Hank calls the technique equivalent to a virtual cover band playing The Beatles' songs. He bought all of their albums, had a computer analyze the waveforms to determine their pitch, timbre and other defining qualities, then destroyed the original copies of the music.

He then had a computer reconstruct the songs based on the data it collected from analyzing the waveforms. It wasn't a recording, but a complete mathematical rebuild of the song.

That's really cool, and incredibly impressive that he managed to recreate the tracks from scratch like that, but there's no way the defense stands a chance against EMI's lawyers. I think I remember this argument being tried before with MP3s. A defendant claimed that because a majority of the waveform data was thrown away during encoding, it was not identical to the original recording.

Nice try, said the judge. As long as it's audibly identifiable as a certain recording, it constitutes as copyright infringement. At least that's what I remember. If anyone knows the specific case or I'm completely wrong, please chime in. Have fun in court November 20, Mr. Risan. [FastCompany]

Music royalty groups ASCAP and BMI are harassing online music stores such as iTunes to pay performance fees not only for the songs that they sell, but for the short clips that they use as previews. You know, the things that entice people to pay for music. They want to be paid for advertisements for their product.

Just how backwards is this industry? How many years can they continue to just not get it in such an extreme way? You would have thought that maybe it would have taken a few years for them to figure out the internet, but we're way beyond that. This entire industry seems to be run by people who don't just not understand the internet, but are aggressive about not understanding the internet. They have their old way of doing business and the old way the world works, and they'll be damned if any new fangled thing like a complete upheaval in the way people acquire and listen to music is going to change that.

It'd almost be funny if the people who were really being harmed by these jackasses weren't the artists. Bands aren't the ones pushing for something that will only end with their best form of advertising being pulled from the iTunes Music Store (because make no mistake, that's what will happen before Apple pays for fucking song clips). It's these royalties idiots, the same people who almost killed off Pandora.

So here's the bottom line, guys: you're doing it wrong. And you've been doing it wrong for a while. You need to figure out a new way of doing business, and that doesn't mean just shifting fees around and charging where you clearly shouldn't be charging. Earn your paychecks, because unlike the bands you purport to be representing, you're still getting them. [CNET via Electronista]

• Child abduction: Fine of $25,000 and up to three years in prison, which can be accounted as $50,233 per year (that was the median household income in 2007, probably down because of the economic crisis). Total: $175,699.

• Steal the CDs: A total of $275,000, $52,500 fine for the CDs.

• Steal a lawnmower from your neighbour: A total of $375,000.

• Burn someone's house while playing The Doors: Another $375,000.

• Stalk a Gizmodo editor (yes, you know who you are): A Class 4 felony that will result in just $175,000.

• Start a dogfighting ring: $50,000.

• Murder someone on the second degree, a Class 1 felony: $778,495, which accounts for a $25,000 fine and four to 15 years in prison.

Heck, you can do all these crimes, and the total amount will be only $2.2 million. Of course, you can't really quantify years spent in prison using dollars, but I don't care. The case of Jammie—and many like hers—is still absolutely outrageous.

Ms. Thomas got fined $1.92 million for downloading 1700 songs songs. For some reason, a popular jury thought that was fair. That's ok. There are mentally disturbed people everywhere. But I don't care if it's 1700 or 17000 songs, nobody can be punished like this for downloading songs. It may follow a draconian law to the last comma and period, but that doesn't make the verdict just. The law is what is at fault here, with a punishment that is not proportional to the magnitude of the "crime." This goes against the most basic sense of justice.

I know that el Señor Presidente has more serious issues to worry about that this case, but something needs to be done about it. Something drastic. Unfortunately, nothing will happen, given the "class" of people now at the Department of Justice:

What a crying shame. [Gapers Block]

According to the site: "tracker.btarena.org" can be used to track new torrents.

The torrents available from the BTArena.net copy still carry the announce URLs from The Pirate Bay's tracker but since all torrents were updated with the OpenBitTorrent tracker, they will remain functional even when GGF's version of the site takes over at the end of this month

Remember: this is a torrent file index, not the petabytes of data they link to.

The anonymous uploader who compiled this huge torrent told TorrentFreak that he wanted to have a backup of the site in case all torrents mysteriously disappear after the site is sold. "I suppose I want us to have assurances. If the TPB deal disappoints us, we can just put it up again," he said.

Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay is also hosting what it calls "the $675,000 mixtape"—a collection of the 30 songs that student Joel Tenenbaum was found guilty of sharing, and then fined that amount for.

[The Pirate Bay via TorrentFreak –Thanks Mark!]

In his interview on the fantastic podcast The Sound of Young America, Kot states that the music industry was actually one of the primary causes of piracy. The explosion of boy bands and bubblegum pop in the late 1990s was due to the labels' insistence on pouring a huge amount of money into just a few dumbed-down, impersonal, lowest-common-denominator acts, which meant in turn that commercial radio was almost completely garbage. There was little room for genuine weirdo geniuses like, say, Prince or David Bowie, and devoid of good music, the market was bound to react—hence Napster.

Kot goes through the standard points all dedicated pirates know—artists have never made money on record sales, the mp3 revolution encouraged the indie movement and a huge variety of new and exciting acts, the RIAA's insistence on trying to sue piracy out of existence led to the public having absolutely zero guilt about pirating music. But what's nice is Kot's recognition that iTunes, the much-applauded champion of legal music downloads, is still far inferior to pirate options.

I'll toss this out there: I think the dear departed OiNK, an invite-only torrent site that was forcefully shut down in late 2007, was the greatest music distribution service ever created. It was leagues ahead of iTunes: Faster downloads, better mandated sound quality, an incredibly vast library, vibrant forums full of knowledgeable music dorks, and, of course, totally without DRM. Even now that iTunes has abandoned DRM, it can't hold a candle to a service that hasn't even been operational in nearly two years. Record labels seem to have pinned their hopes to iTunes, but Kot stresses that iTunes is far from perfect, and the labels should be busting ass trying to come up with a viable business model that attracts, not polices, customers, and can at least hold pace with the illegal options.

Cue the "screw the RIAA" comments. [The Sound of Young America]

This is the second big victory for the RIAA this month, after the even-more-ridiculous decision that filesharer Jammie Thomas should pay $80,000 per song. But unlike Thomas, Tenenbaum hasn't come out and said he will outright refuse to pay the fine, and it looks like this is a more concrete win for the RIAA dirtbags.

The RIAA specified to TorrentFreak that the money won will go to more lawsuits, not to the artists the RIAA supposedly represents. It looks like yet another episode in this long public relations attack in which the organization mercilessly kills any sympathy for their cause that might have existed. [TorrentFreak]

Roy, a New Hampshire resident, actually thought the letters she received from UMG's lawyers were either a joke or a scam and didn't respond for several months. Her reaction is pretty understandable; the RIAA simply directed her to a site where she could pay her "debt" with a credit card (which certainly seems like a scam) and, again, Roy did not own a damn computer.

UMG had mistakenly sued her due to the vast deficiencies in MediaSentry, the anti-piracy software the RIAA uses to track down pirates. MediaSentry incorrectly pinpoints IP addresses with not uncommon frequency, and this is obviously one such case. Roy mounted a case and UMG was forced to settle out of court, for fear that any decision at all would result in a precedent that could mean future suits could be thrown out as well. Unfortunately, the settlement does not include UMG paying Roy to apologize for being such a-holes about the whole thing, and neither side will receive any money. [Recording Industry vs. The People via Electronista]

The decision has taken a ton of twists and turns—even after the jury had decided what Thomas had done was in fact illegal filesharing, the punishment wasn't at all clear. Originally she was to be fined for over 1,700 songs, which was then whittled down to 24 "representative" songs, and the per song fine has shot up from the initial $750 (the legal minimum) to the current $80,000.

Apparently Thomas "gasped" when the number was read out loud. We don't blame her, although our reaction was more fist-shaking and muttering about old white men in suits than sheer surprise.

The ordeal isn't over, of course—Thomas will appeal the decision and it'll probably be heard by a few more judicial levels before any final say is had. Jammie, we're pulling for you. Stand tall. Or sit down, it's easier to steal music that way. [Ars Technica]

The irony of a man in charge of a company who artists and consumers both hate making this statement apparently was lost on him.

AT&T says they're not doing any of the actual spotting—the RIAA is handling that part—they're just "forwarding notices from content providers to our customers" to edumacate them. Cnet's Greg Sandoval reports that a Comcast executive said that they've sent customers two million warning notices about infringement. [A Comcast spokesperson later added that these letters weren't part of any new campaign, see below.]

What happens if you ignore AT&T's notices? Will they disconnect you? Here is their lovely wishy-washy answer that really doesn't say anything at all: "We are not suspending or terminating our customers' service. With that said, we do refer customers to our Acceptable Use Policy, which governs use of our service." Just keep in mind, it's the same AT&T that was plotting a massive, intelligent anti-piracy dragnet that would sweep their entire network for pirated content.

Update: Comcast adds via spokesperson that nothing's changed:

"Comcast, like other major ISPs, forwards notices of alleged infringement that we receive from music, movie, videogame, and other content owners to our customers. This is the same process we've had in place for years - nothing has changed. While we have always supported copyright holders in their efforts to reduce piracy under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and continue to do so, we have no plans to test a so-called 'three-strikes-and-you're-out' policy."

Probably not a distinction they want, but since they're the only major ISP that's not seriously clamping down on bandwidth usage and hanging out with the RIAA at bars—the RIAA's new buddy group reportedly includes AT&T, Comcast and Cox—Verizon still looks like the best ISP around for people moving around less-than-legally shiny material (i.e., everyone on the internet), especially if you get FiOS. [Cnet via CrunchGear]

Hypebot, the site that reported the layoffs, says that the "RIAA as you know it is probably history by Tuesday." And yes, that means tomorrow. Offices are closing and over 100 people are being shown the door, so this is clearly a serious move.

So what will happen to the RIAA? It'll probably merge with the IFPI, the European organization currently ineptly suing The Pirate Bay. But really, it's only a matter of time before that organization bites the dust as well. This is something we've known was inevitable for a while now, but I'm somehow having trouble feeling all that happy about it. You never like to see people lose their jobs, even if said jobs were inherently despicable. [Hypebot via Threat Level]

According to CNET, "President Obama is continuing to fill the senior ranks of the U.S. Department of Justice with the copyright industry's favorite lawyers" with the selection of Donald Verrilli, from the Verrilli Family, el Señor Presidente's latest acquisition.

Verrilli is the guy who shut down Grokster, sued Google on behalf of Viacom, and sued the pants out of Jammie Thomas in the name of the Recording Industry Association of America, that bunch of nice lovely assholes. His new position at the Department of Justice? Associate deputy attorney general.

This follows up the naming of Tom Perrelli, from the Perrelli Family, as associate attorney general, the third-in-command post at the DoJ. Perrelli was and probably still is the favorite lawyer of the RIAA, suing people and companies left, right, and center in the name of the recording gang. He will be in charge of the DoJ's civil, antitrust, and civil rights division.

But don't go away, because there's more. Who is the deputy attorney general, the second in command at the DoJ, do you ask? Mr. David Ogden, who-according to his previous job's biography-represents "media and Internet industries, as well as major trade and professional associations." He also as "part of the department who successfully defended the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act before the U.S. Supreme Court."

Not enough? Don't worry, because the VP has other friends in other places. Take Neil MacBride, another associate deputy attorney general, who previously was an aide to Biden himself. MacBride was the king of the legal hill at the Business Software Association. As the BSA's antipiracy enforcer and general counsel, MacBride oversaw the creation of the program that rewarded people for phoning tips about suspected software piracy.

All these picks follow President Obama's words, announcing that these people "bring the integrity, depth of experience and tenacity that the Department of Justice demands in these uncertain times." It also comes after his words as presidential candidate, asking for less restrictions and less power for the recording industry.

Surprised? We are not. After all, there's a pattern here. Mr. Clinton was the one who signed the DMCA. And the president of the RIAA reportedly only contributes to Democratic politicians and causes. Not that the Republicans are any better in this front, mind you.

In any case, you know what we think about the recording industry and these issues.

And no, this is not making us happy bunnies. [CNET]

The New York Times' account of the behind-the-scenes negotiations that led to iTunes going totally DRM-free, getting downloads over 3G and variable pricing is fascinating for several reasons. One, it reveals that while Jobs said he was taking the holidays off to spend time with his family instead of preparing for Macworld, he was plenty busy making record executives cry. The Christmas Eve call, the Times says, "ricocheted around the music industry."

Two, it reveals that Apple and iTunes have reached a tipping point since becoming the number one music retailer in the world: iTunes is now a more powerful institution than the record labels themselves. Just 18 months ago, Universal was flexing its muscles to show that iTunes still depended on the record instury, not the other way around. But in this round of negotiations, "several high-level music executives" told the Times (anonymously, of course) that "they operated in fear of Apple’s removing a label’s products from the iTunes store over a disagreement, even though that has never happened. The labels do not have much leverage in negotiating with Apple."

Sony was the lone dissenter, which resulted in the "particularly tense" Christmas Eve chat. And well, we all know how it turned out. [NYT]

Since they both vividly recall past PR debacles when it comes to monitoring or borking your internets—AT&T floated and quickly stopped talking about plans for internet-wide copyright dragnet, and Comcast, well, you know—they're not signing any formal agreements this time around.

But the gist is that the ISP would be a courier for the RIAA's notices, with graduated penalties, like suspension, all the way up to termination. Details left to be worked out, according to CNET's sources, are who would pay to send the takedown notices, and how the ISPs would make up the lost revenue from booting users.

Even though in one sense I'm not surprised AT&T and Comcast would be the first to play ball with the RIAA, on the other hand, it seems weird they'd go through the extra effort to be the RIAA's buttboy, given that they're already implementing aggressive traffic management, with monthly data caps and in Comcast's case, slowdowns for heavy users. Especially since the RIAA really has no major leverage over them in terms of content, like say movie studios or networks, who they depend on for content to sell their services to customers.

Hey, at least it's net neutral, right guys?

Update: Here's the official word from AT&T: "While not commenting directly on the RIAA announcement or speculation, we believe that consumer education is a key component to enabling customers to find and use legal methods to access the content they want, and we have also consistently said that automatic cutoff of our customers is not something we would do." [Cnet]

The feed, provided by the Courtroom View Network, will cover every thrilling up and down of the case, which involves the RIAA suing BU student Joe Tenenbaum and others. The RIAA opposed the live broadcast, which the judge found pretty strange seeing that this entire campaign of lawsuits was designed to scare people away from downloading.

In any case, the hearing is set for 2pm on January 22nd, so mark your calendars for hot courtroom action, LIVE! [Threat Level]

Straight up, you run into DRM pretty much every day. Bought music from three of the four major labels or any TV show from iTunes? Played a game on Steam? Watched a Blu-ray movie? Hello, DRM. If you wanna get technical about it, digital rights management and copy protection are two different, if similar things. Digital rights management is copy protection's sniveling, more invasive cousin—it isn't designed simply to make it harder to steal content like straightforward copy protection—you thieving bastard you—but to control exactly how and when you use media. We're going to cover both here, since they both refer to technologies that restrict what you do with music, movies and more.

There are, approximately, 10,742,489 kinds of DRM and copy protection. Almost every company or format has its own flavor that works in a slightly different way from everyone else—Apple's iTunes-smothering FairPlay, Blu-ray's BD+, the restrictions built into every gaming console. They've gotten more complex and nuanced over time, too, as content delivery has evolved. For instance, elementary-school DRM would simply keep you from copying or converting or doing other unseemly things to a file, like playing it on a non-sanctioned device. Or you might remember old-school CD keys, before the days of online activation. Today's DRM, like for movie rentals, music subscriptions or software, constructs more elaborate obstacle courses, nuking videos 24 hours after you press play, or allowing a certain number of copies.

Many of these work in similar ways—files are encrypted with the DRM flavor of the day, and they're unlocked or decrypted for your use by authorized programs and devices. Think of it like a secret handshake that only certain programs or pieces of hardware know. Often, they're tied to an account like on Steam or iTunes. This makes it easy for the Man to keep track of and manage what you're doing with stuff—how many copies you've made, how many machines you've authorized to play your content, whether your monthly all-you-can-eat music subscription is still active, that kind of thing. DRM-busting cracks look for ways to strip that encryption out to allow free usage, copying or modification of the file.

So, aside from the fact that DRM keeps you copying or modifying content, and playing it on whatever damn player you wanna play it on, and maybe limits your time with a movie to a fleeting window, it doesn't sound so bad. Okay, it does. But it can get worse—like when DRM breaks. For instance, Valve's Steam network had a hiccup in 2004 that meant people were locked out of the game they paid to play. Or when Windows cocks up and tells users their OS isn't genuine. Or Sony's infamous rootkit CDs. Or when DRM servers are shut down, rendering music useless. The list goes on.

But wait, haven't you heard that DRM's dead? Or has a cold? Weeellll, yes and no. Sure, some music stores sell DRM-free MP3s—Amazon is unrivaled in that has 'em from every major label, and iTunes sells DRM-free music from EMI. And CDs have never had 'em, except for that aforementioned BS copy protection from Sony and a few other short-lived misguided attempts. So, it's sort of going away for pay-to-own music, but it's still fairly ubiquitous, in all-you-can-eat subscription music, in movies and in software, and it's not going away anytime soon. The emergence of streaming serious video content, like with Hulu in particular, sort of challenges this on the video front—there's no DRM, but then again, it's not as easy to rip a stream for Joe Blow as it is to share a file over Limewire. Harder questions, though, like whether DRM means you ever really own anything anymore, we'll leave to the lawyers.

Here's a list an quick blurb on every major kind of DRM you're likely to run into, and why it sucks (beyond the whole keeping-you-from-sharing-it-with-all-your-friends business):

Audio
• FairPlay is Apple's flavor of DRM that's baked right into iTunes, iPods, QuickTime and iEverything else—most music from the iTunes store is lojacked with it, with exceptions from EMI and some indie labels. It allows for unlimited copies of music files, but only five computers at a time can be authorized. FairPlay files only play on Apple's own iThings. Like every other DRM scheme, it's been cracked.

• PlaysForSure (now simply "Certified for Vista," which is confusing since not all "Certified for Vista" stuff will play PlaysForSure, like Microsoft's own Zune) was Microsoft's attempt to get everyone in the portable player industry on the same Windows Media DRM. Even though Microsoft has basically ditched it, it's successful in that a bunch of services, like Rhapsody and Napster, and players—essentially everyone Apple, from Sony to Toshiba to SanDisk—have used or supported it. It's fairly generic copy protection that keeps you from sending it to all of your friends, though it works with and enforces subscriptions, with the biggest bitch being that it restricts you to Windows and to PlaysForSure devices. (Read: Not iPods.)

• Zune uses a totally different DRM tech than PlaysForSure and is incompatible with it. It allows you to share DRM'd subscription content with up to three other Zunes, though it won't let you burn songs unless you buy 'em. And if subscriptions die, it nukes your songs. It also manages the Zune's "squirt" feature, making sure you don't play beamed songs more than a few times and other annoying restrictions.

• PlayReady: Hey lookie, another Microsoft DRM scheme. This one's different from the similar-sounding PlaysForSure in that while it's backward compatible with Windows Media DRM, it works with more than just Windows Media audio or video files, like AAC and MPEG, and is meant to cover a broader range of devices, like mobile phones.

Video
• FairPlay for video is a lot like the audio version, but adds a couple tricks like nuking rental videos 24 hours after pressing play and presenting a slightly more complicated obstacle course to sync them to portable iThings.

• High-Bandwidth Digital Copy Protection prevents video from being copied as it moves across certain digital video interfaces like HDMI, DisplayPort and DVI, which sounds innocent enough, until you try to watch something on a non-HDCP compliant display—and you can't.

• Content Scrambling System (CSS) was DVD's piddly encryption scheme, long ago busted open like a rotten watermelon.

• AACS (Advanced Access Content System) is one layer of copy protection that's part of the spec of both HD DVD and Blu-ray. It's way stronger than DVD's CSS setup with several components involved in the encryption/decryption process, and allows for blocking specific players that have their keys compromised. Plus it can allow specific numbers of DRM'd copies of content, like for portable players. Also cracked, rather explosively.

• BD+ is Blu-ray's secret sauce DRM that's actually a virtual machine, allowing it to do stuff like make sure the hardware and keys are kosher, and execute code. It's been cracked, twice actually, but part of the appeal is that it can be updated—the last version is at least three months away from being cracked again, though it totally will be. BD+ was the main reason some studios supported Blu-ray over the AACS-only HD DVD, and you can see why.

• Macrovision VHS, yep, that old chestnut: copy protection on VHS tapes that made everything squiggly when you tried to run two VCRs together. Why include it in a digital roundup? Well, besides nostalgia, if you want to convert your original 1986 Star Wars VHS tape to digital, this will make your life difficult—fortunately, a quick Google search turns up ways around it.

• TV and cable—there's a lot going on there to keep you from stealing cable's goods, so you need a box or a CableCard to take the encrypted feed and make it watchable. The industry didn't even really get behind the plug-n-play CableCard, either—it was more or less forced on them. There's also this thing called a broadcast flag that stations like ABC or NBC or HBO can embed in shows at will so you can't record them.

• Tivo uses DRM from Macrovision that can slap you with all kinds of restrictions, ranging from no copying at all to automatic expiration, limiting copies or managed transfers to PCs, or even not allowing you to view certain football games outside of a designated region. Its TivoToGo, for porting stuff to portable devices, actually uses Windows Media DRM though.

• Windows Media DRM, speaking of it, is one of the more popular off-the-shelf DRM kits, used by everyone from Netflix for its streaming service to Amazon's defunct Unbox downloads (now Video on Demand downloads) to Walmart's old video store, that's somewhat flexible it what it allows or doesn't, depending on the service's wants—from no copying to nothing but Windows Media compatible devices (i.e., no iPods). It only runs on Windows, naturally.

• Even Adobe Flash has DRM now. If you've used the streaming part of Amazon's Video on Demand service, you've run into Flash DRM (which had a lovely Antarctica-sized hole allowing you to rip movie streams until a couple months ago). Two bad things about this DRM, notes the EFF: First, with an unencrypted stream it's "unlikely that tools to download, edit, or remix them are illegal." That changes if it's locked up with DRM. Also, it means you'll have to use Adobe's own Flash player to video Flash videos. Lame.

• PlayReady is another Microsoft DRM flavor, aimed mostly at portable devices, but it also powers the DRM in Microsoft's Silverlight, which is what just brought Netflix streaming to Macs.

Software
• Windows Genuine Advantage is what makes sure you're not using a pirated copy of Windows. It phones home occasionally, which can cause bad things if the servers go down. If your copy is legit and it says you're a pirate, you're not the first person it's falsely accused.

• Valve's Steam is one of the most elegant, integrated DRM solutions we've seen in a physical-media-be-damned world (except for its two infamous outages). Unlimited copies of games on unlimited computers, but only one can play on an account at a time. It's fairly seamless, like good DRM should be.

• EA's copy protection system got real famous, real fast thanks to Spore, and nefariously restricts game installations to three computers—in its lifetime, not just at one time like some media DRMs.

• Pretty much every console has varying levels of DRM and copy protection (duh, it's a closed system), but DRM issues are coming more brightly into focus as we download games from stores, like on the Xbox 360 and Wii, where games are tied to your original system, so you're screwed if you get a replacement—it'll take some decent footwork to get your games back, at the very least.

• Not software DRM per se, but Windows Vista has a ton of DRM technologies baked right into it.

Any DRM schemes we missed, feel free to complain about how they make your life more miserable in the comments.

Something you still wanna know? Send any questions about DRM, rights, McDonald's managers or Taiko Drum Master to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

Alas, it took the RIAA five years and 35,000 cases to realize that suing individual for illegal downloads was not an effective deterrent. Not only was it an abject PR failure, not even the RIAA has ever pretended that it was making a difference.

That's not to say the RIAA is not entirely out of the anti-pirate game, of course. Now, they will focus on notifying your ISP of your malfeasances, should their wide net of semi-legal piracy detection agents sniff out your IP seeding 808s and Heartbreak to 12 year old girls. The RIAA will email your ISP (if it is one of the "major" providers that has an agreement), who will then either forward the email on or send their own warning. If you don't comply to that and subsequent warnings, your service may be canned. [WSJ]

Essentially, he was working out very complicated licensing deals with the major labels (after they threatened him) well before the RIAA shut the site down. They weren't playing ball as much as he would have liked, but they were making slow progress. Then, one day, out of the blue, the RIAA got in touch with his host and shut the site down. Despite the fact that the RIAA is paid for by the major labels, none of the people he was dealing with seemed to care enough to do anything about it.

In the end, he decided to ditch the progress he was making with the labels and head in a completely different direction. In the near future, Muxtape will be a simple music player for bands to stream their music in a way that's embeddable and expandable around the web.

It sounds cool, but I'm not in a band. I liked the old Muxtape. It was a simple way to share music with friends that didn't provide downloads, instead introducing people to music that they could then obtain legally. Slap Amazon and iTunes links on all the songs and I guarantee that music sales would increase. Instead, it's just another example of the RIAA idiotically biting the hands of the music fans that feed them. [Muxtape]

UPDATE: Is it a joke? From Mutape's tumblr blog: "No artists or labels have complained. The site is not closed indefinitely. Stay tuned."

After posting this information on ripten, a Dell representative chimed in to say that the lack of a sound card Stereo Mix option was most likely due to an issue with laptops running XP, and that a driver existed to correct the problem. However, it is still not clear whether the driver works for all Dell computers or why the option was disabled in the first place. Nor does it address the possibility that the problem may not be confined to Dell products alone. Naturally, random forum threads do not confirm RIAA involvement with Stereo Mix as a fact—but it does have that slimy, fishy vibe we have come to expect from them. With that having been said, have you experienced similar problems? [ripten]

In addition, half of this group was happy to share all of their music, though probably more often through BitTorrent than Times Online's "hundreds, or thousands, of songs at any one time" postulation. Another point that's not quite clear is whether or not CD backups were considered to be stolen tracks. If so, these numbers become extremely tough to interpret.

Still, 80% of the music pirates said that they'd pay about £10/month for a subscription service. Now if we could only find a subscription service that offered as many tracks as the entire dark alley of the internet, we'd really have something. [Times Online]

Hughes' argument centers around subscriptions: "(Recently) I made a list of the 22 ways to sell music and 20 of them still require DRM...any form of subscription service or limited play-per-view or advertising offer still requires DRM. So DRM is not dead." And he thinks subscription services are where we're headed (or at least the industry hopes so), meaning DRM for all.

But the fact that he's pinning DRM's survival on subscriptions—as opposed to advocating for it on all tracks you buy online—shows that we actually have come a long way, and DRM is dead, at least in one sense. Contrast with the MPAA's rep, whose industry is still in the beginning of the DRM life cycle: "We need DRM to show our customers the limits of the license they have entered into with us." The RIAA is a veritable Lessigian copyright hippie in comparison. [CNET]

We kind of touched on the stickiness issue when we talked about owning vs. licensing eBooks. The crux of this case is that EMI claims users are giving the files to a third party without their permission, so MP3Tunes is infringing on their copyright.

MP3Tunes, however, argues that "files are not MP3tunes' possessions any more than the contents of a safety deposit box are owned by the bank that houses them." And, you're not sharing the files with a million other people. So the usual record label arguments about file-sharing don't quite fit.

Legally, this is kind of a grey, ill-defined area. But cloud computing is coming, so it's going to have to get defined sooner or later, most likely sooner. Personally, I think place-shifting should fall under fair use, but I'm not the one pounding the gavel. [MP3Tunes' Michael Robertson via Consumerist]

Though the European Parliament has plenty of power, this particular legislation seems to be more for advisory purposes. The BBC says:

The vote has no legal force and leaves national governments free to implement their own anti-piracy plans. But, said the Open Rights Group, it does "signify resistance" among European law makers to the strict measures that nations such as France are implementing.

Cases such as the Jammie Thomas case, which resulted in $222,000 worth of penalties, are based on files being made available in a shared folder in a P2P program such as the now-dead Kazaa. In that case, there was no evidence that any transfers ever took place.

However, while the judge stated that merely making files available is not enough as the basis of a lawsuit, he did say that an "offer to distribute" can be good enough. This probably means that the lawsuits will continue, just with adjusted language and arguments. Now we'll just need to wait and see whether or not the courts see keeping files in a shared directory as an "offer to distribute." And the soap opera continues. [CNET via Broadband Reports]

Michael Arrington points out that a $5 tax—besides essentially turning music into a service requiring us to perpetually suck on the industry's teat—would double its size, from $10 billion to $20 billion. So of course the labels are all for it. It's guaranteed revenue that would flood their coffers like never before. Warner's plan calls for the cash stream to flow into a pool that'll be split between copyright holders and artists. But we all know how hard labels want to screw artists.

And as Arrington points out, it would basically freeze innovation in the industry, meaning labels would be able to ream them that much harder. Not to mention, thanks to the fine print, we'd probably no longer own our music. But that's the whole point. [Portfolio via TechCrunch]

The whole video is over 60 minutes long—these are just two of the more outrageous minutes with Jim Dedman, from the NDAA, interviewing Deborah Robinson and Frank Walters from the RIAA about the benefits of going SWAT on music pirates. At one point, Walters says the piracy/drug connection can be so bad that you get asked "When you buy a CD, would you like it with or without—the with is enclosing a piece of crack or whatever the case may be."

"If an artist has just delivered an album from [the] studio, we could potentially deliver it to a limited number of users for a higher price. It's something we're quite keen to develop; for example, through our own B2C channels—artists' Web sites."

For one, charging more simply to get first dibs at an album is ludicrous on principle. But more to the point (that maybe they'll heed) this model really presents two choices: Hear it early for an artificially inflated price, or do so for free, probably less than an hour after it goes up. Temporality is not value added, and not all music fans are as eager to pay exorbitant prices for immediate access as some of Radiohead's cabal, so this seems like epic fail waiting to happen. Unless, god forbid, people pay up. In that case, we're all doomed. [Idolator, Moconews]

As a bonus, a local filter would defeat encrypted torrents, since you've gotta decrypt 'em, at which point the filter would kick in. Sherman is a smart cookie though, and knows people aren't just gonna sign up to have their machine lojacked:

"Why would somebody put that on their machine? They wouldn't likely want to do that, they'd do that when it benefits them such as for viruses and so on and so forth...it could be enforced at the modem or put in by the ISP."

Yes, the RIAA doesn't think the record companies are making enough and that musicians are clearly making too much. I mean, they get 13% now. Like they deserve 13% for writing and creating the music that people are paying for. Hogwash! Someone had to, you know, encode it. That's worth at least 40%. And hey, these shoes don't shine themselves! So they're pushing to get that rate cut down to a shameful 9%, giving artists even less of a slice of the pie than before.

Of course, Apple, Napster and other large online retailers make the RIAA look like a charity in comparison, with Apple pushing to cut the royalty rate down to an insulting 4%. Yes, Apple wants artists to get a 4% of wholesale royalty rate. Really looking out for those artists, aren't you Steve?

If there was ever a time for a band to try going completely independent, this is it. Why give over 90% of your income away to greedy sleazebags when you can sell your music online without the middleman? This industry needs to be burned to the ground and built back up again; it's broken and it seems less and less likely that it'll be able to be fixed. [Hollywood Reporter via Slashdot]

Andrea Monti, an Italian copyright attorney, said all music sold on major music download sites is degraded. As such, exchange across P2P networks of these files, and any equivalent type of recordings, would seem to be legal under the new law. The law does restrict the sharing for "educational or scientific" use, but prosecuting offenders will nevertheless be more problematic because of it. The president of the RIAA counterpart in Italy was said to be confident in the restraints of the new ruling, but we imagine he crapped his pants as he said that. [Ars Technica]