According to the New York Times, Universal, the world’s biggest music conglomerate, said it would offer albums and songs without the software, known as digital rights management, through existing digital music retail services like RealNetworks and Wal-Mart, nascent services from Amazon.com and Google, and some artists’ Web sites” but not through iTunes, the world’s biggest seller of digital music.

While I am a mere bleacher-seat observer of this and don’t even pretend to understand the law, I’d like to ask any trade-attorney-types out there the following: Aren’t there factors related to restraint of trade that would make it difficult for Universal to distribute product through all available channels but the iTunes Store? While I can completely understand Universal wanting to put the horse back in the barn by doing this, I would think (again, as a mere layman unschooled in such legal nuances) that the “public at large” would have standing in this issue.

Let’s say Universal made the announcement they were only going to sell DRM-free music through Walmart.com (it’s theme night). Wouldn’t that trigger a flood of restraint-of-trade complaints?

Why is this any different?

Even if it’s not a tight case, is there enough of an argument here to yank Universal’s chain?

For the record, this is a first: I’ve never come close before to encouraging or supporting any action by those lawsuit-happy Apple barristers.

Technorati Tags: drm, itunes

Remember Wal-mart’s cool social networking site about this time last year, “The Hub”? Didn’t think so. You blinked, that’s why you missed it. This year, they’re not making that mistake, again. This year, they’re going Facebook by launching “The Roommate Style Match Group.” It has the memorable URL, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2784351093. According to Reuters, “users who join the Wal-Mart group (2784351093) will be able to take a quiz to determine their decorating style and get a list of ‘recommended products’ they can buy at Wal-Mart to mesh their style with their roommate’s.”

No word on how long the Roomate Style Match Group will last. “The Hub” lasted 10 weeks before they shut down the empty hall.

Speaking of empty halls, the Wal-mart Roommate Style Match Group (2784351093) currently (10 p.m., EDT, 8/9) is busting out with a whopping 114 members. Sure, that’s before it got this great publicity on the rexblog, but I’m thinking, isn’t there more than 114 employees at their ad agency who could have seeded group 2784351093 so it wouldn’t look so lonely?

Dear agency, haven’t you ever heard of interns? You know, college interns? Interns with lots of Facebook friends who could join this group so it wouldn’t look so lonely? I hear August is a good time to get college interns to work for, say, $10 an hour. As a good college intern will have something like 500+ Facebook friends, who knows? For maybe like $1,000 you could have had a few hundred members of that group before announcing it.

I know, I know. That may have been an ethically dicey idea if word of it got out. But the way I see it, this would not be like hiring a professional photographer and reporter to pretend they are tourists crossing America and visiting Wal-marts. This would be like hiring real college students to help you figure out how to get other college students to join a Facebook group. I mean, is that a summer job, or what? Getting friends to join a Facebook group. They wouldn’t have to be anonymous or even pretend not to be interns. The interns would merely send a message to all their friends saying, “I’ve got this internship and it would really, really help me out if all of you would join the Roommate Style Match Group. Please, please do it for me. I know, I know. It’s Wal-mart. But you can un-join in a week or so after real people get on it.”

Who knows? Maybe a whole industry could spring up around paying people to spam their Facebook friends.

Speaking of members of the Wal-mart Roommate Style Match Group, I can already tell they are going to be a fun group. Already on the Group’s wall is this love-note to Wal-mart:

“I love wal-mart, thank you for helping the U.S. dollar remain strong! Small business was hurting our economy for too long! I only wish I could super-size the trade deficit along with my fries! No Job? De-valued dollar can’t cover my rising interest rates? At least I saved a nickel on a picture frame!!

That’s the kind of roommate I’d want if I was heading off to college this year.

And for the record, despite my snark, I think the Roommate Style Match Group is a creative idea and I actually do look forward to seeing if it works for them. And I don’t advocate using interns to get their friends to join a Facebook group — (unless the intern is your daughter).

Here’s a blast from an almost four-year-old, distant past: over the past few days there has been a micro-debate about the identity of the “first White House blogger.” I found out about it because William Beutler discovered some dead links on the rexblog (now fixed) related to posts relevant to the topic I made a few years back. He was responding to a post from Micah Sifry on the techPresident weblog related to a recurring mini-dispute over who gets credit for being the first blogger to receive White House press credentials.

However, a year before that “credentialed” blogging happened — as William points out — I did some un-credentialed blogging at the White House — and not of a briefing, but of a private meeting with the President that (I learned later) was off-limits to the press. (This link will take you to a category that groups — reverse chronological — all of the posts related to that event.)

Coincidentally, when I was in Washington on Monday of this week, I ran into the former administration official who set up that White House meeting I participated in back in 2004. It was the first time I’d seen him since that day and he told me the White House press office “went nuts” when they learned (via the Washington Post) that I blogged the meeting. (On the other hand, Patrick Ruffini, who had recently joined the Bush campaign and was heading up their grassroots web strategy, was quick to view my post as something they should point. After that, Patrick and I became friends.) As I said at the time, as I was leaving, a White House press person asked me if I’d talk with a reporter and told me I could tell him anything I wanted to. I figured if I had permission to do that, I had permission to report on the meeting myself. Today, we call that “citizen journalism.” Dan Gillmor used the meeting as an example in his book We the Media (Amazon link) a few months later — which is when I learned I was a “citizen journalist.”

I wasn’t then or now a “political” blogger — and, frankly, I didn’t consider my post “political,” but rather a “geez, people, guess what I just did,” post. (Those were simpler days of blogging innocence.) At the time (remember, it was nearly two years before the last election), most political bloggers who wrote about it at the time — from the right and left — thought it was great that I blogged the meeting.

Why bring this all up again? At best, it’s a historical footnote. But, hey, it’s this weblog’s historical footnote.