Interesting news/reviews/deals from the portable audio market
File-Sharing winners and losers of 2005: good wrap-up; BitTorrent, Apple (those MP3s end up in iPods) and the open-source P2P apps make the winners list. The RIAA (so much money wasted on lawsuits), Sony BMG (cf. rootkit), KaZaA (had to close down), and Grokster (forced to shut down too) are sitting on the opposite [...]
How couldn’t it be with almost 20M tracks sold? The previous record was 9.5M, and it happened just a week earlier. According to Billboard’s report:
A look inside the numbers shows just how unprecedented a week it was for the download business:
Before the week ending January 1, 2006, the record for the most downloads sold in [...]
France may allow downloading of copyrighted content for private use: “The Association of Audionauts isn’t suggesting that copyright holders go without compensation [...] It supports pairing the amendment’s text with a royalty tax collected from Internet service providers. Those companies would likely raise the money by levying a monthly fee-say, 2 to 5 euros-on customers [...]
From the “this has got to be comedy” department: Why you shouldn’t download music from the internets (or is it “cyberspace”?): “Every illicit music recording your child downloads from the network is a violation of copyright law, and every illicit copy made from his computer hard drive is a violation of U.S. law, even if [...]
Magnatune to distribute a Weedshare-enhanced version of its catalog via LimeWire’s LimeClick P2P network? Weedshare means you can trade the songs you buy with others, and when those others buy them too, two things happen: (a) DRM restrctions for’em are waved, (b) you get a cut of the sale.
“Sony, I download your music”.
I2hub says bye-bye too: if you visit their site you’ll see a “Remember i2hub.com” picture, followed by a “R.I.P.” message. Seems like the superfast P2P service enjoyed by college students finally conformed to RIAA’s cease-and-desist letter. It joins Grokster, WinMX and several others.
Bertelsmann is to launch Gnab later this year, a platform that will allow the distribution of music and movies. If I’m reading the article correctly, there will be two parts in Gnab—whose ridiculous name comes by reversing ‘bang’, by the way—: a centralized server that will handle all the evil DRM’ing of the available content, [...]