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RIAA’s Legal Blitz Begins
From Wired: The music industry began a promised wave of lawsuits on Monday, suing 261 people it accuses of illegally distributing about 1,000 copyright music files each, using peer-to-peer networks. FOXNews.com adds an “innocent victim” scenario by pointing out that a 12-year-old New York City girl is among these “pirates”. Meanwhile, the EFF says individuals…
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Testing Ownership of Digital Music
Let’s pretend we are deeply naive for a second: when you buy a CD, are you buying the music it contains? Or an aesthetically value-added material object that enables you to access the music? i-Tunes (and other online digital music outlets) would prefer us to believe the former, and the price differential between ludicrously expensive…
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George’s i-tunes track reaches $15,000 on ebay
George’s iTunes m4p has reached a bid of $15,000 on ebay. Either there are a lot of wingnuts putting in bids for fun, or someone is really really committed to some fuzzily formulated anti-hegemonic principle or other. Either that, or someone really, really, wants a totally non-unique inferior-quality compressed recording of Double Dutch Bus by…
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Social Capital and Micro-Networks
In The Network is the Market, Ross Mayfield introduces us to the social theory behind Tribe.Net, a friendster-type social network-builder that is just coming out of beta. Like friendster, (but without that whole icky high-school-esque vibe) the idea is to build interconnected nodes of common interests. But unlike friendster, tribe.net is about information flow (classifieds,…
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RIAA tactics revealed
From BBC NEWS: The music industry’s methods of tracking down suspected music pirates have been revealed for the first time. Using digital fingerprints, or “hashes”, investigators say they can tell if an MP3 file was downloaded from an unauthorised service. The industry also tracks “metadata” tags, which provide hidden clues about how files were created.…
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Dyke to open up BBC archive
I’ll leave the puns about the title alone and just send hurrahs to the BBC for this. The BBC has announced plans to give the public full access to all the corporation’s programme archives, that is, digitally – the service, the BBC Creative Archive will be available to everyone not trying to turn a dollar…
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iTunes iSbogus
Again, sonic proliferation as strategy from “below”: check out the radically snazzy Down Hill Battle’s (as in, the RIAA is fighting an uphill one!) stylish manifesto: iTunes iSbogus An excerpt from the warcry: Steve Jobs says the Music Store is “revolutionizing music.” What an impoverished imagination he has. An expensive jukebox and a long-playing walkman…
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Open content and value creation
First Monday has an article by Magnus Cedergren that is related to the stuff about sonic proliferation I have been writing about lately. The abstract of his paper Open content and value creation says: “The borderline between production and consumption of media content is not so clear as it used to be. For example on…
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Napster Bits
My prize for cleverest marketing strategy of the year so far: Napster hints at re-entry with an unfolding series of shockwave animations, in which Napster is anthropomorphized as a funky, peace-loving little dude who is all about the music. Baddies of course=suits, money, the RIAA. Jump in now at episode 4.
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Illegal Art
Amidst all the hype, all the gasbagging, all the soapboxing, and all the mind-numbing statistics, here is a really refreshing intervention into the explosive juggernaut that is the IP debate: an art exhibition called illegal art, explained thusly:The laws governing “intellectual property” have grown so expansive in recent years that artists need legal experts to…