p2pnet February 7 news roundup
Hi all:
For the first time since I started p2pnet, I’m deliberately running only one item today – Brittany Kruger’s story.
By way of compensation, below are a few links to interesting (IMHO 
) posts elsewhere.
Cheers!
Jon
Here you go »»»
RIAA lies exposed – The Inquirer
THE RIAA has been outed as a lying toad as it claimed in a letter sent out on December 23rd last year that it was discontinuing lawsuits when in fact, this was simply not the case. Mitch Bainwol’s letter to the Congressional Committees claimed that the Recording Industry Association of America “discontinued initiating new lawsuits in August.” Of course this information was taken as red, yet after a bit of digging around, this was found to be utter tosh. After locating the text of the letter and reading its lies some cases were found to prove the exact opposite ….
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The Answer For Sagging Record Sales? A Government Bail-Out – TripWire
Let’s face it, government bail-outs are just about the trendiest thing since the Snuggie. Even South Korea has jumped onto the bail-out train, and it’s not to help finance companies or automakers or fat guys in suits smoking cigars â they’re giving a boost to their ailing music industry to the tune of $91 million. In times this tough, everyone is looking for a little extra help â even the porn industry, bless their little hearts â but when congress opened its checkbook for the auto industry, it issued an open invitation for begging. It’s like reaching for your wallet while a homeless man is walking through your subway car. You’ve just committed, and there’s a line forming, so you’d better have enough spare change for everyone. So why shouldn’t the music industry be those beggars? South Korea definitely got this one right. The country’s Culture, Sports and Tourism Ministry plans to create a Korean version of the U.S. Billboard Charts, as well as a Grammy-like awards program to put Korean pop music on the global stage. They’re hoping the five-year plan will double the country’s annual sales to 1.7 trillion won (about $1.2 billion) by 2013. The plan also calls for two new concert halls in Seoul, specializing in pop music and offering 4,000 seats total, and a Korean pop culture center in Goyang City, about 25 miles north of Seoul, including a 3,000-seat concert hall.
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MySpace Begins Monetizing Music Videos With Impressive Results – TechCrunch
In an effort to monetize the growing number of music videos on its site, MySpace has just launched a new pilot advertising initiative that places attractive overlays at the bottom of some clips, allowing users to buy the song they’re listening to or immediately jump to the artist’s homepage. The new initiative stems from MySpace’s partnership with Auditude, a content detection and management company that can identify copyrighted content and serve relevant advertising, even on user-submitted video. Now Auditude is applying the technology to music videos, which in the past have largely relied on banner ads and static text links to music stores for monetization.
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Producer’s Track Record as a Label Executive Is Raising Questions – New York Times
Less than two years after Sony Music Entertainment made a daring move by hiring the legendary music producer Rick Rubin to run its Columbia Records label, the company is learning a lesson from baseball: sometimes the best players don’t make the best managers. Sony hired Mr. Rubin â a founder of Def Jam Records who has produced hits for Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Johnny Cash â hoping the appointment would lead to a new business model for the struggling record business. Mr. Rubin has continued his run as a hit producer, for acts within Sony and on other labels, including Warner Music, where he produced a hit Metallica album last year. But Mr. Rubin, in the words of his close friend, the hip-hop mogul and philanthropist Russell Simmons, likes to work at his own pace, and it appears he has done little so far to lift Columbia out of the doldrums that is the contemporary music business.
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Global torrent connections mapped out by The Pirate Bay – Ars Technica
Have you ever wondered how many people around the globe are seeding and leeching torrents? The Pirate Bay, one of the most popular torrent
trackers, has published an interactive map with data for each country, both in terms of an exact percentage of users and how many connections are going through that country at any given time. The statistics may not give a complete picture of P2P activity across the globe, but they do offer some insights into habits of different users. The data points, laid over a Google Map, are shaped and colored depending on how many connections are coming out of each location. For example, as of publication time, about 5.515 percent of all TPB connections are coming from the US, while Canada sits at 2.949 percent and Japan at 6.553 percent. China, which is the only country that gets the little bonfire icon, represents a whopping 34.822 percent of all TPB connections at the moment.
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Get a load of Mr.BS – ezee.se
Although postings on eZee.se have been a little erratic lately due to a few secret back projects we are working on, we have been quite active on forums and discussions/blogs like Jon N’s P2Pnet/TF/Ray B’s RvP/Wired/Ars etc Just a while back we were reading a very very informative article on Ars about the upcoming Tenebaum case, (click the above link it’s worth it and opens up in a new window) when we navigated ourselves to one of the `critics of the Tenenbaums case’ blog from page three of the Ars article, a blog owned by a Mr.Ben Shiffner, whose initials ironically (as you will soon see) are “BS” so we shall henceforth refer to him as Mr.BS. After reading Mr.BS’ post; Ryan (one of the people who work on eZee.se) left a small comment on the BS blog: “Perhaps you prefer the stunts of the RIAA which include suing printers . and dead people?” Surprisingly the comment was approved to be published on the blog and we Ryan and Mr.BS did a little back and forth even more surprisingly Mr.BS stated he had no knowledge of the RIAA suing a person who was dead at the time the alleged `infringement’ occurred, but he still stood by his RIAA pals as closely as possible. Just as things were getting interesting Mr.BS pretty much stopped the discussion dead and refused to publish Ryan’s last comment …
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Last.fm chief fears for future of online radio – The Guardian
Britain’s complicated music royalty system is killing online innovation, according to one of the founders of internet radio service Last.fm. Martin Stiksel, who helped oversee the $280m acquisition of the London-based music recommendation site by American media conglomerate CBS in 2007, told the Guardian that the situation was becoming increasingly problematic.
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Video: Assistive Technology for Band Students – musicedmagic
Assistive Technology Finding ways to help students with disabilities find a meaningful, proud place in a school band has always been one of the most rewarding challenges that a band director might face. Find out how technology allows a student with almost no arm or hand control play euphonium in his high school band program. For a boy named Lukas in Spokane, Washington, playing an instrument in the band was very important, but aside from the challenges that come along with learning any instrument, Lukas had another chip stacked against him. Born with a birth defect that greatly limited the use of his arms, hands, and fingers, most people would think that he would never be able to contribute in any meaningful way to an ensemble. For a long time he was content to just play one or two notes whenever that harmonic came up in the music, but his teachers and friends saw a way to use technology to allow Lukas to play every note on the euphonium without having to flex a single finger. Through the use of a joystick and a mechanical piston device attached to his horn, Lukas was now able to participate in jazz, concert, and even marching band as an active and proud member of the band.
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Hollywood Takes Another Crack At Getting Permission To Break Your DVR – TechDirt
The movie studios and the MPAA have been pushing hard over the last year to get the FCC to let them use “selectable output control” to basically block DVRs from recording certain broadcasts of movies. Their somewhat creative (but totally ridiculous) argument is that this would allow more consumer choice. Now, you might ask how limiting what consumers can do with products they already purchased can possibly allow more consumer choice, but this is where the MPAA tries to play a bit of a jedi mind trick. It claims that if it’s allowed to block recording of movies, then it would add another window to its windowed release program of movies (i.e., theater -> special locations (airplanes/hotels) -> DVD -> cable TV -> network TV). If they can break your DVR, they claim that they’ll also release it to TV before it’s even out on DVD.
February , 2009
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