A California senator [Sen. Dianne Feinstein] has suggested that because file-sharing networks continue to house illegal files, they should be shut down. … Pointing to what she called a “rise in peer to peers” since the Grokster decision, Feinstein said current law is not effective enough to deter illegal file swapping and the government must enact stronger enforcement measures. “If we don’t stop it,” she said, “it’s going to destroy these intellectual property industries.”

It seems outrageous to me that legislators, lawyers, and RIAA suits can continue to quibble about an issue that most of them completely do not understand. There is undeniable truth to the assessment that the music industry has a legitimate gripe about consumers illegally acquiring music through file swapping services. However, what they don’t seem to realize is that throwing laws and lawsuits at the problem does nothing to help their cause. Consider the following points:

• Imagine that a retail store has caught a 13 year old child attempting to steal hundreds of dollars worth of goods. A typical response might be to call the police, re-acquire the stolen property, and enforce proper disciplinary action on the offending child. Nobody would suggest that the store sue the child for monetary damages thousands of times greater than the actual value of the stolen goods. Yet this is essentially what the RIAA is doing. It doesn’t seem to me like very good publicity or an effective way to establish a mutually beneficial relationship with its customers.
• Contrary to what the RIAA bigwigs and many of the legislators and lawyers seem to be saying, file swapping services have very legitimate and wholly legal uses. The fact that they are used for illegal activity is unfortunate, but certainly not a valid reason to shut them down. I’m pretty certain that many other legitimate internet services have been used for illegal activities. I’m purely speculating here, but perhaps instant message services or email services have been used for terrorist communications? or maybe child pornography has been spread through online photo publishing services? or how about viruses being spread through the very infrastructure that defines the internet? I haven’t heard any cries to shut these services down yet.
• Perhaps even more ignorant of the RIAA is that the legitimate legal uses of these file swapping services can and do directly benefit the music industry. Many, many, many independent and lesser-known artists embrace file sharing services as a means to spread their music and freely distribute and advertise their content. Does the RIAA even realize this? or do they just not care about these artists because they are not a significant contribution to their bottom line?

The music industry has a potentially very profitable music distribution paradigm sitting right in front of them. They have already made a step in the right direction unveiling services such as Napster 2.0 and Apple’s iTunes. However, I am sure that they can exploit this model further to make file-swapping services a true benefit to their business. Rather than wasting money on lawsuits, lawyers, and legislation that ultimately stifles innovation, they should be investing this money directly into research efforts to encourage innovation in this area. You can’t eradicate the pirates and the copyright infringers; they will always find a way to live on. Instead, give people a reason to want to buy music through legitimate means.

The state of Massachusetts is proposing to make all its workers stop using Microsoft’s Word, Excel and other desktop software applications and switch to open source software, said the Financial Times. In its online edition, the newspaper reported that the US state said yesterday that at the beginning of 2007 it is planning to order all state employees to create and save documents using only open format software.

This is definitely an intriguing move. Personally, I haven’t used Microsoft Word in a long, long time. Having thus far developed my skills in the academic world, most of my documents these days are built with the ever so geeky LaTex. I do think that Excel and Powerpoint are quality applications, but at the same time, OpenOffice offers very similar applications with many of the same features and functionality. OpenOffice is of course free; Microsoft Office we all know is definitely not.

However, regardless of whether you are inclined to pay a lot of money for an application suite, or use a very very similar one for free, I think the main problem that plagues the Office-centric business world is not what software people use to create their documents, it’s what formats they use to distribute them. For example, let’s say I’m looking to buy something – it doesn’t matter what it is – from some company. So I express interest, let them know what I’m looking for and they send me a quote for this product. If you’re this company, please please please don’t send me a Microsoft Word document, or even an OpenOffice document for that matter. If all I want to do is open and read your quote, why on Earth would I want to start a full fledged document editing/writing/creating application if all I want to do is view it? Documents that are meant for viewing should be sent in viewable-only formats (such as the de facto standard PDF). This way, I can open a much smaller and simpler document viewing application rather than the cockpit-of-a-747 Microsoft Word.

I think Massachusetts is on the right track by mandating a switch to only open formats. However, I’ve see it all too often in the business world where people send Microsoft Word documents all over the place and their only purpose is for the receivers to open them up and look at them. Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, or any other office suite should be used for the creation of content only. The distribution of this content should be done in open, view-only formats such as PDF. Of course now we run into the problem that most people have no idea how to convert a Microsoft Office document into PDF. Uggh.

Think about the spectrum of users that OS X touches. It’s got the geek appeal as a Unix-based OS (actually it’s in the FreeBSD family which makes it even more awesome than Linux); it’s just as user-friendly as Windows (some might argue even more so); the GUI is just plain cool to look at and use; and it’s not nearly as targeted and exploited by virus writers as that other operating system made out in Redmond. Rather than let the hackers run wild and see OS X popping up on all kinds of unauthorized hardware, why not release it to the masses? The effect might be slow, but the right marketing campaign could pull OS X out of its niche and introduce legitimate competition in the consumer operating system market.

Since I’ve been using Firefox, the popup annoyance that used to plague my browsing experience has all but disappeared. However, there are still a couple of methods that website designers employ that still peeve me. First is the insistance by some websites to have all of their links open up in a new browser window. I can see why they would want to do this. If the site opens in a new browser window, you actually won’t be leaving their site, which increases the chances that you’ll return to their site after you finish browsing the newly opened link. In fact, I use multiple browser windows all of the time for this very reason. However, I like to decide myself when I want to open up a new window and when I don’t. In addition, usually when I want to open a link in a new window, I actually open it in a new Firefox tab and not an entirely new window. Multiple windows and tabs are crucial to properly structuring your browsing experience. But this structure should not be forced by web designers who just want to keep you on their sites.

One other annoyance that I find to be even more intrusive to my browsing style is when web designers resize my browser window. For some reason, they think that I actually want it to fill the entire screen. I experienced this insanity yesterday when I was wasting time browsing blogs through blogsoldiers.com. Every time I clicked to see the next blog, the window would be resized to fill the screen. I tried to deal with it and fix the size myself, but after it happened a few times, I just gave up. I can understand the popup ads and the new window links, but I honestly see no beneficial reason why any website designers would employ tactics like this one. It’s a good way to push visitors away rather than keep them coming back.

In any case, I like my browsing experience to be customized to my own personal style. Rather than using cutthroat tactics to trick visitors into visiting or staying, website designers should respect their users so that they have an enjoyable and unintrusive experience on their sites.

Perhaps this is the problem? Despite the recent overwhelming success of the Firefox web browser and my enthusiasm for it as well, web browsers as they stand today are still the limiting factor in the capabilities of web applications and their capacity to fully utilize system resources that are available on the client side. I recently came across an article posted on Slashdot that examines this problem at what people are trying to do about it. They refer to a programming model called Rich Internet Applications or RIA’s that strive to break the boundaries of current browsing methodology to create more interactive and user pleasing web applications:

What we need are applications that have the deployment characteristics of browser-based applications but have equivalent power and more interactivity than desktop applications. That’s what RIAs are all about. They bring complexity on two levels. First, computing happens on both the client and the server over a potentially unreliable WAN. Second, they aim to deliver highly interactive user experiences (UEs).

Google Maps (!) is one of the mentioned applications. Not only does it provide the basic functionality of other internet mapping services such as Mapquest, it also provides a user experience more like a desktop application and less like a web browsing experience of click and wait and refresh. It seems to me like this is the next wave of web applications on the horizon, the next “killer app” if you will. Perhaps even more crucial than the development of these applications, though, is the expansion of the browser’s capabilities to facilitate even greater funcationality.