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Having set the pace by victimizing 12-year-old Brianna Lahara, the four members of the Big Music record label cartel say they're equally OK with suing children in Britain. Brianna and her mother live in a New York housing project. Last year, Mrs. Lahara paid $2000 to the cartel's trade group, the Re...
A number of high-powered tech companies have banded together to create a "common antipiracy language." Ignoring the reality that if you can hear it, you can copy it, members of the Coral Consortium want to come up with a set of technology specifications "that will let different kinds of copy protect...
You knew it was coming, and now it's here -- the latest evil spurred by the latest Microsoft security hole. It's called the JpegOfDeath, but JPEG isn't all it threatens. "[F]or the people out there who think you can only be affected through viewing or downloading a JPEG attachment... you're dead wro...
Bill Xia, CEO of Dynamic Internet Technology, a company which runs services aimed at allowing Chinese people to access unfiltered news, says Google is helping Chinese authorities to maintain an online "matrix" that keeps people from finding out what's happening outside the country's borders. DIT was...
By selling "product" at half price, RealNetworks has climbed into second place in the corporate music market dominated by Apple. That was Real's claim at the conclusion of its 49-cents-a-pop download offer, under which it sold three million tracks to spotlight its Harmony application that lets songs...
The entertainment industry has been riding rough-shod over consumers ever since Napster -- the original, not the ghastly Napster II -- showed up online. Napster's appearance represented the first act in a commercial revolution that pits ordinary people against the corporate interests who've been in ...
It's the dripping tap principal. Eventually, you can't hear anything else. Repeat something continually and people -- including the mainstream print and electronic media -- will start to believe it, particularly if what you're saying comes nicely wrapped in a study. "The paid-for music downloading m...
P2P operators aren't responsible for their users' online file-swapping activities, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled in the landmark MGM v. Grokster decision. Still, Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) boss Mitch Bainwol says, "This decision does nothing to absolve the...
Troubled Roxio, owner of the equally troubled Napster 2, is deceased. Or, rather, it's dropping the Roxio part and is taking a second shot at using the Napster name to revive its failing fortunes. The firm has been tottering along for months, issuing statements based more on hope than reality and cl...
At 5 a.m., German police kicked in the front door of the modest apartment house in working-class Essen and, guns drawn, ordered an unsuspecting family out of bed. Then they hauled off a 22-year-old college student as his stunned parents watched. The intro is from a Boston Globe story that continues:...
Apple FairPlay "consumer control" technology prevents people from playing iTunes tracks, which cost a dollar per track, on players Apple doesn't like, which is just about everything -- except iPods, of course. Apple wouldn't deal with RealNetworks to allow music from the RealPlayer music store to be...
A trade group of technology companies has issued a policy statement urging Congress to take a close look at the controversial, so-called Induce Act. The Business Software Alliance (BSA) adopted a policy urging that "U.S. Senate legislation introduced to stem the growth of online piracy [Induce] shou...
U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch and other parties with a stake in the wars over peer-to-peer (P2P) software should meet with commercial P2P industry companies to talk about the so-called INDUCE Act. This is the point of view expressed by StreamCast Networks CEO Mike Weiss, one of several industry leaders who ...
Morpheus owner StreamCast Networks has signed a deal with Sovereign Artists and SML under which tracks from the rock band Heart's "Jupiter's Darling" album are being offered on Morpheus in SML's Weed format. Each track is in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format and comes wrapped with Microsoft's d...
Thanks to the combined powers of music and the Internet, anywhere between 8 million and 9.5 million people around the world are logged on to peer-to-peer file-sharing networks at any given moment. At a conservative estimate, some 1 billion files are being swapped online between and among music lover...
The entertainment industry, with the Big Five record labels and major movie studios to the fore, is one of the wealthiest corporate sectors in the world. And yet it's in deep trouble, or so it says, the latest complaints emanating from Big Music spokesman Mitch Bainwol in a letter to the US Senate d...
A massive new multi-million-dollar anti-DVD piracy campaign riding on the back of the UK premier of "Spider-Man 2" seeks to make a questionable link between illegal file sharing and organized crime, triads and terrorists. The aim of the campaign by Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) is to "ma...
There was an interesting article in the New York Times over the weekend. Called "From a High-Tech System, Low-Fi Music," its focus was on compressed music files that are lossy by virtue of the fact that they've been compressed and, hence, are missing information. So people who use iTunes for their i...
What's so great about the 70 million or so downloads Apple says iTunes managed in more than a year, compared to the one billion (at a conservative estimate) that happen on the peer-to-peer networks every month? The "one billion" figure, which comes from industry observer Big Champagne, helps make th...
It's deja vu all over again. Napster 2 in Europe reloaded as the mainstream media players fell over each other to carry Big Music's message that the joyless online music stores it supplies and backs are all there is to online music. Only this time, instead of Napster 2, it's Apple's iTunes. Not to b...
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