From slashdot:

Netflix Throttling Instant Video Streaming
from the bandwidth-available-but-not-to-you dept.

rsk writes "For the last few weeks I've been experiencing terrible streaming video performance from Netflix on both my Xbox 360 and PC. While my Xbox 360 would at least stream at a lower resolution, my PC cannot seem to avoid 2-hr. buffering times before playback even started. I smelled shenanigans and started digging. With some help finding the debug menu for the streaming video player, I set out to figure out why playback was so slow. It seems that Netflix is significantly throttling Watch Instantly users (on the PC) down to an unusable cap — in my case, 48 kbps — on a per-connection basis."

It happens to all Netflix subscribers eventually. Your buddy the film buff drags you to a revival of Antonioni's L'Avventura. To your surprise, you find yourself rapt. Upon returning home, you log in to your Netflix account and move La Notte, the second film in Antonioni's ennui trilogy, to the top of your queue. It arrives a few days later, just as L'Avventura's spell is starting to wear off. You watch Anchorman instead. You totally still want to see La Notte… but now you've mailed Anchorman back and here is Ghost Rider—starring Nic Cage! La Notte can wait. And it does. For weeks. You're never quite in the mood to watch it, but you can't quite bring yourself to return it, either.

More than 1,000 of you sent in e-mails confessing to having sat for days, weeks, months, and even years on everything from All About Eve to Z, the Oscar-winning French drama starring Yves Montand. Renee from North Carolina has conceived and carried a child to term in the time since Fracture, the Anthony Hopkins thriller, arrived in its red envelope. ("I'm sure it's very good, I really want to watch it," she writes.) But the movie you had the most trouble actually watching is....

It has always seemed ludicrous for the music industry to be taking on customers one at a time the way the RIAA is doing it, when there are honest-to-god counterfeiters out there ready to sell carloads/truckloads/boatloads of fake CDs and DVDs for injection into the distribution channel: folks that make a real business out of piracy.

And Germany seems to realize that. Per tech.blorge

[I]n Germany... law enforcement officials from several states have declared that the vast majority of illegal file-sharing will simply be ignored from now on. It seems that while the big players will still be pursued with the full force of the law, small-time sharers need not worry about being prosecuted.

According to Janko Roettgers at the P2P Blog, the toning down of pursuing file-sharing lawsuits was first mooted last week by the state prosecutor of Nort-Rhine Westphalia. Speaking to German site Jetzt.de, he openly stated that file-sharers will not have to worry about legal proceedings unless they share files on a “substantial, commercial” level.

Obviously this begs the question: what constitutes substantial or commercial levels of file-sharing? It seems that not all files are equal, and that it’s not only a question of the number of files shared but also the specific value.

The economic value of a music file is about one Euro, whereas a movie is valued at about 15 Euro. Based on that we define a commercial level as damages greater than 3000 Euro.

But that doesn’t mean you can safely share 3000 music files in Germany without fear of prosecution, as the commercial infringement involved is affected by the nature of each individual file. For instance, sharing a movie that hasn’t been commercially released in Germany at that time could spell trouble regardless of your other activity.

Yo La Tengo Release Film Score Compilation

Yo La Tengo will release a compilation of their soundtrack work, titled They Shoot, We Score, via their own Egon imprint on September 5. It contains music from the movies Old Joy (starring Will Oldham), Junebug (featuring but not starring Will Oldham), Game 6, and Shortbus. (Their music for the forthcoming Ryan Reynolds vehicle Adventureland didn't make the cut.)

Of the 27 instrumental tracks on They Shoot, We Score, 26 are previously unreleased. The CD comes with a booklet containing posters for each movie "from around the world," according to the band's website.

Yo La Tengo will start shipping They Shoot, We Score on the aforementioned September 5 release date. On that date, a digital download option will also become available.

• Bewitched - Luna - They were definitely on the crest of the wave with this, way back in 1994. They hadn't announced that they were going to do the entire album, and they never did specifically say that that was what they had done. Dean Wareham would just occasionally step up to the mike and say "It's a concept" and left it up to the audience to figure out what the heck he was talking back.
• Pet Sounds - Brian Wilson - One of the most goosebump-inducing shows I've ever been to. This was in 2000, I think, or maybe 2001.
• Insert Two Cheap Trick albums Here - Cheap Trick - So I don't know my Cheap Trick and can't remember what two albums I heard. So sue me. But they were out there fairly early on with this. They did three nights in a row in Austin in the late '90s, and I went to two of them.
• Quadrophenia - The Who - This feels like it shouldn't even count because they have always been so profoundly into the concept of The Album, not to mention The Concept Album. But I'll count it anyway. This must have been 1996. This romp 'em stomp 'em show included performances by Gary Glitter and Billy Idol

Broadband Internet customers of cable television giant Comcast should be free to use file-sharing software, the Federal Communications Commission says.

The commission voted Friday to order Comcast to stop blocking its Internet customers from using BitTorrent, an online software application that enables users to share large movie, TV show and music files, The Hollywood Reporter said.

Commission Chairman Kevin Martin split with his Republican colleagues to join the two Democratic members to produce a 3-2 vote against Comcast. The (NASDAQ:CMCSA) precedent-setting decision was hailed by supporters of so-called net neutrality, which maintains Internet service providers should be barred from discriminating among various types of traffic.

"It was unreasonable for Comcast to discriminate against particular Internet applications, including BitTorrent," Martin wrote in his majority opinion. "They delayed and blocked customers using a disfavored application even when there was no network congestion."

Apparently so. New York Magazine has the lowdown:

It probably goes without saying that Howard Stern's forthcoming remake of 1979's Rock 'n' Roll High School, announced this morning, is a terrible idea. We're happy to say it anyway, though: Howard Stern's upcoming Rock 'n' Roll High School remake is a terrible idea. As we noted in today's Industry post, the original was, at the same time, the greatest and most idiotic movie in history. In it, a group of students conspire with the Ramones (who, themselves, were the world's dumbest and best band) to get revenge on their rock-hating principal by blowing up the school (this was back in the seventies, long before the advent of plausibility or responsible filmmaking). It was a stupid — and awesome — movie that would've been completely forgettable had it not been for Roger Corman's ingenious decision to cast the Ramones.

But who are the Ramones of 2008? What contemporary band is capable of inspiring today's cynical, careerist, AP-credit-seeking teenagers to do something with their lives — like shirk their educational responsibilities, scrap their futures, and risk life in prison by demolishing their school with deadly, hard-to-obtain explosives?

• Coldplay
• Sonic Youth
• The Strokes
• Kings of Leon