Robert Scoble is organizing an open dinner tomorrow night at the Cheesecake Factory in Palo Alto. 6 pm. Good place to be if you can make it.

The next TechCrunch party will be on Feb 17. Past parties have been wonderful, and this one is going to be even better. We’ll be celebrating the publication of a new book.

I am taking six sponsors for this event. There are a couple of slots left open. If you are interested in being one of the sponsors, please email me at editor@techcrunch.com for details on sponsor benefits. I expect these to be sold out in the next 24 hours.

This party will be partially by invitation, and then open up for sign up to about 300 attendees.

Everyone’s talking about online music and DRM issues today (David Berlind’s post is excellent). Elliot Spitzer is even starting to look into the labels online music pricing habits. I also enjoyed this quote in my inbox from GMSV this morning, although I do not have a date:

“We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don’t have a share of iPod’s revenue. We want to share in those revenue streams. We have to get out of the mindset that our content has promotional value only. We have to keep thinking how we are going to monetize our product for our shareholders. We are the arms supplier in the device wars between Samsung, Sony, Apple, and others.”
– Warner Music boss Edgar Bronfman Jr.

I’m sticking to my prediction that music will have to be free and un-DRM’d at some point. There is just no other way. Labels and artists will need to make money from certified-quality downloads, limited edition merchandise, tours, etc. Bands and managers will make a lot more money. Labels will mostly go out of business.

And while this debate and courtroom drama continues, Russia-based, pay-by-the-megabyte allofmp3.com is changing the game permanently. The RIAA either needs to go nuclear on them (if they can) or change their own business models for good, because they can’t just continue to pretend they don’t exist.

Om writes about his experience with splogs and plagiarism too. What’s great about these complete copy-cat blogs is when they steal and re-post the entries that talk about them stealing and re-posting content. It shows, of course, that this is just an automated system, and these guys are doing it to generate revenue. They do it because they can, and because it makes business sense for them to do it.

I had my own experience with plagiarism recently as well, as did Steve Rubel and countless others. The experience I had just sucked the energy right out of me. It was good, I guess, that it happened just before Christmas so that I had an excuse to stop blogging so much for a few days. But knowing there are people out there that don’t have any ethical grounding whatsoever, and that they have complete power to take what they like from you without any consequences, makes me just want to stop blogging altogether.

I found that I actually had to defend myself and how I dealt with the fact that someone stole my content. People have a tendency to try and see both sides of an issue. So when someone steals content from you, others are going to ask if you handled yourself properly in dealing with it. It is the same mentality that leads people to forgive other types of criminal behavior, and blame the victim.

Update: Dave Winer pointed me to a post he did two years ago that pretty much says everything I mean to say, but better (see the comments to this post as well). Journalists have a responsibility to dig for the truth, not to blindly report what both sides are saying. Just because people disagree doesn’t mean the truth lies somewhere in the middle. That’s why I was somewhat disappointed with Jonathan’s post.

I’d like to get people’s opinions on what annoys them the most about faulty beta launches for products. For instance, do landing pages with email signups really annoy you, and would you rather not hear about a product until it is ready to launch? What about a lack of proper FAQs? Lack of firefox or safari support? Etc. Let me know what really pisses you off.

I need to make a decision about when to return to the bay area (I’m up in Washington state for the holidays now). There are a few important meetings happening next week, and I’d like to be in SF for New Years. However, the snow report is looking extremely promising at Mt. Baker, which is an hour away, starting Tuesday:

BY TUESDAY WE EXPECT 6 – 10 INCHES OF NEW SNOW. We are hoping to have both base areas open on Monday, or by Tuesday at the latest depending on when the snow moves in.

FROM TUESDAY ON IT LOOKS EVEN BETTER
From Tuesday on are the days to look forward to for significant snowfall. How much we get and when depends on the timing of how the storms move over us, but these will likely be the “rally” days as cold air mixes back in . . .just what we like to see!

I love skiing almost as much as I love blogging.

I’m also finding that I’m able to get a lot more work done up here than I expected.

Rex and Dave - Why would you pay $1 for a DRM’d file in the first place? Particularly when you are just buying a one-time download?

I either buy the cd, keeping the master physical copy somewhere safe, or buy from AllofMP3.com, where you can purchase non-DRM music in the format and quality level you choose, at a price of $0.02 per MB. Yes, two cents per megabyte. And it’s, arguably, legal. If I lose the copy, the biggest cost in replacing it is download time, not dollars out of my pocket.