Kelly McNeill of OSOpinion writes: “Napster has a problem: There is no solution that respects end-users’ right to copy any music they bought as many times as they like for their own use, and still prevents them from giving it away to all of their friends. To sum it up, what the record companies need is a technology that allows them to sell music to a consumer once and that consumer can then use that music whenever and wherever he or she wants for personal entertainment. Consumers should be able to play the digital music on their digital stereos, their laptops, in their cars and on their computers. Even if they are limited to only playing on one of these devices at a time, things would be just fine — most people can only listen to one piece of music at a time anyhow.”

The BBC resports that the European Union is going to examine DVD pricing and distribution, to see why the prices in Europe are higher for a different selection of encoded DVDs than North America. Hopefully some positive results will stem from the investigation.

Even if Sega’s stopped producing the Dreamcast, and the game development for it has lost a little momentum, other development steams along. Slashdot has news of X11 working on the SegaDreamcast, making it an ideal box for X terminals, and cheap network appliances.

– By Grant Gross
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Netscape’s corporate owners seem to want to rebrand the Open Source browser company as something more than it is. One of the big stories this week was AOL Time Warner’s attempt to reposition the browser company as something called an “Internet media hub,” whatever that means.

Maybe just being a browser isn’t enough in this tough economy.

For Caldera, being a full-service Linux and Unix company isn’t bringing in profits, either. The company announced this week it lost $11.7 million the last quarter, outpacing Wall Street’s loss expectations. The good news was that revenues were up overall.

Plugging JXTA

There was lots of news this week out of the JavaOne conference, some of it of interest to those following Open Source. Bill Joy, Sun Microsystems’ co-founder and chief scientist, was talking up Sun’s Open Source peer-to-peer JXTA suite and Open Source in general. Joy dreamed out loud about the day when peer-to-peer computing would allow gas-price auctions on handhelds in cars.

Into the fire

In other Microsoft news, Microsoft v.p. Craig Mundie will debate Red Hat’s Michael Tiemann at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference in late July. Yes, it’s that Craig Mundie. Say what you will about the guy — he’s misdirected, we know — he’s certainly brave.

New in NewsForge

Stories unique to NewsForge this week:

Free Software movement founder Richard Stallman debuts on NewsForge with a warning about an international treaty called the Hague Convention and how it could affect webmasters’ free speech and patents. Also, the EuroLinux Alliance offers some advice on how to protest the treaty.

News editor Tina Gasperson sorts out the disagreement between the creator of ipfilter and the folks at OpenBSD.

For something a little lighter, check out Gasperson’s look at tech-related humor sites.

use Perl; has news of the resuscitation of the CPAN Index. The plan is to have it stay working into the future.

Wired: “Last weekend’s four-day quarterly meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers was such a fiasco, it has strengthened the calls for major structural changes in the board.”

Debianplanet has the scoop on deb packages of Mozilla 0.9.1.

In a move that surprised few, Thomson announced royalties on streaming MP3 usage (thanks to Slashdot). As one commentor observed, you have to wonder how long it’ll be before they follow Unisys’ example and charge for many other uses.

Ken Whistler has had a rebuttal to the “Why Unicode Won’t Work on the Internet” essay posted on Slashdot.

KDE Dot News: “Two months ago, we announced the birth of Gideon, codename for the next generation version of KDevelop that was most notable for its modularity and extensibility. Since then, Gideon has made enormous strides — not the least of which includes Java, Perl, Python, PHP and Fortran support, full Python scripting, and an editor framework that will allow one to plug in a favourite editor.” Complete details and discussion are on the Dot.