iLounge

The survey also notes that enthusiasm for downloading audio files has increased significantly in the past several months, with the proportion of Americans who have downloaded a music or MP3 file growing from 26% in December 2002 to 30% in April 2003.”

Napster failed because it was determined by the courts to violate intellectual property rights and because it did not have a successful business model, or any business model for that matter.  Any successor to Napster must be both legal (if barely) and profitable. [...]

Snapster is all about ownership. Snapster will be a company that buys at retail one copy of every CD on the market.  Figure 100,000 CDs at $14 each requires $1.4 million.  Snapster will also be a download service with central servers capable of millions of transactions per day.  Figure $100,000 for the download system and bandwidth for one year.  Throw in $100,000 for marketing and $400,000 for legal fees and the startup capital required for the business is $2 million.”

Here’s another example: BuyMusic.com sets strict limits on what you can do with the songs you buy. Most are bound to a single PC, so you’re only allowed to listen on one computer, while every song you buy at iTMS can be played on up to three Macs. [...]

I can’t recommend BuyMusic.com to anyone on any platform. Mac users should avoid it. And Windows users will be better off waiting for iTunes for Windows, available later this year.”

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 [url=http://www.eff.org."]http://www.eff.org.”[/url]

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.”

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

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.”

In truth, opposition makes little sense. Even some execs from the biggest labels have signed on to iTunes. Says Universal Music Group CEO Doug Morris, one of the album format’s inventors: ‘iTunes is pushing us into the future of how music is produced and consumed.’”

Like the iTunes Music Store, Buy.com will sell individual music tracks without collecting an up-front monthly subscription fee; even though it has yet to secure licensed music from all five major record labels, knowledgeable sources say.”

Neither developer released any official statement explaining the addition of the new features designed to defeat the RIAA’s scanning efforts, which the agency reportedly began at the beginning of this month in an attempt to discover which users are illegally sharing copyrighted files. Once the IP addresses are matched to individual users, the agency will begin filing copyright infringement lawsuits this fall.”

Theoretically, you could. But the RIAA says it is suing file swappers who have consistently trade large amounts. 

It recently took action against a college student in Michigan who ran a network offering more than 650,000 files - the equivalent of more than 43,000 albums. They have chased other users who have again uploaded thousands of files.”