Bill Hopkins is the Webmaster of PhotoSourceFolio* (www.photosourcefolio.com) and a regular contributor to PhotoStockNotes. Send comments via Email to wh@photosourcefolio.com. Fax: 1 818 831-0916. Or US Mail: PhotoStockNotes. (*Display 6 of your images on our Web site!) For on-line marketing questions, contact him on the Kracker Barrel at www.photosource.com/board

Well, it's official. Adding to the worries of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is a class-action lawsuit alleging that the software giant knew about Y2K defects in FoxPro and Visual FoxPro and failed to provide owners of the product with effective notice. Yeah, it's all lawyer talk, but it portends what's yet to come. Many manufacturers have mutually agreed to arbitration to attempt to resolve any Y2K issues that arise, but of course that won't stop attorneys from filing lawsuits. Better to spend the dollars on fixes than trying to fix blame in a punitive fashion.

The Canadian government passed a law effective January 1, 1999 that

requires a tax be added into the cost of all recordable media, such as blank tapes and CD-R and CD-RW disks. This was due to pressure from the music industry. One proposal has the fee pegged at $.25 per 15 minutes of recording time, and another at $1 per blank CD or tape. The fact that many people use these media for other purposes, such as archiving their own images, doesn't seem to matter at all. The only exemptions seem to be for tapes for the blind. Canadian photographers and others are in an uproar over this proposed new tax. The money will be redistributed to the "copyright" owners in the music industry. Kinda begs the question that if buying blank media "pays" copyright owners, then folks will no doubt conclude that it's legal to copy their works.

No tax is being collected yet since the amount of tax has not been determined (and it could still be derailed), but when it is, it will be retroactive to 1/1/99. (Ed. There was quite a run on blank media prior to 1/1/99.)

Last month I wrote about how some ISPs (Internet Service Providers) were battling the spam problem (unsolicited E-mail) by turning off the "mail relaying" capability of their systems, and how it was more a case of controlling the pain rather than curing the illness, and in the process taking away certain useful features of Internet Email. AOL (America On-Line) has a much better approach--go after the money! They continue to sue in court for monetary damages and injunctions against the alleged spammers. AOL recently won three lawsuits and has filed nine more (as of this writing). That's the better approach. Hats off to AOL!