France was one of the first countries to impose laws that require ISP’s terminate the service of users who repeatedly engage in copyright infringement. Under the rules, the entertainment industry tracks offenders and submits infringement claims to a specifically-created government agency named Hadopi. Hadopi then works with ISPs to obtain personal information and send out warning letters or kick people off the Internet. By October, the industry was already making 25,000 requests per day, a daily total they’d like to see at around 50,000. However, according to the Record Labels, Hadopi isn’t sending out warnings fast enough for their liking, only sending out about 2,000 per day.

Techdirt correctly wonders about any kind of accuracy in the claims process when you’re working at that speed:

Think about how many mistakes are being made when you’re sending 50,000 notices per day. Over the course of about five years, the RIAA apparently sued less than 20,000 people and still made a lot of mistakes. US Copyright Group got a lot of attention for accusing a few thousand people of file sharing particular movies and also appears to have made a lot of mistakes. Yet, here, with Hadopi, the labels are accusing 50,000 people per day, and are upset that Hadopi isn’t just rubber stamping all the notices? It appears that the record labels don’t care at all about what happens if they accuse totally innocent people.

Of course the goal of the record labels with any of these campaigns has never been accuracy or fairness. The goal has long been to generate media coverage and create fear, something that’s easier to do with the government’s help. Of course this is all a rather expensive taxpayer and ISP funded game of whack-a-mole, where non-infringing users can easily get caught up in the wash. Meanwhile, France piracy rates remain stable or growing as people simply move to less-watched alternatives like direct downloads.

Link to the original article…

Broadbandreports.com recently noted how ISPs are seriously considering bundling subscription music services like Spotify (or creating their own) for a small additional, optional fee. Spotify, which offers users streaming access to music free with ads or for a monthly fee, is one way the recording industry can shake off the impacts of piracy without resorting to suing children and grandmothers. But Warner Music apparently is having none of it, and according to the BBC, no longer wants to offer its music catalog up for use by free streaming services:

Warner chief executive Edgar Bronfman Jr said: “Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry and as far as Warner Music is concerned will not be licensed. “The ‘get all your music you want for free, and then maybe with a few bells and whistles we can move you to a premium price’ strategy is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future.”

One, Bronfman is pretending that he actually has a choice in the matter, when the labels can either adapt to what their audience wants, or go out of business. Two, Bronfman has ingeniously decided to kill off one of the major user alternatives to music piracy – simply because the avenue doesn’t allow Warner to charge the kind of high music prices they’ve grown to love. Mike Masnick over at Techdirt puts it this way:

You don’t compete with “free” by taking your ball and going home. You don’t compete with “free” by pretending that old artificial scarcities are coming back after the wall has been broken down. You don’t compete with “free” by suing customers. You don’t compete with “free” by shunning those who have business models that work. You compete with free by offering a better product and a better business model. WMG is choosing to go in the other direction. Best of luck to them…

Bingo. Couldn’t have been said better. Warner, RIAA… they all need a wakeup call and see that the “old way” doesn’t work well in these new times.

Link to the original article…

The Pirate Bay crew had already essentially been disbanded, the site dissected, and its remnants sold to a somewhat dubious company that simply wants to turn the site’s visitors into little P2P cash cows.

So an announcement today over at the official Pirate Bay blog that they’re officially shutting down the site’s tracker probably surprises nobody. According to the site, they’re not shutting the site down however – they’ll still annoy the entertainment industry by going trackerless and using the Distributed Hash Table (DHT) for file distribution:

The development of DHT has reached a stage where a tracker is no longer needed to use a torrent. DHT (combined with PEX) is highly effective in finding peers without the need for a centralized service….

Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date.

According to the site, with the use of a more decentralized system of handling tracking (DHT+PEX) and distributions of torrent files (Magnet Links), downtime and outages should be less of a problem. According to a follow up report at Torrent Freak, the site owners are apparently trying to convince other BitTorrent portals to ditch torrents entirely and decentralize, perpetuating the entertainment industry’s game of whack a mole. Sweden’s The Legal has more on how this impacts the site founders’ court case.

Link to the original article…

“We’re approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision,” said Tim Westergren, who founded Pandora. “This is like a last stand for webcasting.”

I’m not one to normally editorialize much; however it seems like something that actually made sense, will probably be looking at closing it’s doors due to licensing fees. The idea… Pandora Music Genome® Project. Sign up, tell the site what music and musicians you happen to like, and it’ll find music and match from other offerings in it’s catalog that you just may like as well.

I’ve had an account for years. And won’t even lie… it’s shaped my taste in music in so many genres where I thought I’d like only one or two in a particular genre. Next thing I know, I have like twenty favorites. And armed with that information, I’d open up iTunes, buy the music that I found on Pandora and go about my day. Even share that knowledge with people around the water cooler, online, et al.

Enter the bad guy(s). Normally I’d just go straight at the fact that the RIAA had created SoundExchange merely to collect royalties from music that’s played on satellite and internet radio. Mind you, there’s no model for collecting royalties for music played over the normal radio at all. And if you were to think about it… it’s the most backwards way of thinking. Internet entities that are willing to work with the RIAA and each of it’s arms – I can’t even keep up, so I’ll just use the RIAA as common term from hereon – that the RIAA possess, it seems like people are getting penalized for having genuinely good ideas and all the RIAA wants to do is capitalize for as long as they can, then shut them down.

Yet… Pandora opened up the doors for new musicians that most people had never heard of. Which in most simple terms… would mean that more sales for those lesser known artists, the ones that the labels don’t exactly allocate advertising to and thus garner less sales might have yet another avenue to be seen and heard.

But no. The RIAA wants it’s money. The same money that the RIAA has collected and yet they “cannot find the artists” to give them the money they owe. Or this is the same RIAA that basically gives the artists about $2.00 out of $20.00 – and the RIAA didn’t create anything. And don’t forget… this is the same RIAA that had about 700mb of e-mails leaked out that detailed on how it would create fake torrents and trackers all to disrupt p2p traffic.

Simply put… RIAA is clearly a dirty organization that has yet to catch up with the fact that it’s poor sales are clearly attributed to the death of the CD single – face it, only one to two good songs are on each music CD released, to find more, it’s rare – and the fact that the distribution model shifted from in-store to online quicker than they were willing to change to… and no DRM will last forever. It’ll be overcome in mere minutes. And here is a pretty legitimate unique idea that for once broadened my personal music tastes instead of hampered it with playing music over and over from artists that a certain label thought should sell well.

Here’s to hoping that Pandora finds a way to continue to exist.

Read more about this situation in a more informational manner over at the Washington Post.

Why? Because the Judge has decided that actually showing evidence of a crime might be a good idea. In response to that ruling, a few weeks ago the MPAA publicly stated that they should be able to collect as much as $150,000 in damages from individuals without any real evidence of wrong doing. Says the MPAA:

Wired’s Threat Level Blog says the RIAA has now filed their response to the Thomas case, and like the MPAA, apparently the organization feels that that concepts like “evidence” and “proof” are somewhat over-rated:

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