Tuesday, February 14, 2006

MA Wal-Mart required to carry morning after pill

Wal-Mart says it will comply:

BOSTON (AP) - The state board that oversees pharmacies voted Tuesday to require Wal-Mart to stock emergency contraception pills at its Massachusetts pharmacies, a spokeswoman at the Department of Public Health said.

The unanimous decision by the Massachusetts Board of Pharmacy comes two weeks after three women sued Wal-Mart in state court for failing to carry the so called “morning after” pill in its Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores in the state.

The women argue state policy requires pharmacies to provide all “commonly prescribed medicines.”

The board has sent a letter to Wal-Mart lawyers informing them of the decision, said health department spokeswoman Donna Rheaume. Wal-Mart has until Thursday to provide written compliance.

RELATED: In Pill of Rights the Daily Show’s Jason Jones wonders how one can make a moral judgment over someone making a moral judgment for women.

Google DRM: not so kind and gentle after all

In January I quoted Thomas Hawk on Google’s Kinder, Gentler DRM.

Today Cory Doctorow voices a starkly different view in a long post that asks, why is Hollywood more important than Google’s users?  A brief snippet:

Google’s DRM has the potential to drastically re-shape the contours of copyright law, turning a few entertainment companies’ wishful thinking about the way that copyright would work if they were running the show into de facto laws.

Some examples of user-rights that Google Video DRM takes away:

• Under US copyright law, once you buy a video, you acquire a number of rights to it, including the right to re-sell it, loan it to a friend, donate it to your kid’s school and so on. But with Google Video DRM, none of this is possible: your video is locked to your account and player.

• Educators, archivists, academics, parodists and others have the right to excerpt, copy, archive and use any video in their work, under the US doctrine of fair use. However, Google’s DRM tool stops them from doing this, and Google’s video can’t be played on anyone else’s tool.

And later:

Your ongoing enjoyment of the property you buy from Google is dependent on their ongoing relationship with their suppliers. If you buy a Warner Brothers DVD from Tower Records, it doesn’t affect you in the least if Tower and Warners have an ugly dispute. You’ve bought it, it’s yours. But with Google DRM, auto-update means that it’s never really yours. Third parties always have the possibility of taking away the rights you bought, after you bought them.

Quit your day job?

NY Magazine:

Two years ago, David Hauslaib was a junior at Syracuse University who was, as he confesses, “totally obsessed with who Paris Hilton was sleeping with.” So he did what any college student would do these days: He blogged about it. Hauslaib began scouring the Web for paparazzi photos of Hilton and news items about her, then posting them on his Website, Jossip.com. (Sample headline: PARIS HILTON SPREADS IT IN THE HAMPTONS.) “My friends got a chuckle out of it, but it didn’t get really big or anything-maybe a few hundred visitors a day,” he says.

Then one day Hauslaib took a good look at Gawker, a gossip site owned by the high-tech publisher Nick Denton. Gawker’s founding writer, Elizabeth Spiers, had pioneered a distinctive online literary style and earned a large following in the Manhattan media world. What really got Hauslaib’s attention, though, was Gawker’s advertising-rate sheet. According to Denton, the site received about 200,000 “page views” a day from readers. The site ran roughly two big ads on each page, and Gawker said that it charged advertisers $6 to $10 for every 1,000 page views-almost the same as a midsize newspaper. There was also a smattering of smaller, one-line text ads bringing in a few hundred bucks daily. Doing a quick bit of math, he figured that the income from Gawker’s ads could top $4,000 a day. The upshot? Nick Denton’s revenues from Gawker were probably at least $1 million a year and might well be cracking $2 million.

Not bad, considering the blog had no serious expenses other than its writersâ€"first Spiers and now Jessica Coen and Jesse Oxfeld, all working for journalist wages-and Webhosting fees of maybe a few thousand bucks a year. “The rest of it,” Hauslaib points out, “just goes into Nick’s pockets.”

“And I was like, I can do that,â€Â� he says, laughing.

So in June 2005, Hauslaib packed his bags and moved to a sparsely furnished sixth-floor walk-up in the East Village, where he parked his massive Dell laptop on his kitchenette counter, installed a flat-screen LCD TV to catch breaking celebrity news, and began working on Jossip in earnest.

I’ll have to read on, but I suspect that it’s not nearly so easy as it seems.