billso.com

Tech: Yahoo! News - DVDs will be obsolete in 10 years: Bill Gates: “Asked what home entertainment would like in the future, Gates said that DVD technology would be ‘obsolete in 10 years at the latest. If you consider that nowadays we have to carry around film and music on little silver discs and stick them in the computer, it’s ridiculous,’ Gates said in comments reproduced in German in the mass-circulation daily Bild. ”

Tech: Yahoo! News - Studios Cut to the Chase: “Hollywood sees Germany as a crucial battleground in its assault on piracy. Industry officials say the country is the Internet piracy capital of Western Europe. Although black-market street sales of pirated movies proliferate in Asia and Latin America, experts say, much of the problem in Germany involves widespread downloading and copying, with little social disapproval. Bootleg DVDs are openly traded in schoolyards and shown in country clubs, bus depots and even by teachers in classrooms. In addition to the home-grown piracy, movies smuggled in from Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic feed a busy network of German flea markets. ”

Tech: Yahoo! News - Five Short-Range Wireless Standards Seen Combining: “Five short-range wireless connection technologies are fighting for the industry limelight, but sector specialists said on Friday that companies would eventually combine the five to make life easier. Automatic wireless connections between electronic devices are the Holy Grail of the computer and consumer electronics industry.
Companies hope consumers will buy new devices once they are able to listen to their music collections anywhere in the house or on the road, see DVDs and photo albums on any screen, or program their hard disk recorders from a Web site. This brave new world, in which a car’s lights, speakers and cell phone are all connected to the dashboard with wireless chips, may be here in a few years, or in some cases sooner.
‘We haven’t even scratched the surface,’ Paul Marino, manager of connectivity at Philips semiconductors unit, told Reuters at a Wireless Connectivity industry show. ” Bye-bye Bluetooth?

Internet: The RIAA threatens lawsuits. Again. From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “‘The recording industry is not going to win if all they do is sue people,’ said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a Washington-based advocacy group on technology and copyright issues. ‘They can sue all they want, but that’s not going to make CD sales go up.’”

But if more users keep sharing more copyrighted files online without adequate payment to the artist, who’s going to record any new music? Musicians have to eat.

This will get really fun as more people share entire movies and DVD sets.