TroySchneider.com

A belated reminder for a panel discussion I'm moderating tomorrow (Tuesday, Feb. 26) at Google's DC offices.

A quick summary and list of the panelists follows. It looks to be a full house, but last-minute attendees are welcome.

Much like their mass-market cousins, publishers that target DC decision-makers are scrambling to adapt to a rapidly changing digital landscape - trying to capitalize on "web 2.0" trends while also protecting their existing reader bases and business models.

GrandCentral.com -- the Google-acquired service that offers "one number for life" and a host of call forwarding /screening/management tools -- is tiptoeing out of private Beta and effectively giving out numbers to anyone who wants one. (Well, anyone in 46 of the 48 continental United States, anyway.)

Has everyone forgotten that copyright exists primarily to encourage the public good that can come from intellectual property? That helping to compensate the content creator is a means for getting good ideas out there, not an end unto itself?

The Wall Street Journal reports today that a coalition of "Internet, media and technology companies" is set to announce... a set of guidelines they have agreed on aimed at protecting copyrights online."

Jeff Atwood is taking YouTube to task for its wink-wink, nudge-nudge approach to uploading copyrighted video clips.

It's a valid point, and I especially like his quip that "by YouTube's own rules, YouTube cannot exist." But YouTube's copyright tips also qualify as a "big copyright lie" in another sense: they seriously downplay the importance of fair use.

On ars technica yesterday, Nate Anderson wrote about the Computer & Communications Industry Association's "Defend Fair Use" initiative.

It's a nice run-down of the effort by Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Sun, Red Hat, and others to rein in the overly broad copyright notices that accompany sports broadcasts, DVDs and a wide range of other "big media." Toward the end, however, Anderson notes:

GrandCentral -- the "one phone number for life" venture acquired by Google earlier this year -- has drawn criticism a couple times on this site, but that's been tough love. I really do like the service, and here's another reason why:

OK, so GrandCentral under Google is now 0 for 2. First they turned off the custom MP3 feature, and now they're dropping "a very small number" of the phone numbers that have already been issued:

Hmm. Wasn't the whole point to quit giving out your home/work/mobile numbers, and instead steer everyone to this cool new GrandCentral number "that you can keep for life"?

It's safe to assume that Google, in purchasing GrandCentral, didn't set aside millions of dollars as a hedge against lawsuits like it did as part of the YouTube acquistion. So it's not surprising to see Grandcentral -- which offers "one phone number for all your phones, for life" -- making some quick changes to curtail possible copyright-infringement claims.

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