wax&wires

The Swedish Court of Appeals has determined that Judges can’t be called biased simply because they support the law.

Just minutes ago the verdict in the case of The Pirate Bay Four was announced. All four defendants were accused of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. Peter Sunde: Guilty. Fredrik Neij: Guilty. Gottfrid Svartholm: Guilty. Carl Lundström: Guilty. The four receive 1 year in jail each and fines totaling $3,620,000.

[via ars]
What happens when a professor who believes that file-sharing has been beneficial to the music industry takes the witness stand in The Pirate Bay trial, then learns that prosecutors have been talking to his boss about the quality of his research? Fireworks—and flowers.
The Pirate Bay trial settled into something (sort of) approaching normality today [...]

[via ars]
U2’s yet-to-be-released album, No Line on the Horizon, is already available on P2P networks across the Internet thanks to a leak that the band is always so adamantly working to prevent. Considering U2’s views on piracy and Safe Harbor, the leak is both poetic justice and confirmation of the band’s fears.
What’s the worst thing [...]

[via ars]
The Ruckus music service shut down over the weekend, raising the question of whether universities are done offering sponsored legal download services to students.
The music industry, struggling to find workable business models for the digital age, apparently can’t even give its product away. Ad-supported services like SpiralFrog have generated what can only be charitably [...]

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) recently released a report concluding that despite initiatives by the music industry, 95% of music downloads continue to be illegal.
The IFPI, considered by some to be the global version of the RIAA, says that 40 billion songs were illegally downloaded in 2008. Those songs don’t necessarily [...]

US District Judge James P. Jones has ruled that copyright holders cannot equate each illegal download with a lost sale. Just because somebody downloaded your song, doesn’t mean that they would have purchased it otherwise. Practically what that means is that you cannot seek restitution based on the amount that hypothetically would have been gained [...]

Though not yet available in the U.S., the new music player Spotify looks to have all the makings necessary to create a new paradigm in music acquisition.

Spotify is a music player that allows users to stream any songs they want, without downloading the songs onto their computer. In that regard, it functions much like Pandora, and the sound quality is comparable. Where it one-ups Pandora is in the fact that’s so much more than a music discovery tool. Spotify lets users select the specific songs they want to hear, create playlists from songs hosted on other users’ computers, and share their playlists with other users. The GUI looks a bit like Songbird, a mashup between iTunes and last.fm.

I just found this article in the Wall Street Journal.

A quick look at album sales in the U.S. shows that they have been dropping consistently since 2004.It looks like the RIAA is abandoning mass lawsuits in favor of a new structure for combating illegal file sharing. I think that it’s a good call since the current practice of suing individuals was clearly not working on a large scale. The chances of getting sued were too slim for people to be scared out of sharing, and there was still never a way to say difinitively that the person being sued was the person who was file sharing anyway. Consider open wireless networks. The RIAA would have to seize computers to prove that the shared files were even taken by the person in question, and to my knowledge, that never happened. The anonymity of the internet must be combated before people think that their actions need to change. Offloading a lot of that hunting workload to the ISPs, which the RIAA plans to do in this new plan, will help bring more file sharers to the RIAA’s attention. What they do with that huge influx of new culprits has yet to be seen, as there will still be no way to prove that the holder of the ISP plan was the one file sharing. Do the ISPs then pin responsibility for network security on the customer? The RIAA plan is to issue several warnings to copyright violators provided to them by ISPs, as well as throttle their net speed as punishment…

Back in March of this year, Warner Music Group brought on digital music guru Jim Griffin to consult on how to combat illegal file sharing and recoup some revenue from an ever depleting amount of CD sales.

It doesn’t look like illegal file sharing is going anywhere, so what should the new music distribution model look like? Here are a few lessons learned from Radiohead’s “pay what you want” experiment with In Rainbows.