When the music industry began suing song swappers in September, Kazaa was characteristically quiet. It is the most popular peer-to-peer program, enabling users to swap free songs, movies and games that owners contend should be paid for. Nearly 300 million copies of the software have been acquired at Cnet’s Download.com, and Kazaa says it has [...]

LOS ANGELES – The recording industry, it seems, doesn’t hate absolutely everything about illicit music downloading. Despite their legal blitzkrieg to stop online song-swapping, many music labels are benefiting from — and paying for — intelligence on the latest trends in Internet trading. It’s a rich digital trove these recording executives are mining. By following [...]

It’s quite the ironic twist on the current state of tunes: Major labels hacking jobs and budgets just to stay afloat while tiny independent labels and artists with pea-sized bankrolls are seeing increased sales, exposure and critical recognition. Granted, this success isn’t what most dreamed of while air-guitaring atop their childhood beds. There are no million-dollar [...]

New legislation delivers jail time to anyone offering pirated films via a shared drive, but what if a user isn’t aware they’re sharing pirated films? As we mentioned on Thursday, the Artists’ Rights and Theft Prevention Act is the latest batch of legislation designed to help thwart what the MPAA views as a looming film [...]

WASHINGTON – If you acquire and swap a movie or music online ahead of the official release date for the film or the music, you could be going to the hoosegow for five years, if a bill introduced November 13 in the U.S. Senate goes all the way to President Bush’s signature.Sponsored by Sens. Dianne [...]

Changes:  – 0.303 2003-11-14 –* Fixed reversed free and open slots in search results (oops…=)…upgrade or you’re likely to be banned!  – 0.302 2003-11-14 –* Added a small menu to the tray icon (thanks orkblutt)* Added port to hub log files* Some fixes so that client will compile better under linux (thanks christer palm, he’s [...]

Internet media company CNET Networks announced Friday that it is acquiring the assets of online music distributor MP3.com. San Francisco-based CNET Networks said it has signed a definitive agreement with Vivendi Universal Net USA to acquire the assets of MP3.com, with the deal scheduled to close in December. Terms of the transaction were not released. [...]

The FCC said Thursday that it is adding 255 megahertz of spectrum in the 5 gigahertz range–an increase of 80 percent–for devices that use unlicensed radio frequencies. Making this additional spectrum available will ensure the continued deployment of unlicensed wireless broadband networks,” Michael Powell, chairman of the FCC, said in a statement. The availability of [...]

DICE is hybrid server to host IRC clients and opennap clients, and has capability of web server, on Windows 2000/Windows XP/Windows Server 2003. DICE version 0.82 was released (2003/11/13) What’s new + Fixed bug in session-pool expansion + Fixed synchronization bug in memory allocator + Added reserved nickname list + Fixed message-flood detection to work [...]

A forthcoming copyright bill backed by key U.S. senators would place file swappers in prison for up to three years if they have a copy of even one prerelease movie in their shared folders. In addition to the prison term, the Artists’ Rights and Theft Prevention Act would punish making such movies available on a [...]

The Australian company has been scrambling for months to find a way to convince record companies and movie studios that it is sincerely interested in becoming a legitimate, licensed distributor of mainstream entertainment content. It hasn’t yet been successful–Sharman and Kazaa, its file-swapping software, are still the target of lawsuits from the entertainment companies. Sharman [...]

Compact discs could be history within five years, superseded by a new generation of fingertip-sized memory tabs with no moving parts. Scientists say each paper-thin device could store more than a gigabyte of information – equivalent to 1,000 high quality images – in one cubic centimetre of space. Experts have developed the technology by melding [...]

Altnet, a company that distributes files legally through Kazaa and other peer-to-peer services, has sent legal threats to nine companies that monitor or meddle with file-trading networks, accusing them of violating its patent rights. The cease-and-desist orders are the first legal use of a patent Altnet unveiled last June , under which it claims to [...]

Jealous that the RIAA gets to sue everyone for piracy, BMI is sending their own type of litigious message; they sued an Indianapolis Karaoke bar for not paying them licensing fees for the pop tunes that are part of the karaoke juke box in the bar.The lawsuit claims that Parrotheads Bar and Grill failed to [...]

Darin Linnman, a Microsoft spokesman, said that the company plans to add the pop-up blocking feature to an updated version of Explorer with Service Pack 2 (SP2) when it’s released in the first half of next year. But one caveat, he said, is that Microsoft will be gathering customer feedback that will be weighed as [...]

Penn State University, the RIAA and Napster – the axis of spiel – continue to defy the laws of common sense and economics that our country once held dear. Penn State trustee and RIAA legal counsel Barry Robinson has denied having anything to do with the university’s recent adoption of the Napster music service. Robinson [...]

On a Monday morning in late September, just weeks after the music industry hit hundreds of file-sharing consumers with lawsuits, News Corp. Chairman Peter Chernin held an anti-piracy summit meeting in his executive conference room on the studio lot. On hand was an impressive array of top Hollywood studio brass, including Viacom Entertainment Group Chairman [...]

Sony Music, home to such artists as Beyonce Knowles and Bruce Springsteen, said Monday it plans to introduce new CD technology in Germany that prevents users from copying songs to file-sharing sites, but allows them to make copies for their personal use. The record industry blames its recent sales slump on file-sharing services like Kazaa, [...]

It could now be illegal to make a compilation of your favourite tunes under new copyright laws – and soon even tougher measures could be introduced. A mix disk for the car may be illegal What we can do with the CDs, DVDs and videos lining our shelves has changed this month – the law [...]

This version fixes a bug in the previous build that wasn’t allowing people to download. Download now