Wes Phillips

As we reported almost a year ago, US District Court Judge Michael Davis awarded record labels $220,000 in damages for Jammie Thomas' having posted digital files to the KaZaa peer-to-peer site. To date, that has been the RIAA's sole victory in its prosecution of file sharers and it hinged upon an instruction Judge Davis gave the jury, specifically Jury Instruction 15, which said that Capitol Records did not have to prove anybody downloaded the songs, only that Thomas had posted them. This is known as the "making available" argument and was vigorously opposed by Thomas' lawyer.

Audiophiles probably know Steve Guttenberg for his writing about hi-fi and home theater in numerous publications, as well as his blog The Audiophiliac. What only a handful of folks know, however, is that Steve is a talented graphic artist, manipulating photographic images to express the world as he (sort of) sees it.

Let's do the It's a Wonderful Life exercise, shall we? Imagine what popular music would sound like today without Jerry Wexler. Aretha Franklin would have never returned to her gospel roots, Ray Charles would have continued imitating Charles Brown and Nat Cole, Stax would have been a tiny regional record label, and denatured white covers of R&B songs would dominate the charts. In fact, the music we know today as rhythm and blues would still be called "race music"—Wexler having coined R&B while working at Billboard in 1949.

In July, I received an invitation from Bentley to participate in a "driving event" involving the 2009 model Continental Flying Spur and Continental Flying Spur Speed. How come? Because the 2009 Bentleys have the Naim For Bentley music system and, in addition to debuting it for the automotive press, Bentley wanted some hi-fi writers along for the, umm, ride.