Within a month of its launch at Ball State University, 6,421 students went online to download music from the Ruckus server. However, some students are abusing the system by stripping files of their anti-piracy coding. The software Ruckus uses is Windows-based and is not compatible with old Apple technology that doesn’t run both the MAC [...]

Studio obstructionism, and lingering tech hurdles, keep Apple’s new online movie store from repeating the success of iTunes. IT’S A FAMILIAR story line in Hollywood: An innovative high-tech company unveils a revolutionary new way to sell entertainment, only to be waylaid by giant retailers that don’t want to disturb the old ways. This kind of [...]

Customers picking up the latest MP3 players this fall are getting much more than just a device. Increasingly, they’re getting free music as well. To set themselves apart from the pack, manufacturers are preloading content into their players to increase sales–and the music industry is only too happy to oblige. The Zune from Microsoft, expected [...]

THE recording industry has spent the last several years picking off one peer-to-peer file-sharing company after another: Napster, Kazaa, Grokster and several others have settled lawsuits, been acquired or agreed to stop allowing users to share copyrighted music. But LimeWire is standing firm. In response to the industry’s lawsuit against it last month, the company [...]

iTunes eat your heart out, for years now we’ve been told that the online music store (aka limewire or anyother P2P provider) offered us something we simply couldn’t get in a music store: convenience, price and choice. Well, now music front runner Beck is has come up with somthing that gives us something we can’t [...]

Peer-to-peer delivery was a major theme at a London conference on digital distribution for film and television. While technology can provide low-cost global distribution, issues of rights, licensing and regulation remain as complex as ever. Kevin Baughan, head of technology strategy at UK cable operator NTL:Telewest described an experiment to accelerate downloads using a peer-to-peer [...]

A 29-year-old man from Västerås in central Sweden suspected of sharing files from his computer was today acquitted by Svea Court of Appeal. Last year the man was the first person in Sweden to be convicted of file-sharing, having been charged with making the Swedish film Hip Hip Hora available for download from the internet. [...]

Amsterdam has the world’s busiest Internet exchange, thanks to nuclear physicists and mathematicians who in the 1980s connected their network needs with the academic belief that knowledge needs to be free. At a time when the neutrality of the Internet is at stake, and Internet service providers (ISPs) are moving to prioritize their premium traffic, [...]

Cachelogic, a network monitoring firm that conducted a worldwide survey of network activity during June 2004, found that BitTorrent accounted for 53 percent of P2P traffic and 35 percent of overall Internet traffic. Seeing this as a good market, Microsoft had been following suit and they jumped on the bandwagon of BitTorrent file-sharing software. In [...]

Imagine if, back in the day, record labels had said to Napster, “Sure, take our stuff,” instead of bringing down the big legal hammer and crushing the pioneering peer-to-peer service. Times have certainly changed. Over the past week, the popular BitTorrent site has posted a short documentary from major-band Death Cab for Cutie, as well [...]