Some states in the land of the free are pushing new legislations which have the purpose to curb the sale of stolen goods but affect you, me and your local used record store more seriously. Let us take Florida as the prime example how things can get really out of control. Stores who sell used CDs have to apply for a permit. Once a customer comes in they have to take his fingerprints (!) and get a copy of one of their documents that can legally identify them.

Pandora.com made the decision to stop streaming music to users who are not living in the United States. To be able to do this they implemented a script that checks the IP address of every user connecting to the server and if that IP happens to be located outside of the United Stats of America you will not be able to connect to the streaming client anymore. Pandora already updated their FAQ section to reflect this changes, here is what the entry said:

You can’t say that the guys from the Pirate Bay are full of ideas and surprises. Their latest project is called Playble, a website that offers free music to the visitors while still paying the artists directly. This is the biggest difference to the dominating music portals such as iTunes that do not pay the artists but the record labels who in turn pay their artists. This concept eliminates the need for a man in the middle who collects the money and distributes it to the artists.

NiN – Nine Inch Nails – added a new announcement on their website stating: “As a reward for stealing Year Zero, We’ve prepared the next batch of multitrack audio files for you to download”. Beneath the announcement are links to three of their songs, Capital G, My Violent Heart and Me, I’m not in Garageband / Logic Format for the Macintosh and a generic format for other applications. The interesting aspect of the generic format is that the links are actually torrent files that point to the Piratebay.

Now if that is not a clever idea. Force DRM on the users for several years with a pricing scheme straight out of hell and then use a huge publicity machine to make the customers believe that DRM free music is the future raising prices once more. If you thought that everything would be good now that many labels decided to offer drm free music albums as well you could not be more wrong. What is happening now is that the Music Industry once again fools the customers by offering overpriced products.

Tunecore online service offers an incredible opportunity for everyone who is creating music. You can use Tunecore to upload your music to their site and publish it at well known online music stores such as Apple iTunes, eMusic, Sony Connect or Rhapsody. It is possible to upload single songs, albums, cover art and everything else that is related to the music. Tunecore gets non exclusive rights to submit the songs and albums to the stores that you selected and to collect the money from the music sales earnings. They have no other rights on the songs such as merchandise rights or master recording copyrights.

Apple and Emi announced today that the entire digital repertoire from Emi music can be purchased at Apples iTunes store without DRM. The songs will be offered at a higher quality which means an encoding quality of 256 Kbps instead of the usual 128 Kbps. There is however one downside: The DRM free songs cost $1.29 per song instead of the usual price of $0.99 per song. I’m a little bit concerned about the 30% increase which can not be explained rationally I think. Albums on the other side will not change in prices at all which makes the single song price increase a mystery to me.

Microsoft added resource heavy DRM processes to Windows Vista in a move to “please” the content industry. I can’t think of another reason why they would add this kind of mechanisms if there would not be some kind of agreement between them and the content industry. Microsoft would have made such a big impact if Vista would not enforce digital rights management protections on content. The system would probably be more stable, faster and more resource friendly. Well, Microsoft decided to ensure that not only the needs of the consumers but also those of the content owners would be supported which makes me wonder which consumer would actually be pro DRM.

Rapidshare, one of the largest file hosters in the world, is currently under heavy fire in Germany. The Gema, which administers the copyrights of more than 60,000 members as well as those of over 1 million rights owners from all corners of the world managed to get a court ruling in their favor. The court ruled that the hoster could be held responsible for copyright violations committed by users who upload copyrighted material to Rapidshare servers. The court furthermore ruled that Rapidshare had to implement filters that would prevent further copyright violations.

I found this interesting article at DRM Alternatives and would like to share it. DRM Free Music Search is a service that searches 19 music sites that offer – only – DRM free music. Some sites sell the music while others provide it for free to their visitors. The search uses Ajax to display the search results. Just enter a search term and watch how the results appear below the search box. Every result displays the title, the artist, the name of the album, the music site that hosts the file and the possible price of the file or album.

Today i discovered a independent online radio station which has owners that see radio as an art form and not a platform to turn out a endless stream of advertisement and mediocre music.At the moment they pay around 10-12% of their income in royalties for the music they play, which seems very reasonable to me.But the “US Copyright Board” has made a decision about online radio which will mean the end of Radio Paradise and many other online radio stations.

This new regulation means the stations have to pay not 10-12% but as much as 125% of their income in royalties.
So if they don’t have some huge advertisers behind them (which will lead to a music station with a lot of advertisement, thus leading to the opposite they want to the station to be) they will not be able to continue their work and passion.
If you want to read more about this issue visit Save our internet radio which is made by the owners of Radio Paradise and is a good source for more information.

I’m sick and tired. Sick and tired of the RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America, their methods, their pressure against their customers, their inability to cope with a new situation, their stubbornness and their greed. Instead of listening to their customers and possible customers they cling to their old ways of distribution and show an unbelievable ineffectiveness to cope with new technologies and ways of spreading music.

Jamendo is a music service that tries a different distribution model for music albums. Instead of paying money to download and listen to music you download the music for free and pay or donate money later directly to the artist who created the music. You may either donate money using paypal or visit the artists website to purchase music directly to support them even further and receive CDs that are send to your location.

Ding Ding Ding, welcome the the next round in this amazing fight. In the right corner we have the underdog, a Russian mp3 website that offers what customers apparently want: MP3 files without DRM, variable bitrate at low costs. Did I mention that this is a perfectly legal company under Russian law ? In the opposite corner the RIAA, a institution living in the past, trying to hold of progress by sueing its customers and denying them what they really want.

Fox, the big media company, is apparently forcing a website owner to shutdown his website for linking to tv shows at sites like youtube and dailymotion claiming that linking to those shows would be illegal. This question never made it to court before it seems – here we have it again. A big company with money enough to pay a dozen lawyers is suing a website owner who probably can’t afford to even higher one lawyer.

Just a few weeks ago I was reporting that Universal Studios was receiving it’s share from every Zune player sold and asked my readers to consider this before buying a Zune player because it could very well be the precedent of something that Universal, and other movie studios, wanted: A share of every media player that is being sold. Apparently they were quick to act.

Before you judge the article by looking at the title read on and you might understand why I suggest that no one buys a Zune. It has nothing to do because it is produced by Microsoft – I really do not care about that. It also has nothing to do with the features or hardware [...]

The guys at techdirt.com are reporting that the RIAA dropped to cases recently where the defendant claimed that it was not him using the IP to download copyrighted files. The only evidence the RIAA lawyers can gather when opening a case is the IP address that did the download. Every IP address in use can be traced back to a person who was given that IP at the time of the downloads.

Nonsense. That was my thought when I first read the articles ” Music industry demands the right to sue ISPs” from the Independent Online Edition and “Indie Labels want copyright shift” from the BBC Online. Several trade organisations including the Association of Independent Music (AIM), the Musicians’ Union and the MCPS-PRS Alliance proposed that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should be liable for illegal filesharing by their users. (which means that it would be possible to sue ISPs because of this liability)

The Music Industry (from now on only called MI) is putting a lot of pressure on the consumers. They release copy protected media but fail to realise that this is a punishment for the people who buy music. Even if you don´t download music from the internet you most likely know sources where to get that music for free, without DRM and in high quality. The commercial pirates as well don´t care about copy protection.

That´s at least what the RIAA is saying according to an article posted at the electronic frontier foundations deeplinks subsite.

Good news for the first real post on the new server. It seems that more and more artists are beginning to take a stance against the practice of major music industry players like Sony BMG. Well known bands like Foo Fighters and The Dave Matthew´s Band already spoke out against selling copy protected music CDs to consumers.

I wrote an article about living without the music industry a month ago. In this article I added some good sites that offered free musik downloads. Lots of people replied to this article and added more sites that they used to get free music. Free, meaning free of charges and free to download without breaking the law.

I know, its a rather long title but it contains important information for everyone living in the European Union. A parliamentary committee decided to approve a plan to force communication providers (like your ISP) to retain customer data for up to one year. This plan will be voted on soon by the European Council.

Well this is no big news to the internet community. We, more than everyone else, are keen on using new media devices and like to be among the first when it comes to technology in general. A survey among canadian music retailers now found out what we actually now for a very long time: Copy protection is bad for business. Customers are more frequently than before returning cds which they could not play in their personal computer or copy to their mobile player. Retailers also observe that customers tend to put cds down when they spot the copy protected logo.