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Apple is going to challenge Pandora and create their own streaming-radio. I don't know if I like where Apple is headed, because they already have to great an influence in the music industry. Plus, this might kill Pandora, for they have pretty shaky licensing pacts with labels as it is.

This article just reiterates some of our analysis from last week on music services and the industry as a whole. The best take away really is the headline. Too Expensive to be free, too free to be expensive. The music industry falls somewhere in the middle of this perception of value. And admittedly so do many forms of media (TV via Hulu, NYT and paid subscriptions, etc.)

While it is true that oneof the goals of the Copyright Act is to discourage infringement, it is by no means the only goal of that Act. The Constitution grants to Congress the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." U. S. Const., Art. I, § 8, cl. 8. We have often recognized the monopoly privileges that Congress has authorized, while "intended to motivate the creative activity of authors and inventors by the provision of a special reward," are limited in nature and must ultimately serve the public good. For example, in Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aiken, 422 U.S. 151, 156 (1975), we discussed the policies underlying the 1909 Copyright Act as follows: "The limited scope of the copyright holder's statutory monopoly . . . reflects a balance of competing claims upon the public interest: Creative work is to be encouraged and rewarded, but private motivation must ultimately serve the cause of promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts. The immediate effect of our copyright law is to secure a fair return for an `author's' creative labor. But the ultimate aim is, by this incentive, to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good." (Footnotes omitted.) We reiterated this theme in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340, 349-350 (1991), where we said: "The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but `[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.' To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work." (Citations omitted.) Because copyright law ultimately serves the purpose of enriching the general public through access to creative works, it is peculiarly important that the boundaries of copyrigh

A new generation of programmers "would rather work with open systems and tools than closed and proprietary approaches, which are seen as more limiting." While the closed and proprietary systems mean big bucks, the open source means big change.