Wired.com’s homepage was loaded with copyright-related headlines this Friday morning: From the Reporter’s Notebook department, “The DMCA Is the Toast of D.C.“: “Despite broad opposition to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it’s major content-holders who have Washington’s ear, and they think the law is just swell. Declan McCullagh reports from Washington… [more]” From the Hollywood [...]

“Napster was absolutely a groundbreaking technology that changed the way consumers listened to music, discovered music, and interacted with music,” said Stacey Herron, an entertainment and media analyst with Jupiter Research in New York. “Napster so fundamentally changed the way people interacted with music that there’s no turning back.” I think everyone can say ‘Thank [...]

“Music disc copyright protection schemes such a Cactus Data Shield 100/200 and KeyAudio can be circumvented using tools as basic as marker pens and electrical tape, crackers have discovered. The Blue Peter-style hack, which was first unearthed by a reader of chip.de works by covering up the outer ring of a copyright protected audio disc. [...]

“Compulsory licensing is political dynamite from the point of view of the record companies and other copyright holders. If a compulsory license for file swapping were passed, record companies and potentially movie studios would be forced to allow anyone who asked–or who pushed a download button–to use their works on demand.” This is a serious [...]

With the WinMX 3.1 release, Gator2MX utility has been released in its 1.2 version. Gator2MX is a GPL program used for adding easily opennap servers (napigator ones) to WinMX. Among new (and old) features are: Uses hostnames rather than IP addresses. Groups servers by network to avoid multiple log-in problems. Attempts to correctly place servers [...]

A Slashdot reader posted this interview transcript, “Siva Vaidhyanathan On Copyrights and Wrongs.” Vaidhyanathan is the author of “Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity” and is currently working on another book tentatively titled “The Anarchist in the Library.” The interview talks about the DMCA and the Consumer Broadband [...]

A post by internal betatester MrMario64 in the eDonkey forums reveals some new inside info about what we can expect from the upcoming eDonkey release. I really hate some people that can only bitch and write only negative shit…. Probably one of the reasons why it is not very encouraging to post in here… but [...]

The FastTrack network, with about 1.8 million users online at any time in the last weeks, suddenly dropped to about 400 thousand users sometime around yesterday or today, as reported on all the clients’ status bars (KaZaA, Grokster and KaZaA Lite). Reports are flooding in forums like FastTrack Central, DSLReports and Napsterites. What happened? Speculations [...]

I found this and thought it might be of intrest to all you Morpheus fans.

From News.com: “Sony Music Entertainment, one of the companies that sued Scour Exchange to the brink of extinction, will now use the service to promote some of its artists. CenterSpan Communications, which bought Scour’s assets in bankruptcy court last year, said Tuesday that Sony would promote music from Macy Gray, B2K, Five for Fighting, Flickerstick, [...]

From News.com: “Napster Chief Executive Konrad Hilbers is stepping down, capping months of unsuccessful negotiations to sell the file-swapping company and settle lawsuits hanging over its business. The company may also be close to filing for bankruptcy, according to at least one source close to Napster. In an e-mail to the company Tuesday, Hilbers confirmed [...]

This article says it just may be. I say BULLOCKS and I’m not even in England! When I d/l’d almost every song from Kazaalite most of em looped continuously except for 2 or 3. Be patient and you may find them all. Bullocks

Remember this Zeropaid news item? And that was after this news item about Verizon not wanting to be ISP police. Well, today, “An unlikely alliance of swap-service Kazaa and telephone and Internet giant Verizon is floating a proposal to break the logjam of lawsuits: Computer manufacturers, blank CD makers, ISPs and software firms such as [...]

WinMX V3.1 has been released after almost a year since the last major release. The new version of WinMX is spyware free. From Website WinMX is a FREE file-sharing program like no other. It allows you to simultaneously connect through the decentralized WinMX Peer Networking Protocol AND to many networks based on the OpenNap and [...]

News on the first page of Yahoo news. This is telling us what we already know, but there is an actual quote from Jorge, so I knew you people would enjoy this. Looks like filesharing is unstoppable, as if we didn’t know that already. Read the article right here

Eric and Sounni de Fontenay, founders and editors of the MusicDish Industry e-Journal, are noted RIAA and copy-protection supporters. All you have to do is read a couple of their site’s articles on the subject of copyrights and royalties; the slant is obvious. But in a letter to the music community, the Fontenays reveal their [...]

“Sonicblue Inc. moved on Monday to overturn a court order for it to spy on users of its digital recording devices and share detailed viewing data with major studios and television networks, saying the order would violate privacy rights. Santa Clara-based Sonicblue called the May 2 order from Central District Court Magistrate Charles Eick ‘breathtaking [...]

Wired.com’s “Piracy: The Star Wars Solution” article states, “Star Wars and other larger-than-life movies have given Hollywood the ultimate weapon against digital piracy: They make people want to go to the movie theater. The music industry continues its mighty struggle against online file-sharing networks, but the movie industry has seemingly overcome that battle. Ticket sales [...]

“Fears that the pending European Union Copyright Directive could lead to a European re-run of the Dmitri Sklyarov prosecution were much in evidence during the recent Campaign for Digital Rights mini-conference at London’s City University. But Matthew Rippon, of Ipswich law firm Prettys Solicitors, says such fears are misplaced and that the EUCD will lead [...]

In an article called “A New Direction for Intellectual Property” (free registration required), the New York Times reports, “Perceiving an overly zealous culture of copyright protection, a group of law and technology scholars are setting up Creative Commons, a nonprofit company that will develop ways for artists, writers and others to easily designate their work [...]