"Starting this summer the Hong Kong government plans to have 200,000 youths search Internet discussion sites for illegal copies of copyrighted songs and movies, and report them to the authorities. The campaign has delighted the entertainment industry, but prompted misgivings among some civil liberties advocates. [...]
The Youth Ambassadors represent a new reliance on minors to keep order on the Internet. All members of the Boy Scouts, Girl Guides and nine other uniformed youth groups here, ranging in age from 9 to 25, will be expected to participate, government officials said." The whole story or try this alternative link
An english subbed version of the news cast about the MPAA and US government threatening the swedish government with trade sanctions if thepiratebay.org is not shut down
chaosradio.ccc.de "Tim Pritlove talks to Peter who is one of the maintainers and system administrators of The Pirate Bay system which has become the biggest BitTorrent tracker system in the world effectively generating half of Swedens Internet traffic. The system was recently raided by Swedish police after the US government complained about the site to the swedish government. This interview was done two days after this incident happened and while the Pirate Bay System was still offline.
Peter explains what exactly happened during the police raid and explains the history and philosophy behind the anti-copyright scene in Sweden and the technical details of the Pirate Bay system and the BitTorrent protocol in particular. He also explains what the technical difficulities are in maintaining the service and the amount private data the system stores and handles." Listen here
According to the RIAA, CD sales are increasing. Now, the RIAA also says that P2P destroys music sales, so it follows that if they're selling more CDs there must be less P2P, right? Uh, no -- file-sharing is up, too (so CD sales should be falling right?).
So is it possible that CD sales and P2P are decoupled (as all the quantitative, independent research indicates), and that the downturn in CD sales is better laid at the feed of bad business, a bad economy, fewer albums and more things competing for entertainment dollars (cough games cough Internet cough).
The number of CDs and other music products shipped from record labels to retail merchants rose 2 percent last year, to 814 million units, the first annual increase in five years, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.
"eXeem™ is a brand new Peer-To-Peer program, which is based on the BitTorrent idea. eXeem™ eliminates the need for trackers as nodes in the program will be taking their role. eXeem™ also features easy publication of files to the network as well as a rating and comments system. eXeem™ contains NO SPYWARE. eXeem™ is free and is ad-supported. eXeem™ is currently still in its beta testing phase, which means that the network might not be completely stable yet. You are still very welcome to give eXeem™ a try and see how it is different from other Peer-To-Peer programs."
Rumors in the blogosphere of a new Bit Torrent application being developed by the folks at SuprNova.org. The name is Exeem and it’s supposedly a “decentralized BitTorrent network that basically makes everyone a Tracker. Individuals will share Torrents, and seed shared files to the network.”
At this time, details and the full potential of this project are being kept very quiet. However it appears this P2P application will completely replace SuprNova.org; no more web mirrors, no more bottle necks and no more slow downs.
[...] So what happens when anti-virus companies share viruses for analysis? Unless they have permission from the virus creator, they're technically infringing on the virus writer's copyright. When they dissect part of the virus code to store its "signature" in an anti-virus program's scanning database, does that constitute a "derivative" work, thus protected by copyright law? [...] More
Is there anyone who hasn't seen those funny poster from modernhumorist.com ? They were created during the napster era.
You can buy those posters at:cafeshops but there are also some very well hidden pdf files to download and print availible at the homepage of the modernhumorist.
Downloading pirated music from the Internet has had almost no effect on real world sales, say researchers from Harvard Business School and the the University of North Carolina.
Their recent report effectively discredits record executives who claimed that the progressive slump in music sales can be linked to the rise in online piracy.
The researchers studied the most heavily downloaded songs to determine if there was a measurable drop in legitimate sales. They discovered that filesharing actually increases sales for popular albums - those that sell more than 600,000 copies. They found that for every 150 illegal downloads, legitimate CD sales of that album are increased by one copy. More Download the whole paper here
Eine kurze Geschichte der Internettauschkultur. Von Janko Röttgers
...Im Sommer 1999 vollendete Fanning die erste Napster-Version. Er lud das Programm auf einen Webserver und gab die Adresse an einige seiner IRC-Freunde weiter. Dabei bat er sie, das Programm umfassend zu testen, es jedoch vorerst nicht weiter zu verbreiten. Seine Freunde probierten es aus, waren sofort davon angetan und konnten der Versuchung nicht widerstehen, die Software an ihre Freunde und Freundesfreunde weiterzuleiten. Nach wenigen Tagen verzeichnete Napsters Testversion bereits Tausende von Nutzern und stieß an ihre Kapazitätsgrenzen. ... Mehr
Zudem gibt's noch ein Interview mit einem der Gründer von "Downhill Battle" und eine wenig spektakuläre kommentierte Linkliste
You'd think Madonna would have learnt by now: it never pays to annoy the fans, especially on the internet. An attempt by the singer and her record company to embarrass people downloading illegal free copies of her album – by replacing them with a brief message from Madonna, saying "What the f*** do you think you're doing?" – has instead sparked a remix bonanza, with online DJs creating dozens of brand new tracks using her words as a sample.
<img src"www.antville.org" align="left" hspace="3">Pay for music online? It used to be square, but the crackdown on pirates is giving legal sites new life
«With as much as 70% of each sale going to the record label and the rest eaten up by surprisingly high costs for things like infrastructure and credit-card fees, sales volume must but doesn't yet compensate. 'It's not a way to make a lot of money,' acknowledges Jobs. No, it's a way to help sell iPods. Apple says sales of the music-storing, high-profit-margin palm-size gadgets almost quadrupled between the quarters before and after iTunes' launch.» More
New Yor Times: Crackdown May Send Music Traders Into Software Underground
Some people may well be intimidated by the 261 lawsuits that the music industry has filed against Internet users it says are illegally sharing songs.
But hundreds of software developers are racing to create new systems, or modify existing ones, to let people continue to swap music — hidden from the prying eyes of the Recording Industry Association of America, or from any other investigators More
People don't change. It's allways the fallt of someone else. Peolpe are blammed for downloading movies, now they are even blamed for telling the truth about crapy movies:
...No, the executives are not blaming such bombs as The Hulk, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle or Gigli on poor quality, lack of originality, or general failure to entertain. There's absolutely nothing new about that...Read more, or discuss at Slashdot.org
I don't know if U2 ever was mentioned in THE WIRE. I'm not a fan of them anyway but they seem to be nice people. Like REM, it's OK for them, if people are trading shows on a non profit base:
In another instance of free online file-sharing taking an authorized route to large-scale distribution, U2 MP3 treasure trove U2BloodRedSky.com hosts hundreds of complete U2 concerts for FTP download.
"We tell people who come to our concerts that they can tape the shows if they want," reads a quote from frontman Bono plastered across the margin of the site. "I think it is cool that people are so passionate about our music."
In that spirit, the site is home to 767 (and counting) complete U2 shows, with individual songs in either MP3 or Shorten form. Individual live files on the site date from a 1980 television appearance up through promotional concerts from June 2003. The most recent count of its file catalog listed a whopping 20,869 MP3s. Read more
The record industry blames piracy and downloading for sagging sales — here's the whole story.
Turn on the radio and chances are you’ll hear a top-selling song from a rock, country, or hip-hop artist. But stroll through the offices of almost any major record label and you’ll hear an entirely different kind of music: the blues. After nearly a decade of unfettered growth, music sales are down for the second year in a row. And if the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is to be believed, downloads and piracy are the verse and the chorus of the music industry’s current sad song.
... While few dispute the numbers, some, such as George Ziemann, are challenging the RIAA’s inferences from them. Ziemann, an Arizona-based musician and owner of MacWizards, a music production company, was propelled into the debate when he wasn’t able to sell his band’s CDs via online auctions on sites such as eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo because they were burned on recordable CD-Rs. Ziemann says he was told that because CD-Rs are often used to record pirated material, they’re banned on many auction sites as a result of the RIAA’s antipiracy efforts (eBay allows CD-R sales if the seller stipulates he owns the copyright).
As a result of that experience, Ziemann researched the RIAA’s figures and came to very different conclusions, released in a much-circulated article, “The RIAA’s Statistics Don’t Add Up To Piracy,” posted on his Website. He makes two key assertions: 1) that the labels raised CD prices during a down economy, and 2) that they slashed the number of new releases by almost 25% during the past three years. He says that these factors, and not downloading, are responsible for sluggish CD sales...Read more
You'd think Madonna would have learnt by now: it never pays to annoy the fans, especially on the internet. An attempt by the singer and her record company to embarrass people downloading illegal free copies of her album – by replacing them with a brief message from Madonna, saying "What the f*** do you think you're doing?" – has instead sparked a remix bonanza, with online DJs creating dozens of brand new tracks using her words as a sample.
People don't change. It's allways the fallt of someone else. Peolpe are blammed for downloading movies, now they are even blamed for telling the truth about crapy movies:
