Counterfeiting, Not Online Piracy, is the Real Plague of the Music Industry: “Will we see industry/government calling consumers who buy illegitimate CDs or download illegal music files online as supporting terrorism, as happened in US commercials where the connection between the average drug user and terrorists/murderous gangs/organized crime was made?” The mp3 way: The Cop-Chip [...]

I found this program surfing the web and was quite impressed. It’s Splooge 0.0.5.39 BETA. As you can see, it’s in the early stages, and while it’s still very buggy, it has quite a lot of potential in the P2P world. For more information and download, go to the official Splooge website.

“Add music-player software to the list of technologies the European Union is considering regulating in the name of privacy. Because many European nations have strict privacy laws, the EU is trying to hammer out policies to deal with the numerous new products that share people’s personal information–even if the data is only collected and stored [...]

Richard Menta writes, “I have come to the conclusion that the music industry must be ruled by organized crime because everything they do is a shakedown. One of the most prominent examples is for the industry to distort the notion of you buy a CD by claiming that all this time you have been only [...]

The CD sales slump has forces labels to lower prices for new releases. It looks like lables might finally be listening to consumers who have been saying that CD’s are overpriced for some time. A series of different price models are been tested at the moment. Read more on this story here

Coming very shortly after the release of 3.1, Frontcode have released WinMX 3.2. From the homepage: This new version contains several major and minor bug fixes and a more efficient network. Download it here.

Another Lawsuit has been filled against copy-protection but this lawsuit is the first to tackle the issue on an industry-wide basis . The lawsuit, filled in California by Milberg, Weiss, Bershad, Hynes & Lerach on behalf on 2 consumers is been taken against all 5 major record companies. The RIAA have called the lawsuit “frivolous”. [...]

File Spree v1.2.3 BETA has been released. It fixes many bugs, and adds a few new features. Here is the changelog: + Transfer Rates are Now Averaged + Estimated Time Added to the Transfers + Instant Message Invisible Fix + Web Browser Bar Crash Fix + IP’s Resolved by Adapters (Attempts to Resolve IP’s Without [...]

Those of us that started using the Internet 10 years ago know what all the initial hype was all about. It wasn’t necessarily e-commerce, it was the creation of a techno-library accessible to all with information on all topics and all media forms available freely. But I think it’s obvious that the creators of the [...]

Think about the idea of televisions becoming Napster-like file servers. The technology should be simple since CATV systems are piping net access into millions of homes. Click here to read Stewart Alsop’s (a director of TiVo) thoughts on this idea, posted by Fortune Magazine.

“Traditional music pirates, who burned and sold bootlegs long before the days of Napster, continue to cost the music industry billions of dollars every year. But the same technologies that pirates use to steal — file sharing, CD-burning and computers — are driving legitimate sales by consumers, according to research from market research company Ipsos-Reid [...]

Any tech review article that starts of with, “Internet music service misses a few key notes,” but later states, “despite its glaring gaps, Rhapsody’s interface for sampling, storing and playing music on the Web is among the best I have seen,” is bound to be a little confusing. To me, it simply says, the idea [...]

New p2p app BrendanLand gives each user a piece of land to customize. Users can walk around and interact with each other. The site also contains some screen shots and good technical details. However, you must email the owners before you can download the software so that they can manage the size of the community. [...]

Craig Matusinski posted this in the latest issue of the Detritus hardrock e-newsletter: “Well, I guess it had to happen, but I’m still shocked. It’s no longer just the thoroughly evil major labels fucking over consumers with this new CD copy protection scheme. One of our little melodic rock labels, newbie Atenzia Records, has decided [...]

“In the swirling debate over digital rights and intellectual property, Bram Cohen ran into a surprising discovery as he developed a new software program in the past year: It’s an uphill battle to convince people that individuals can make their work freely available over the Internet, available for folks to use however they want without [...]

“MacOpener allows Windows users to open files created on a Macintosh … the updated MacOpener requires a third-party product, such as TrentSoft‘s EphPod, to use all the features. Used alone, the MacOpener software can mount iPod as an external hard drive to which files can be transferred. But with EphPod, consumers also can manage and [...]

“An economist says music piracy should be hurting the recording industry, but it isn’t — and he doesn’t know why … On May 15, the Cato Institute published a new paper by Liebowitz, ‘Policing Pirates in the Networked Age,’ that takes a comprehensive look at the history of the recording industry’s battle with piracy. In [...]

“Young, male, wired, music rippers … A digitized demographic that’s turning the music industry on its head. Illegal downloads and CD bootlegging were the reasons Eminem’s record label released his new album ‘The Eminem Show’ nine days early in late May. The recording industry is scrambling to adjust to the new digital marketplace. Eminem is [...]

“Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment plan to cut prices for digital music downloads and add new features, including CD burning and the ability to transfer songs to portable devices. The moves are aimed at reaching out to consumers who have continued to flock to free file-swapping services while turning a cold shoulder to [...]

On June 10th, LanShine corp released their newest software: UniShare preview edition v0.01 build 1335. Although it is still a preview edition, it works smoothly. UniShare is a full free P2P program and supports many P2P file-share network protocols. Now OpenNap protocol, Napster protocol(old), Gnutella protocol, and WinMx protocol are supported. And UniShare also has [...]