“Worldwide portable digital music player unit shipments will grow from 2.4 million in 2000 to over 9 million in 2005″. That from a report released yesterday by Cahners In-Stat showing that the digital music player industry will triple its market foothold over the next four years.

A News.com report talks about the new Harry Potter movie and how there are fake copies circulating around on Morpheus and LimeWire.

Wired has a story about Aimster’s new subscription service called Club Aimster which promises quicker connections and downloads for those who pay the 5 bucks a month. I doubt many people will sign up.

Recent news about LimeWire bundling Adware/Spyware with the latest release (1.8) has started a Spyware backlash among many gnutella/LimeWire users. LimeWire contends that “we need to pay developer’s salaries–like mine–to keep driving innovation on the Gnutella network.

When the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) proposed SoundExchange, a new agency they set up to collect royalty fees for digital broadcasts under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), artists were up in arms.

Check out Fat Chuck’s list of protected CDs that “can’t be played on PCs or ripped.” Will this CD really play on my equipment?“. Visit CDFreaks.

Just released file sharing add-on for MSN Messenger. Share files with MSN contacts with drap/drop functionality. Browse remote file shares and setup read/write/delete access control to users own private folders. A public folder allows a complete anonymous FTP server to be hosted.

Want a web browser with the speed of Internet Explorer, and the configurability of Mozilla. Then you should check out K-Meleon (it’s for Windows only, Galeon would be the Linux/Unix alternative).

Blubster is the new way to share music over the internet. With a decentralized design, we aim to create an online community for safely sharing and downloading your favorite music.

Wired News said in a news article just recently that “P2P fans predict rebound”… well in my own opinion I really don’t think P2P was ever dieing. P2P is going strong in wake of an economic downturn and no one single lawsuit or tech stock slide is going to stop it.

I guess all things come to an end. LimeWire 1.8 comes loaded with some of our favorite SPYWARE! Also, don’t try to delete the garbage with Ad-Aware, it just causes LimeWire not to work at all. I suggest sticking with LimeWire 1.7 or get on over to Xolox.

SongSpy is new and has a refreshing look with it’s recent version 2.0 beta, it also has a a good amount of users as well as shared files, but with it’s installation comes a dirty little deed it would rather no one talk about or figure out how to disable.

Hilary Rosen, CEO of the RIAA, recently addressed the P2P community at the O’Reilly P2P Conference. Read her full speech in .pdf format here. She makes some good points, but I was too busy listening to mp3s to really pay attention.

Came across this beta of an MP3 ticker while surfing. MP3, video, and photo files are scrolled across the ticker, offering suggestions for those who need some ideas on what new music to check out.

A Cnet News.com report says “The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which has represented hackers, cryptographers and computer scientists in its push for digital rights, agreed to defend MusicCity against copyright infringement charges by movie studios and record labels.

A Brad King Wired report says “EMI Recorded Music to offer a limited selection of videos from its Priority Records label through the Gnutella network.” It goes on to say “The catch is that the files come with embedded links to online record outlets and advertisers.

A class project for a bunch of bright students at Berkeley produced Gnutellavision, a “bright” way to view the gnutella Network. On the site you can download a short .avi that shows Gnutellavision in action.

Another News.com report on the popularity of “Napster Alternatives”. “Consulting firm Webnoize said Monday that the number of digital music files downloaded using Kazaa, MusicCity and Grokster jumped 20 percent, increasing to 1.81 billion in October from 1.

Great news for all you open source LimeWire fans, LimeWire 1.8 beta has been released. New features include a new media player and improved file searching (metadata, XML, ID3 tags, etc). Post your thoughts on LimeWire 1.8 beta in the LimeWire forum or download LimeWire 1.8.

Shift.com just ran a story about how dencentralized servers and decentralized wars are incredibly hard to fight, if you’re the opposition.