Month: May 2002

Copyright Office Rejects CARP The Register of Copyrights and the Librarian of Congress have apparently seen what was obvious to most rational people — that the arbitrated agreement for the royalties to be paid by webcasters to the recording industry are absurd. They have released an order rejecting the agreement. Wired news has coverage, as…

Napster is resurrected: “Two days after Napster closed its doors when a potential sale fell through, the company accepted a buyout offer from the Bertelsmann media conglomerate”

Wired News logs the brief history of Napster in “The Day the Music Died.” At the same time one of my favorite filesharing programs, WinMX, just released the new “milestone” version 3, which adds, amongst many features, multi-source downloading. This type of downloading means that you can get different parts of a file in question…

Napster is dead. But filesharing lives on and on. Previously in mediageek: Digital Media Distribution: Is the Honeymoon Over? 10/10/01 The End of Peer-to-Peer? 4/5/01 Independent Music? 2/13/01

Anita, of Low Hug fame, gave me a couple of issues of TapeOp magazine–which I discovered only by picking up the compilation volume The Book About Creative Music Recording–and, like the book, I’m enjoying the hell out it. It’s just chock full of great ideas and advice for the DIY recordist, whether you’re using a…

Wired News’ Brad King notes that bootleg copies floating around the Internet aren’t putting dent into the box office sales of blockbusters like Spiderman. King attributes it to the theater experience of these films’ massive special effects, and I’d agree. I could see myself downloading Spiderman or Attack of the Clones because I’m lazy and…

LawMeme has a well considered essay on the appearance of new movies, like Spiderman and the new Star Wars, as bootlegs on file sharing networks and pirate VCDs/DVDs. Especially nice is the author’s explication of the “digital copies are more dangerous” myth, by noting that most analog pirates (like a VHS tape bought on the…

The On-line Journalism Review covers three former print publications that decided to go Internet-only, mostly for reasons of cost and the difficulty of maintaining good distribution of an actual paper magazine. One site is LiP, which is a lefty, progressive monthly that I read when it was a print ‘zine out of Chicago, and continue…

Business Week has a nice short interview with everyone’s favorite cheerleader for sensible copyright rules, Lawrence Lessig. No revelations here, though I’m glad to see him explain his logic to the short-attention-span business audience, who are the guys who need to hear it (whether I like that fact or not). I think his final comment…

Appeals Court Orders Revisit of Former Pirates’ LPFM License Rights Back in February the DC Court of Appeals ruled that former radio pirates should be eligible for low-power FM licenses, contrary to FCC rules. Unfortunately, yesterday that court vacated its own ruling, ordering a rehearing of the case. This update comes from Greg Ruggiero, who…