Blaring Bono creates new piracy dilemma

Some tracks from the new U2 CD are appearing online, on YouTube, after singer Bono played them too loudly at his holiday villa on the French Riviera.

A Dutch fan of the group heard the music blaring from Bono’s beachside home in the village of Eze-suMer, and recorded them on his mobile phone. He then boasted about his achievement on U2 fan site Interference.com before putting them on YouTube.

Although U2 has managed to remove the four leaked songs from YouTube because of “copyright violations,” they have not been able to stop people trading them via e-mail.

The quality is said to be poor — the noise of waves crashing on the beach and seagull cries can be heard — but the new development in the world of pop piracy has introduced additional questions about how artists can copyright music that is played loudly in a public space.

•Campaign zen: Barack Obama has turned to mobile technology to announce his choice for vice president, and the real payoff may come during the next few months – one text message at a time.

The Obama campaign lets people sign up to receive e-mail or text messages when major announcements occur. As tens of thousands of people provide their names and numbers, the campaign acquires a massive list of cell phone numbers that could be used to mobilize voters under 30 on Election Day.

Mixed Nuts

Another free online photo editing site just debuted, Pixlr.com. What the critics have said, so far, is that Pixlr is closer to an online version of Photoshop than even the online version of Photoshop.

Unlike other free image sites, Pixlr uses editing layers, a necessary feature for all but the most basic of edits. Other sites that offer free online image editing include Picnik, Fotoflexer and Phixr.

•One of the true little-known great Web sites, Scribd.com is something like a YouTube for documents and text files. People have uploaded millions of documents to the site, many of them interesting and worth looking at.

Say you’re a comedian or an amateur jokester looking for new material. Scribd has a full comedy section, organized by subcategory.

Another interesting document group at Scribd is devoted just to product manuals.

And not to be ignored is Scribd’s storage value. It lets you upload documents and store them there indefinitely. Anytime you need to find them, just log on and they’re there.