 100000 Riyals and a car as well.” What does this person want Laila Bint Naseeb to do for him to be happy? Does he wants her to share whatever profit she might make with him?

It might be a bit late to vote for Laila Bint Naseeb, but if you read this before the winner is announced, please do vote for Laila Bint Naseeb. SMS the number ’15′ to ’90067′. There is no reason for you not to vote for Laila Bint Naseeb.

I finally managed to get some time to work on my weblog, I decided to use my domain http://www.blue-chi.com to direct to this page rather than keeping it parked without any serious purpose, and obviously as you can see, the look of the website was finally edited. My camera actually sucks, I really want to get rid of it and buy another one, I’ll probably do that in September. My laptop is also dieing, I’ve had it for three years already, and it now looks AND feels extremely so bad. I am getting a new laptop in September as well. Until then, you guys enjoy the new look of Law & Music!

BTW, I really suffered to complete this, the connection is so slow here, and you cannot image how hard it was to debug all the annoying browser compatibility issues, there is completely nothing to the outer frame that IE users get when they enter from the blue-chi.com domain. I spent so much time fixing some table issues with Firefox, and thankfully it now works perfect on it. Please do notify me of any errors or bugs that you notice.

My career will NOT involve going to court, I am not going to practice as a lawyer, and my profession should only, initially at least, involve official work in relation to commercial contracts made in relation to a commercial or non-commercial body in the Sultanate. Nonetheless, I decided to give the court next door a visit today, this is my second time in an Omani court, I also did visit the court last year once in summer as well, again, this has no real involvement to my career and it is a matter of curiosity to know how things work in this country.

The court is not really majestic or grand in any major way or form in this country, the procedure and environment looks extremely primitive. I attended the county court of appeal, there is some small printed hearing schedule on the sides of the wall next to the door of the two courtrooms in this court. Once the court starts ‘work’ or lets say, when the court rooms doors are open, a police man would stand and cry out the category of cases that would be heard in the room that he opened, eg. “COMMERCIAL CASES!”, and it was actually something else with which I did not manage to catch. People interested would enter and sit in the ‘audience’ seats in the back. Anyone can enter the court and there is completely no form of security or anything as Oman is a safe country. The clerks sitting even before we entered and had a pile of dusty files on their big desk. The judges came in shortly afterwards, the policeman shouted as he opened their entrance door at the side, “Court!” {Mahkama!}, everyone stood up, the judges walked in, sat, and the hearings started.

For each hearing, the policeman would go outside the door and shout the names of the parties to the case, it was very lame. Whether someone showed up or not, the judge will simply read the conclusion of the appeal, if any of the parties did come, that person would be required to sign the attendance sheet on the clerks desk, then the judge will once again simply read the judgment of the paper, and will tell the parties that they can leave.

For the hearings I attended today, none of the three judges was Omani, I found that very sad, I don’t understand how a person from another country could act as a judge, how could he honestly understand the culture, the motives and the intentions of another culture, no matter how long someone lives in Oman, you will never really integrate with the nation. Omani people are just like the rest of the Gulf, they are very racist. Omanis ESPECIALLY look down citizens of Arabic African countries, is being a judge such a mechanical process in which you use a specific formula that you follow to reach the solution, is taking an Egyptian engineer to work in Oman the same as taking an Egyptian judge to work in this country? I don’t think so. When was the College of Sharia and Law started? How come we don’t have enough trained Omani judges to thank all foreigners for their help and wish them a safe journey back home?

I at least think that it very is. Don’t get me wrong, I buy my CDs, but I, just like the majority of people out there, download so much more as well.

There is no doubt that the situation can’t ever be worse than what it currently is, in fact, it is much better than what it was a couple of years back. It is funny how much record labels claim that downloading music will make artists stop making more music, how many artists actually released consequential albums after making Kazaa, the songs we downloaded DID not kill the artist, and downloading a song is not equal to a straight loss of the sale of a song. There is no guarantee the person that actually downloaded the song would ever have gone and bought the song if it was not offered to him for free, and even if a person did download the song, this does not mean that he wouldn’t go and buy the album when it comes out. Music artists gain a lot from sales of their music albums and singles, but that is not their sole nor necessarily mean source of income. Of course sales of music albums are very important, but tours and other events are a source that should never be undermined, I have no numbers with me right now as I blog this, but imagine an American tour across all the major states, a fan would pay to attend a concert five or six times the price of a music album, and guess how many fans actually attend these. If I am not mistaken, in the year Madonna released her flop album “American Life”, she soar high up in the charts of the biggest money gainers in that year though her album sold so little, all that money came solely from her tour. I am not here to say that downloading music will not harm the artist, but I would just like to make it clear that the fact that we download songs does not mean that an artist will quit. P2P has been here for a while and artists did not stop making profit, their ‘profit’ has decreased, being a little bit less rich does not mean that you are not rich. I am not here to say that we should not pay for our music, the lost profits by the industry is substantial, but not fatal.

The arguments for and against downloading music are all known. Sharing music files promotes the artist, if it wasn’t for free music downloads we would have never heard of so many of our newly beloved artists, if I have never downloaded a music illegally in my life, I would have not bought half the music CDs that I currently have. On the other hand, if people never paid for their music that would be detrimental to the artist, it is clearly unfair.

The destiny of P2P clients is currently under the mercy of the US Supreme Court, the case is a simple one, P2P Clients are accused of being a tool for promoting and enabling the infringement of the rights of record labels, the defence claims that these clients are available for a various of purposes and it is not the fault of the creators that the users use these programs in an illegal way, when it can be used in so many other legal ways, eg. sharing legal material such as personal files, etc. The decision is yet to come, but even if Kazaa and all these other clients were to be doomed, does this mean that people won’t be able to download our music for free? We get our music for free in so many other ways, and P2P is just another way, there is no way the sharing of files could be stopped, DRMs, Protected CDs, or whatever, cannot ever stop people from extracting the data and creating independent sound files, as long as the data is received there is no way to stop the user from storing this data, even if worse came to worse, it could be recorded in analogue and then stored digitally and transferred. Files can now be so easily sent by email, thanks to Gmail, new Yahoo and Hotmail capacities and attachment limits, many people already share files using yousendit.com, there is completely no way to stop people from sharing music files if they wanted to. I know that it is wrong, Again, I am not here to say that we should not do something about downloading music, it is obvious that we should not get our music for free, but the solution to the problem is not in trying to stop all the illegal easy methods of acquiring the music, but in providing more legal solutions to acquire our music, essentially in reasonably prices.

iTunes, the new napster, and all the new online music shops, provided people with legal alternatives to illegal P2P. These online shops do not only provide us with a legal alternative to acquiring music online, but they are much more easier to use than P2P software, you make a simple search and there you find your song. The concept behind these shops is perfect, but my problem with them is their prices, how can buying a music album online be more expensive? First of all, buying your music album on a CD gives you more than the song, you have a hard copy of your music that comes with printed material of the lyrics, credits, a message from the artist and photographs as well. When you buy the music online there isn’t supposed to be any plastic expenses incurred, no manufacturing expenses, no transport expenses from the manufacturer to the retailer, no retailer rent expenses, no employee expenses, etc. On the other hand, the online shop obviously incurs expenses for operating the website securely, but come on, not only that buying music online is not cheaper, when you buy an album, it can so easily be more expensive. Imagine buying Mya’s “Fear of Flying” a music album of 18 tracks, in the US, this would be around $17.82, which is, I guess, the price of a music album in the US, but in the UK, this would 18 tracks @ £0.79, that’s a £14.22 which is expensive for a collection of music files that are not in Hi-Fi quality anyway.

My problem with the prices is on different levels, first of all, why can’t we simply pay the same price for the song in the American market? I don’t know the physics of how this works, but how can the place at where I download the file make the price vary, of course in practice this is dictated by rights holders in different countries and music distributors in Europe and the US, but come on, internet shops are meant to be our gate to an international market where the normal consumer can actually force vendors to charge what we wish to pay. It simply makes no sense for the same exact song more than the American consumer.

The issue of the price difference between the digital and the hard copy of the album should have effect in the price, though the majority of individuals might do buy individual songs rather than music albums, album-buyers should have the choice of buying the whole thing as a package, a discount should take place for buying multiple songs from the same album, or buying the whole thing in one go. A traditional CD has more value than a digital copy; digital copies should be cheaper.

I never managed to get to my ultimate point, is the music we buy really worth the amount of money we pay? Does the price we pay really reflect the amount of effort made in the recording of this sound we hear or is an arbitrary number that the record labels agreed to make us pay? Don’t consumers still download music for free because they don’t necessarily believe that paying for this song is ‘not worth it’, that the value they get in return for their money is not sufficient? Will we ever know?

I was talking my ‘invention’ to a couple of friends the other day in the library, and I was shocked to read about the iBlue just the day after I ‘disclosed’ my invention. At first instance I really thought that somebody finally made my invention, but to my disappointment the iBlue was not exactly what I was looking for. Let me tell you more about the best iPod accessory NEVER made. This invention is basically a bridge that connects your mobile phone to your iPod via Blue Tooth. It is unbelieveable so obvious and I have no idea of how come nobody came up with it until now.

The BiaNm (Best iPod Accessory NEVER Made) is is a very basic blue tooth adapter with a built-in microphone and a standard earbud connector at the top. it looks identical to the many iPod recorders out there, but has Blue Tooth with it as well.

The BiaNm pairs up with your Blue Tooth enabled mobile phone so that when somebody calls you, the music stops, or maybe you can hear your phone ring along with whatever your listening to, or it could just beep once. You can view the details of the caller on your iPod screen, and you can answer by prssing the Okay button on your ipod.

When you do answer the phone, you can listen to the caller using your very same earbuds, and you talk using the built-in microphone of the BiaNm. This way you cannot miss a phone call because you didn’t hear the phone ring because your were listening to music loudly, or for those that have phones that do not have a vibration feature. There are already iPod blue tooth accessories that have a simlar blue tooth capabilities, but none of these allows you to use the standard iPod earbuds and work only with Blue Tooth headsets, which require charging on their own, have a very short battery life, and are expensive. Some manufacturer better read this and make us the BiaNm today, because we DON’T need a blue tooth headset, but we do need blue tooth integration with our phones.

Not a masterpiece but a very entertaining pop-ish RnB album that is not really complicated but still has enough meat to bite and chew. I have not heard Nivea’s previous album, but I doubt that it was very much different from this one, the first single from this album is called “Okay”, which is in my opinion less than OK, the song is produced by Lil Jon, but we are all already sick and tired of his barking and noise. I think that “Okay” was a bad choice for a first single as it does not tell anything about the album, as the other songs in the album appealed to me much more than the lead single. Nivea would’ve been much better releasing “I Can’t Mess With You” as a single as it does sound like radio material. The song “I Can’t Mess With You” features a loop used in J Lo’s “The One” from her third album “This is Me… Then”. The song has originally leaked as “I Can’t Fuck With You”, but as we can see she changed the lyrics, changed teh title, and now features her husbad rapper “Dream”. In addition to the song “I Can’t Mess With You”, the better tracks on the album include “Breathe In”, “Gangsta Girl – Featuring R Kelly” “My Fault”, “It’s All Good”, “Quicky – Featuring Rasheeda”, and “Complicated”. Nivea is obviously not ahead of the game, but her effort is worth a pause.

Album: Complicated
Release Date: May 2005

1. Rain (Interlude)
2. Complicated
3. Okay
4. Parking Lot
5. Fulton County Correctional Call (Interlude)
6. I Can’t Mess With You
7. Breathe (Let It Go)
8. Quickie
9. Indian Dance
10. No More
11. Gangsta Girl
12. Okay [Remix]
13. So Far
14. It’s All Good

The Consumer Law exam was bad, but who cares; we FINALLY finished. I don’t really think that I can fail, that is probably because I never had a resit in my life, I cannot just imagine myself having one, no matter how bad I do, I think that I can always get a pass at least, and I really hope that this works this time as well. I cannot really bother any more cause I so sick of exams and school. Right after the exam we had lunch at the McDonald’s that was next to the exam venue, I went home after that to start packing as I am leaving on Friday. I had to go the Students’ Union to give the renewal form for the Omani Society for next year with another friend who had to give the application form for the Qatari Society. After two hours of hanging around in town my friend dropped me at home, in no time I found myself walking to town to meet my coursemates this time to watch the Star Wars movie, which was really bad. We are going to have a barbecue and a house party tomorrow as well!

I had a bad exam day today. My seat number was 99, but I am so sure that this is not going to be my grade for this exam. (Not like anyone can get over 70 anyway. ) But seriously, though it was so easy and straight-forward, I did not have enough time to prepare as my previous exam was two days ago and adding to this the fact that I didn’t have any of my notes from the first time as I lost my notes folder halfway through the year. I didn’t do anything on the day of the last exam, so I had only one day to recap whatever I studied ages ago. I didn’t have enough time to finish the exam, and it is not like I wrote so much anyway. I am happy though to feel bad about getting a bad grade because I was lacking any motivation, but now I am starting to feel that I actually care, which is a good thing of course. I have one more exam to go; Consumer Law.