The Internet, the Final Frontier

If you'd like to see me in all my video goodness, check out this video of me interviewing Fred Von Lohmann at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month.

Fred is an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, having represented groups like the makers of the Morpheus file sharing application while it was being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America, as well as the makers of the JibJab cartoons, which were being sued by the owners of the rights to the Woodie Guthrie song it parodied.

We spoke about the Microsoft Zune media player, for which Microsoft is paying a royalty to Vivendi's owned Universal Music Group, one of the "Big 5" record producers. This is the first time the maker of a media player has paid a royalty like this. We also spoke about XM Radio, which the RIAA is suing for fundamentally doing the same exact thing on satellite radio using the Pioneer Inno and Samsung Helix that we used to do in the 80s when we recorded music off the FM radio onto cassettes.

I was pretty honored to speak with Fred and I think it turned into a pretty good piece. Enjoy.