Lala.com — a new website that helps song lovers trade entire compact discs for less than the cost of a single iTunes video download — is either the music industry’s salvation or yet another nail in its coffin.

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Women are powering a significant portion of the digital music boom in Britain, according to a recently-released report. The study, conducted by London-based Emap, noted that women listen longer and discover more music than men. Emap also found that three-quarters of women in the 16-45 range own a portable MP3 player or MP3-enabled mobile phone. The study traces the increased uptake to a higher-than-expected female readership of music magazines, including rock magazine Kerrang.

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A couple of months ago, a man with the screen name x-amount logged on to Recidivism.org , the blog he maintains with a few of his friends, and made a pronouncement. “YouTube’s obviously blowing up. We’re living in that Napster-like magic moment where you simply can’t believe the kinds of historic stuff available to you with just a simple search. Which means of course that it’s all gonna get shut down ANY MINUTE.”

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It was former teacher Larry Mead’s love of classical music that led to an addiction to child pornography, his attorney said Monday.

Monterey lawyer Joe Cisneros said Mead, then a sixth-grade teacher, was downloading classical music from a “peer-to-peer” file sharing program on his school computer when he found a file obviously containing child pornography and downloaded it.

“Unfortunately he then stumbled onto one of these sites and quickly became addicted to it,” he said.

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MTV, the television company that is credited with popularising music videos, is turning its attention to the online and digital download market. Its music service Urge will offer users 2 million songs from Wednesday that can be bought either separately for $0.99 (£0.53) or via a monthly subscription.

The service will be the featured music player on Microsoft’s Media Player. Urge will be compatible with more than 100 digital music players but not with the market leader, Apple’s iPod. ‘Well-recognised brand’ “We will concentrate on people who don’t have iPod’s,” said Van Toffler, president of MTV Networks Music Group.

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This is an old interview with the COO of Limewire back in 2003 as was done by OpenP2P. It is intersting to look back at what was said then and look at P2P and the RIAA was we see it today. How much has changed and how much turned outt hey way they thought it would.

Greg Bildson is the COO of LimeWire and president of P2P United, a consortium of P2P software companies created to help educate Congress and the public about peer-to-peer software, technology, and culture. P2P United is the organization that paid 12-year-old Brianna LaHara’s $2,000 RIAA settlement after the RIAA served her with a Digital Millennium Copyright Act subpoena.

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The  Business Software Alliance (BSA), owned by the likes of Microsoft and Apple, is trying to spam surfers with a bizarre online version of Cluedo.
It’s, “part of its campaign to stamp out software piracy,” says Digital Bulletin.
Developed in association with games company Hasbro, it, “lets people play detective to uncover the software pirate,” says the story. “The game, which has been developed by Banner in conjunction with Cluedo’s owners Hasbro, involves players taking the role of a managing director moving from room to room in an office, working out how illegal software was allowed to proliferate.

“The game is being sent to workplace email addresses and has a direct marketing element, encouraging players to visit a BSA-run website that uses a fictional character called Sam to help firms with software problems.”

Here’s a surprise. Russia’s AllofMP3.com is more popular than the disinterred Napster, says XTN, basing its finding on Alexa.com stats.
Actually, given Napster’s dismal performance, that’s not much of a compliment.
Moreover, Alexa.com data are far from representative and in the real world of online music, AllofMP3.com downloads probably easily exceed those of iTunes, usually cited by the lamescream media as the standard for the all-but non-existent corporate music industry online music business.

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Trading small 5 megabyte songs doesn’t considerably hamper a ISPs bandwidth, yet 4.5 gigabyte DVD rips shared among millions of people does. Internet Service Providers aren’t stupid, and realize the success of the broadband revolution is largely attributable to the activities transpiring on P2P and file-sharing networks.

To some extent ISPs have in effect become victims of their own success. With a majority of their traffic absorbed by file-sharing, ISPs are in a continuous state of upgrading and investing their networks – a very costly affair. To mitigate these costs, ISPs have two choices; block P2P traffic or cache P2P traffic.

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Six months after the world’s first criminal conviction of a movie uploader, Hong Kong customs authorities have arrested a 16-year-old Kwun Tong student for using his home computer to make more than 600 songs and 20 movies available for free download on a personal Web site.

Unlike previous file-sharing cases involving peer-to-peer software, the 16-year-old used a high-speed data line and special software to convert his computer into a server, inviting his friends and anyone else on the Internet to distribute the copyrighted files.

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Just when you thought you’d seen everything P2P is useful for. A recently discovered Internet worm, “Nugache-A” is spreading widely via AIM as ell as MSN Messenger.

In and of themselves, new internet worms pop up too frequently to be news anymore. What is significant about this worm is the way in which it can be remotely controlled, via P2P.

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Step forward to May 2006, and UK newspaper The Guardian quotes Real’s Glaser thus: “About half the music on iPods is music obtained illegitimately either from an illegal peer-to-peer networks or from ripping friends’ CDs, which is illegal.”

Presumably he doesn’t consider that iPod owners might have ripped their own CDs. That’s technically illegal too, in the UK at least, but certainly not in the same league as downloading stuff via P2P networks.

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HONG KONG, May 11 (Xinhua) — Hong Kong Customs Anti-Internet Piracy Team has arrested a 16-year-old student in Sau Mau Ping after cracking a case in which more than 600 pirated songs were provided for free downloading from a personal website.According to a government press release on Thursday, acting on a complaint from a copyright owner, following intensive investigations, Customs officers seized from a residential unit in Sau Mau Ping a desktop computer with broadband Internet devices, worth about 7,700 HK dollars (987 U.S. dollars).

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A UK music industry body has called on leading ISPs to take action against p2p file sharing.The Music Business Forum (MBF) has written to BT, Tiscali and NTL, telling them that they have a ‘corporate responsibility’ to discourage ‘illegal downloading’.

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“BitTorrent.com soon to be a destination for downloading Batman, Ocean’s 11, and Smallville…” BitTorrent, Inc. president Ashwin Navin exclaims on his web log. The caveat “Legally!” is cleverly inserted; less people think there’s a more sinister use to the BitTorrent protocol.

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