The results of a survey, announced yesterday, show that the biggest buyers of music are in fact those that pirate the most. The conclusions come from a poll of 1,000 people between the ages of 16 and 50, with 10% of those admitting they download music illegally -- so it's not a huge slice of the population, and it's by no means conclusive, but I think it just confirms what we already know: it's the music fans that download all the music.

It's the music fans that watch live performances and go the extra mile to get the t-shirts and the posters and track down out-of-print B-sides. The survey shows that the average music downloader spends £77 ($126) a year on music -- while the non-downloader only spends £44.

This probably isn't very big news for you in America -- we all know the RIAA are draconian bitches, nothing new, move along now -- but here in the UK we're about to have a law passed that will allow people to be banned from the Internet if they continue to download music illegally after a written warning. It just stinks of poorly-informed lobbying by the BPI -- the British equivalent of the RIAA.

[via The Independent]

It's no secret that I reserve special levels of scorn for the Record Industry Association of America - the music industry body whose moments of fame include suing the dead for copyright theft and in the process destroying any consumer goodwill towards the music labels. It's not that I loathe paying for my music - nothing could be farther from the truth - it's just that as a legitimate customer, I can't help but feel that I get the rough end of the stick for being honest.

Whilst most adults know that it's illegal to share music online, there's clearly a question of how to teach school-kids the law - and their fair-use rights. Enter the RIAA's recently updated "Music-Rules!" curriculum, which encourages youngsters to create class projects to educate their peers in how to legitimately obtain music:

Imagine that you are in the music industry... With your team of fellow music industry employees, plan an information campaign that lets others know why it's important to get their music the right way... You'll want to convince your classmates that your teams' plan is the one that will become the class project!

Challenge: Take your campaign a step further by contacting the editor of your community newspaper or the director of your community cable television station to see if you can submit an article or video about your campaign.

Whilst it's understandable that the RIAA would seek to 'educate' children in the legality of sharing music online, the convenient ommision of fair-use (complex though it may be to explain to younger children) means that the RIAA's campaign fails to convince us it's anything more than a glorified PR campaign. After years of intimidating adults, and now attempting to use children as unpaid PR hacks, it's hard to do anything but criticise the RIAA's ongoing tactics.

[Via Boing Boing]

Just one day after the French Government passed a law that lets judges disconnect users whose computer networks have shown sufficient evidence of illegal file sharing, the UK government's plans to disconnect filesharers have also received an unsurprising boost: from the UK music industry.

The Guardian newspaper today quotes UK Music (a consortium of music industry interests here across the pond) saying "The purpose of [the disconnection] powers is to encourage users of unlicensed P2P networks towards existing and future digital music services." - but we can't help but question the effectiveness of pulling the plug on Internet connections.

Despite misleading super-extrapolated numbers in industry reports, us Brits are far-from reluctant to buy our music online - in the first half of 2008 the UK saw the biggest increase in digital sales in all the major worldwide markets [PDF]. Yet just last week, the Financial Times reported that EMI (the label owning The Beatles' back-catalogue) was reluctant to place the recently-remastered Beatles albums online due to fears of online piracy - despite being readily available in almost every other format, legal or otherwise.

Despite clear demand for digital copies, the music labels continue to blame piracy for their bone-headed decisions on online music. However, as long as the labels withhold music in the formats or outlets that consumers love (hello iTunes and 7Digital) it's clear that there's plenty the labels could do to help their image and balance sheets before turning to the government and bleating for draconian laws to help shore up their own digital naivity.

Royalties have been a bone of contention between major record labels and Internet radio stations for years, and now it looks like the two sides only have 30 more days to iron out an agreement. After they failed to agree by the February 2009 deadline that Congress set last year, Congress took action to extend the deadline to 30 days from last Wednesday.

Until last year, the Copyright Royalty Board had the authority to determine the rates webcasters would have to pay for songs, but a 2008 bill called for negotiation on the issue instead. What's missing from all the coverage of this extension is what happens if an agreement can't be reached by the new deadline. According to the bill -- which was passed without amendment -- after the 30 day period passes, no agreement can be reached under the existing provisions, which means the rules of the game could change again at Congress' whim.

[via AppScout]

Remember the panic a while back about social music site Last.FM supposedly leaking listener data to the RIAA? TechCrunch sure does, because they started the rumor, and then faced accusations of shoddy reporting from basically the whole Internet when it turned out to be false. Well, now TechCrunch have uncovered some new information that shows they were right after all ... sort of.

Last.fm's parent company, CBS, was the source of the leak to the RIAA. Last.fm didn't know about it at the time, having just turned over the data to CBS, which explains their vehement denials. TechCrunch isn't saying Last.fm lied, but they are saying that CBS duped them during the reporting for their original story, asking TC to attribute a CBS quote to Last.fm.

The reason for the link, according to Techcrunch's source at CBS, is that the requester (it could have been the RIAA, or an individual label) had the ability to hurt CBS/Last.fm on streaming rates. The source also claims that Last.fm premium accounts aren't making any profit, and the leak was made with the intent of protecting Last.fm from increased rates that could put it out of business.

No comment from Last.fm yet, but it's still early (and a three-day weekend) at their headquarters in the UK. We'll know more when they've had a chance to respond.

Last.fm has finally put up an official blog post to respond to the TechCrunch-initiated rumor that they turned over users' information to the RIAA as part of an investigation into leaked copies of the new U2 album. The post reiterates that Last.fm takes its users' info very seriously, and that they really don't have the time or system resources to start running extra data dumps, for the RIAA or anybody else. The post is amusingly titled "TechCrunch are full of shit," although I doubt anyone at Last.fm is very amused by this incident.

It also includes an interesting graph of U2's popularity on Last.fm. After the TechCrunch rumor came out, U2 plays skyrocketed. Either more people realized the new album had leaked, or they faked the metadata in protest, as several commenters at both Last.fm and TechCrunch suggested they would do.

Here's the kicker, courtesy of Ars Technica: even the RIAA says they never asked Last.fm for user info, and Last.fm never gave it to them. If you had any doubt that Last.fm was telling the truth, you don't even have to take their word for it anymore. This supposed data sharing never happened.

Incidentally, Ars also figured out how the new U2 album leaked in the first place: it was briefly available for sale on an Australian music site before they realized the mistake and took it down.

Oops! Too late! High quality, DRM-free U2 files are now all over the Internet.

Have you torrented the new U2 album? We won't tell, and neither will Last.fm, if those unreleased tracks show up on your listening profile. That's not what TechCrunch is saying, though. Earlier today, they incorrectly reported that Last.fm turned over listener data to the RIAA as part of an investigation into piracy of the U2 record. According to TechCrunch's anonymous source, "I heard from an irate friend who works at CBS that last.fm recently provided the RIAA with a giant dump of user data to track down people who are scrobbling unreleased tracks."

But according to one of Last.fm's founders, commenting on the TechCrunch post, "This is utter nonsense and totally untrue. As far as I can tell, the author of this article got a "tip" from *one* person and decided to make a story out of it. Techcrunch is full of shit, film at 11." I'm not attacking TechCrunch's reporting here, I'm just doing some reporting of my own to make sure everyone knows that this story should apparently be downgraded to rumor status, and there's no need to dump your last.fm account over it.

UPDATE: Despite it being past 1AM at Last.fm's London HQ, the Last.fm staff have posted in their forums: "Of course we work with the major labels and provide them with broad statistics, as we would with any other label, but we'd never personally identify our users to a third party - that goes against everything we stand for. As far as I'm concerned Techcrunch have made this whole story up."

There's a lot to be said for having competent, well-informed legal representation at a high-profile trial.

You think that the plaintiffs in the the ongoing case against The Pirate Bay would have come into the case with a legal team better prepared to argue key points. For example, how torrent files work and why the tracker hosting them is complicit in the act of copyright violation.

That's what you would think, but the results so far speak to the contrary. It's only day two, and already half of the charges against the defendants have been dropped. It's good news for more than just Pirate Bay founders Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, and Fredrik Neij. It's good news to anyone downloading torrent files.

In the days leading up to the trial, the Tribler P2P from Delft University revealed some eye-popping statistics. In a sampling of nearly 300,000 torrents, researchers found that almost half were tracked by Pirate Bay. If prosecutors were ever successful in shutting down their servers, several other servers could fail due to the increased load as torrents shift trackers.

Not a pretty picture, but at least it now looks like the peer-to-peer community will have some time to come up with a solution.

[ via TorrentFreak ]

Lately, there's been plenty of news about Google and intellectual property. First we heard (or rather, didn't hear) videos go silent on YouTube. Now we've learned that they're also targeting bloggers who post mp3 files on Blogger.com.

The problem is, some of the people sharing songs are doing so at the request of artists and their promoters. That's the case with Ryan's Smashing Life, whose story has been picked up by LA Weekly and Rolling Stone.
In November, some of Ryan's posts began disappearing. There were no takedown notices. The posts were not unpublished. They were unceremoniously deleted without warning.

What's going on behind the scenes are the same idiotic practices that have plagued the music industry for ages. The promoters push material to people like Ryan for publicity without talking to corporate muckety-mucks. The suits get mad, and blame the little guy. Google hosts the content, so the labels order them to grab the intellectual ballbat and make with the kneecapping.

In Google's defense, surely there's something in the Blogger.com TOS that permits this sort of thing, but these actions don't do anything to further Google's friend-of-the-people image.

Ultimately, though, it's the bass-ackwards business model of the music industry that continues to frustrate and inconvenience the rest of us who just want to listen to our music.

[ via Inquistr ]

For the last few years the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has taken a rather aggressive stance on copyright protection by suing individuals who shared songs over the internet using file sharing software.

The Wall Street Journal reports that's all about to change. Well, somewhat anyway. After filing suits against 35,000 individuals the RIAA plans to give up on mass lawsuits. That doesn't mean it won't file any lawsuits against people who illegally upload and share music. But for the most part the group now plans to work with internet service providers instead. The goal is to hunt down customers who are violating copyright. Under the agreements, the ISP will give users a few warnings and then may terminate their accounts.

On the bright side, this means that ISPs don't have to fork over any personal data on customers. The RIAA can submit a list of IP addresses and the ISP can decide whether to go after the users based on that information.

It's not entirely clear whether the RIAA's efforts over the past 5 years have done more to alert people that file-sharing is against the law or to let them know that file sharing software exists and is a cool way to find free music. Now it's time to see if warning letters from ISPs do the trick. Considering how many people say they find internet access to be more valuable than sex, it just might.

Torrent Freak reported yesterday that the SPFF -- think of it as the French RIAA -- filed lawsuits against the developers of P2P clients Vuze, Limewire, and Morpheus. There is also a fourth target, and I'll get to that particular bit of insanity later.

The SPFF's beef is with the fact that these programs don't provide a system to block copyright protected materials from being shared. Because the programs don't prevent files from being shared, the SPFF argues that the programs are complicit in the act itself.

It's the same flawed P2P argument that agencies have been making for the last decade. This "making available" argument has failed to hold up in US court cases against individual users.

To claim that the developers of these programs are responsible for what their users decide to do with it is pure idiocy. If someone were to author a subversive plot to overthrow the French government using OpenOffice Writer, would there be a lawsuit filed against Sun? OK, don't answer that...

The kicker: Rather than actually going after those who develop the fourth app (Shareaza), the SPFF decided to sue SourceForge - who merely provide hosting for Shareaza's project files. SourceForge has absolutely nothing to do with the actual development of the program.

When I read this, I started having visions of the SPFF headquarters looking like something out of Bizarro World from the old Superfriends cartoon. Clearly the only people that could hatch a scheme like this would be badly animated super villains.

I'm sure there's no possible way this fiasco could backfire on the French music industry. After all, I think we can all agree that the P2P community is usually very good about knuckling under to threats from coporate interests.

In an unrelated note, I have to check uTorrent to see if my downloads are finished.

Back in October of 2007, a federal jury ruled in favor of the RIAA and fined the defendant, Jammie Thomas, an outrageous $220,000.00 US for sharing 24 songs on a P2P network. Not surprisingly, Ms. Thomas filed an appeal. Her case was indirectly strengthened when a New York federal judge ruled that the RIAA could not strictly sue individuals under the "making available" claim -- the argument that merely making a file available to download constitutes subjects the user to copyright infringement and punitive penalties -- they would have to prove the person actually downloaded said files. Yesterday, a Minnesota federal judge declared a mistrial in the Jammie Thomas case, effectively setting the RIAA's court victory record back to zero.

The basis of the mistrial were the jury instructions. Initially Judge Michael Davis instructed jurors that could find Thomas guilty of copyright infringement if copyrighted MP3s were made available via a peer-to-peer network, "regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown."

In August, Judge Davis had a change of heart and called both sides back to court, requesting arguments over the "make available" claim. With yesterday's decision, Jude Davis ruled that the jury instructions were "erroneous, and that error substantially prejudiced Thomas' rights."

Although a mistrial was declared, the case was not dismissed with prejudice, meaning the RIAA can sue Thomas on the same grounds, assuming they can make the argument that actual distribution, and that Thomas was responsible for infringing downloads.

On page 41 of the 44 page ruling, Judge Davis also commented on the extraordinary punitive damages in this case:
"The Court would be remiss if it did not take this opportunity to implore Congress to amend the Copyright Act to
address liability and damages in peer? to?peer network cases such as the one currently before this Court." We can only hope Congress listens.

The complete ruling can be downloaded here.



[via Tech Dirt]

In the spirit of Download Like a Pirate Day, If you want to take to the airwaves and be your own radio broadcaster, Pirate Radio, a PC based internet broadcasting app can help you get your own radio station launched with minimum equipment and no technical skills required. All you need is a PC with a sound card, some audio and a constant connection to the internet.

You can broadcast live with a microphone and live input compatible sound card or a playlist of digital audio files. Your station will put you back only $40 for the software. As for whether or not permission is needed to broadcast music, Pirate Radio recommends you check out RIAA's stance on the issues as well as Save internet radio's opposing view. In any event, Pirate Radio puts the onus on you to be in compliance with the laws of your broadcast area.

Yah, sure there are other ways (some free) to get your pirate station on, but Pirate Radio is turnkey and it has an awesome name.

The age-old battle of copyright and artist freedom keeps clanging away in the distance, and are we any better off than we were when DAT machines were castrated in the 80's? I read a report this morning about a UK band called "Show of Hands" who claims they are dependent upon so-called pirates who download their music and share it with friends. This isn't much different than Trent Reznor making his music freely available online (and my wife reports the show here in town didn't look any smaller than the ones in the 90's -- possibly even bigger since Reznor has a new legion of fans younger than us). But the music industry sticks by the mantra "a download is a lost sale, and that is theft." Or, as TorrentFreak puts it, "there is no such animal as 'piracy as promotion.'"

Oh really? This sad, antiquated logic continues to do one thing and one thing only: bolster sales of the top-paid performers while creating a chilling effect on artists who would love innovative promotion but fear free samples will incur the wrath of the mighty RIAA, or worse. It's one thing to send the FBI after some poor schlub who leaks some Guns N' Roses tracks, or sue the bejeebes out of hundreds of college kids, but it's quite another to threaten fair trade when artists (who own their own content, thank you) decide to market in ways they see fit.

The only ray of sunshine could be recent rulings regarding Creative Commons which might allow savvy artists to provide music in the manner they see fit, without the RIAA calling fans of the artists a bunch of pirates. Arrr, matey. At the end of the day there has to be some middle ground, but it's a pity the RIAA and other enforcement agencies see the world in black and white and tend to pull their concepts of ownership from the days when TV's were also monochromatic.

A few years ago you could purchase practically any song you wanted from the Russian music site AllofMP3. And the songs were dirt cheap. While you had to pay Apple roughly a buck for every song you purchased legally in the US, AllofMP3 charged just a few cents per song. If that all sounds too good to be true, the RIAA thought so too. The US recording industry trade group took legal action against AllofMP3 in late 2006, and Russian authorities shut down the service in 2007.

Last week the RIAA dropped its complaint against AllofMP3. An RIAA spokesperson told Bloomberg that there wasn't much reason to continue with the suit, since the site had been shut down.

But as TorrentFreak points out, the same people who created AllofMP3 now have another site that's nearly identical. The only difference we can find is that it has a new name - Mp3Sparks. Like its predecesser, the site sells music at ridiculously low prices, and doesn't appear to pass any of the proceeds along to artists in the US. So we're pretty sure that the RIAA will be filing another suit soon. Or claiming victory and pretending the new site doesn't exist. Definitely one or the other. Possibly both.