iLounge

“Online swappers wondering whether their names are on the record industry’s hit list can check online to see if they’re among 871 whose identities were subpoenaed in the first step of unprecedented mass legal action to stem Net piracy. [...]

The U.S. District Court’s Web site (ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov) is searchable, though users must first apply for an account; confirmation comes a week later in the mail, and there are fees for documents. The Electronic Frontier Foundation may offer quicker action: The activist group hopes to soon let the public check the same information through www.eff.org.”

“A new Internet music download site for PCs debuting Tuesday boasts the cheapest per-song rates yet but many of the same restrictions on copying that have stymied wider use of other music services.

Although online retailer BuyMusic.com will offer a catalog of more than 300,000 songs from the five major record labels, users of the service will not necessarily have the freedom afforded customers of Apple Inc.‘s iTunes service to transfer the music purchased to multiple computers and portable devices, or to burn it to compact discs. [...]

BuyMusic is charging 70 cents for individual song downloads—9 cents lower than MusicNow, which previously had the lowest per song price. It’s also undercutting competitors’ price for a full album download at $7.95. The iTunes’ service charges $9.99 for most full albums.”

“The Deal
You keep all the rights to your music.
You just lend us the right to be your digital distributor: to get your music to legitimate music services like Apple iTunes, Listen.com, and more.”

“Record sales are down, music piracy is up and the pop charts are at an all time low. When piracy threatened profits, the record industry destroyed Napster but created a void into which Kazaa has stepped with the ultimate weapon of mass distribution: peer-to-peer file-sharing.

Yet music is more important now than it has ever been.

Freed from the living room, it exists on your computer, in your car, in your pocket, at work, on TV, in shops, in bars, in clubs.

It’s everywhere. Music is not dying, it’s just going through the biggest revolution since Woodstock.
Do you have the kit to make the most of it?”

“The pop album made its way through the 20th century by staying adaptable, transforming itself from analog grooves to digital bits. But can the notion of an album — a collection of songs sold as a single unit, to be heard in a certain sequence — survive the Internet?

That question has been raised more insistently since Apple Computers started its iTunes store, where songs can be downloaded for 99 cents and complete albums for $9.99. Apple recently announced that 6.5 million songs have been downloaded since the store opened on April 28, fewer than half of them as part of albums. Its competition, Buy.com’s buymusic.com, is expected to announce its opening on Tuesday, selling downloads for the much more widely used Windows operating system.”

“The Recording Industry Association of America said it has sent cease-and-desist letters to five people whom it suspects of illegally offering massive amounts of copyrighted music through peer-to-peer networks. 

The RIAA learned of the swappers’ identities after a protracted legal battle with Verizon Communications, which unsuccessfully fought attempts to unmask its subscribers, citing concerns about privacy and legal liability.”

“The music industry has won at least 871 federal subpoenas against computer users suspected of illegally sharing music files on the Internet, with roughly 75 new subpoenas being approved each day, U.S. court officials said Friday.

The effort represents early steps in the music industry’s contentious plan to file civil lawsuits aimed at crippling online piracy.”

“A new bill was proposed Wednesday that would send a person to jail for five years and fine them for $250,000 for uploading just one file to a peer-to-peer network.

The bill was introduced by representatives John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and Howard Berman (D-Calif.).

The bill, called the Author, Consumer and Computer Owner Protection and Security Act of 2003 would allocate more money to the justice department to investigate copyright crimes and would also enable information sharing between countries to help in copyright enforcement abroad.

The bill states that uploading a single file of copyright content qualifies as a felony.”

“Apple’s iTunes Music Store could capture 20 per cent of the US paid-music download market, claims Needham’s analyst Charles Wolf in a report this week.

Wolf believes Apple could generate annual revenues of $600 million through its store, and that this figure could increase. He describes the Store as ‘providing an arguably superior customer experience.’”