Colleges may soon be required to "provide students with commercial music downloading services and implement traffic filtering technologies in order to deter peer-to-peer filesharing."
Why is the RIAA targeting college students? Because "their appreciation for intellectual property has not yet reached its full development." Read the full interview with Cara Duckworth, spokeswoman for the RIAA, here.
Know Your Rights is Engadget's new technology law series, written by their own totally punk copyright attorney Nilay Patel. In it they to answer some fundamental tech-law questions to help you stay out of trouble in this brave new world.
A recent Harris Poll (conducted on behalf of the Business Software alliance) has found that number of users illegally downloading all types of copyrighted material is dropping substantially. Believe it?
KOAR have an interesting article up about how the internet is changing the musical model. They mention how bands like "One Less Reason andMy Favorite Highway are making between 5 and 10 thousand dollars per month just on downloads."
U.S. Representative Ric Keller (a Republican from the 8th district of Florida) has introduced the "Curb Illegal Downloading on College Campuses Act of 2007."
An interesting article claims the RIAA have begun new tactics to threaten downloaders. Now instead of engaging in costly legal battles they're circumventing the legal system and going straight to the ISP, even though it's common knowledge that ISPs get things wrong.
A study in the Journal of Political Economy by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf has found that illegal music downloads have had no noticeable effects on the sales of music, contrary to the claims of the recording industry.
Catherine Lewan, a former Kazaa user who was sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) during the organization's attempt to crack down on file sharing, has filed a class-action lawsuit against Sharman Networks, the company which created the Kazaa file sharing program.
mewithoutYou have a new album coming out next Tuesday. We currently have the band featured on the main page and are offering a free download on their AP.net profile for a song from their new album. The band recently addressed the "leaking" of their album, and I thought the message was one which should be given more attention.
MTV is set to try to get its share of the digital-music pie, with the roll-out of a new online music retailer set for tomorrow (May 17). The download service, Urge, will put the MTV brand into the multimillion download industry, and will feature exclusive tracks culled from bands’ appearances on upcoming TRL and Unplugged episodes. To give it a push, MTV partnered with Microsoft to integrate the music store into upcoming upgrades of Windows Media Player similar to the retail/player integration in iTunes.
