Philip Fibiger

Gladiator won a bunch of awards, which was disappointing, but in the end the Academy Awards turned out ok. Cameron Crowe won Best Original Screenplay and Stephen Soderbergh won Best Director. Bjork wore this crazy swan dress. Those were the highlights.

I’ve been doing a bunch of programming for Jeff Robbins, the singer/guitarist for Orbit, including a Napster bot that goes out and sends instant messages to people who share Orbit songs, or songs of bands whose fans might enjoy Orbit. Then can click through and download tracks off the new Orbit album. I’ve thought a lot about the invasion of privacy that comes along with this. I went into a napster irc channel, looking for information about the queuing of messages that happens at the napster server, and people were nice and helpful until i explained what I was doing, and then they ‘weren’t going to help a spammer.’ I believe in the freedom of information, and I think that people are entitled to online privacy, but I also think that if a band lets people pirate their music over napster, and in fact wants to offer them more free music, they have every right to get in touch with those fans. And I think it’s worked..we brought literally thousands of people to the Orbit website, and the band got a number of emails from people who said ‘i downloaded the song and then immediately went and bought the album.’ I think this is a perfect example of how mp3s and digital distribution can coexist with artists making money.