I don’t get all the people who are mocking Metallica in their attempts to get their music off of Napster. It seems like Metallica has worked hard to create their music, and they’re not spinning at windmills trying to enforce the fact that it’s their music, and they should be able to control how it’s distributed, and what kind of compensation they get for that. For the webloggers who decry their efforts — would it make you upset if someone took your weblog, design and all, and put it up on their own webserver?

The Supreme Court has let stand a New York ruling that concluded that online services are not publishers, and as such, are not responsible for defamatory or obscene messages that travel through their systems. (The New York case was Lunney v. Prodigy Services Company.)

ABC is back now on New York cable. Interestingly, when I checked, I caught about five minutes of Oprah, when she had Janet Reno on. I was thinking that Reno’s Parkinson’s is getting more and more noticeable (she had a clear tremor), and just then, Oprah recommended that Reno take a little time off, and “maybe not shake so much.” I was floored — has anyone ever told Oprah to stop eating so damn much in an interview? What an insensitive boob.

Also in New York, a woman has been convicted here of fraud and forgery after getting $15,000 from her insurance company for her husband’s penile implant… except her “husband” was really her boyfriend. Her actual husband was shocked to open mail from the urologist and the hospital and see that he had ostensibly gotten, ummm, augmented, and called the authorities and her union (which carried the health insurance). Most funny, though, is that the boyfriend “has fled to Haiti with the implanted evidence.”

Technocool: as of 8 PM EST last night, Global Position System signals are no longer intentionally made less precise, which means a much more accurate reading is displayed on any GPS receiver out there.

An eyebrow-raising discussion has started over on the flounder regarding Dave Winer’s question on yesterday’s Scripting News (now gone, but archived in the hourly XML file from My.Userland) asking if he should terminate the WinerLog site hosted on EditThisPage.

South Carolina, fresh on the heels of being targeted by a potential NCAA boycott, has become the last state to recognize Martin Luther King Day as a holiday.

Bryonn Bain, the author of “Walking While Black”, was my class president at Columbia. I don’t remember much about him, except that he was very involved in civil rights issues on campus, and that he was friends with one of my girlfriend’s roommates, so I saw him around the suite a lot. Of course, my roomate and classmate at Columbia remembers things differently… but just in the hypothetical.