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.

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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.

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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.

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I watched the movie Crank last saturday in a cinema near my hometown, it was a great movie but something that happened before the film really annoyed the hell out of me. Why the hell are they showing clips that it is illegal to record the movie with cams and that you will face jail time for it before the movie starts ? How likely is it that someone who has the intention to record the movie is actually in there ? How much more likely is it that many visitors who paid lots of money to watch the movie are pretty annoyed by this message ?

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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.

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