Check out this blurb from Slashdot where our friend Hillary gets creamed at a college debate… To quote the blurb …. “Oxford University Students’ Union had a debate last Thursday, titled This House believes that ‘the free music mentality is a threat to the future of music.’. Ordinarily, not too exciting, but since it is [...]

New extra tool for WinMX client with SpeedUp option for free! More info: Sharepoint

For those of us that are users of decentralised networks such as FastTrack and Gnutella the words ‘latest US movies’ and ‘DivX’ go hand in hand. Sites such as FastTrack Movies and ShareReactor provide comprehensive catalogues of films that are available through software such a KaZaA with Sig2Dat. For the more adventurous who venture into [...]

It seems that Sharman Networks have released a new version of KaZaA media desktop which is not mentioned anywhere on the KaZaA website. Until now there is no knowledge of what’s new, however claims have been made that this version now blocks Participation Level Hacking. Get it if you wish from the KaZaA website or [...]

Download the latest Bearshare Beta here. The verison history is also avaible. This verison has numerous improvements from a new Library for file management, also improvements to file transfers and a new chat system. The betas are free with no bundled products, if you find any bugs please post any details especially how to reproduce [...]

Rosen and the RIAA respond to Janis Ian’s commentary on file sharing, recently published in USA Today. “Janis Ian’s USA TODAY column (Oct 23rd, “Music industry spins falsehood”) so blatantly mischaracterizes both the RIAA position as well as that of most record company executives that I know on several different issues that a response is [...]

eMule is an opensourced eDonkey network cilent. And here are the major changes in this version: Unk: Sorting the server list now supports dynamic ips. Sorting by description works better. All sorts are no longer case sensitive. Unk: Added some network statistics. Merkur: Fixed several bugs (preview, high cpu load when sharing many files, wrong [...]

“I don’t think there’s a single movie that can survive on box office gross alone; it just doesn’t exist anymore,” says McCallum. “A theatrical gross can’t hack it anymore, and the business is barely surviving right now. This is the biggest potential growth area that we have. Studios need it, or they’re gone. They’re on [...]

Today on the Lycos 50 here, there is a short article by Aaron Schatz regarding the top P2p file-searches through the search engine Lycos. The story is obviously written by a man that knows very little about P2P progams, but it is interesting in the fact that it has a list of the current top [...]

In recent years, intellectual property holders have expanded their efforts to deep linking and metatags. Now they’re pursuing search services, pay-for-play sites and Web libraries. Last month, the Church of Scientology sent a letter to the Internet Archive, persuading the site to pull down archived pages that were critical of the church’s beliefs. Copyright holders [...]

“Technology companies Macrovision and Websense are teaming up to root out illegal MP3s, movies, games and other copyrighted material on employees’ work computers. The partnership is part of a new push by Web filtering company Websense to give employers tight control over exactly what happens on their employees’ computers. Its scope ranges from disabling peer-to-peer [...]

“Record companies and movie studios are turning an anti-piracy spotlight on corporate America, sending a letter to top CEOs this week warning of illegal file trading going on at “a surprising number of companies.” Read More

A shortened version of Janis Ian’s article The Internet Debacle about file sharing appeared in the US national newspaper USAToday. Most of us have already seen this article, but it’s nice to see the reasons why file sharing is good for artists get some national exposure.

XNap is a pure java file sharing client licensed under the GNU Public License. It provides a modern Swing based user interface and console support that will run nicely on every platform with a recent JRE or JDK (1.3 or higher). Features XNap * plugin architecture * supported protocols: OpenNap, giFT (currently broken), gnutella (cvs [...]

“It’s all over the Web: Whitney Houston’s new album, Just Whitney… It was leaked in its entirety sometime over the weekend to lots of Web sites and downloading services. It can be burned onto CDs, distributed for free and will likely turn up on street corners before the end of this week. The record industry, [...]

If you gleefully read last weeks story about the majors having to pay a $138 million fine for price fixing CDs, then the last laugh may be on you. If you’re an artist or songwriter already bemoaning the fact that royalties are hard to come by in major label deals, then the Federal Trade Commission [...]

According to John Healey of the LA Times, Microsoft is distributing videos showcasing the “improved video quality” of its new WMP9 via the P2P Application Kazaa. These videos are distributed on the network via Altnet, “a Los Angeles-based company that uses Microsoft’s digital-rights-management software to place electronic locks on the songs and videos it distributes. [...]

PeerCast 0.115A was released today. This is an important upgrade, adding vastly improved message routing efficiency and bandwidth management. All existing users are advised to upgrade to this version as quickly as possibly. Download: Right here. (Windows and Linux, as usual.)

Despite their cries of piracy, file trading is not what the record industry fears. What they fear is competition, something the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) figured out with regard to the Internet long before they ever took Napster to trial. The Internet has lowered the barriers of entry for Netizens by serving as [...]

WinMX v3.31 is now available. This minor upgrade fixes several small problems with the previous version. WinMX allows you to connect, download, and share files with MILLIONS of other users through the decentralized WinMX Peer Network. Once WinMX is installed, you’ll have access to one of the largest and most diverse networks of shared media [...]