While illegal MP3 downloads may be giving the internet a bad name, here's a story proving it isn't all theft and piracy in the world of digital music.

Scars on 45, a UK band funded by fans via the Slicethepie website, have just bagged themselves a major label record deal with Atlantic Records.

With Slicethepie, music aficionados take on the A&R role, making money by reviewing tracks, spotting new talent and ensuring the best bands get put forward for financing. Fans can also invest anything from £1 upwards to help a band they think are worthy of hitting the big-time.

And that's just what they did with Scars on 45. Within weeks of signing up to the site, the band had raised £15,000 directly from music fans to record their self-produced debut album. Their track "Beauty's Running Wild" was then featured on hit US show CSI:NY and from there on in it all fell into place.

David Courtier-Dutton, Slicethepie CEO said: 'We are delighted for both the band and their fans who, in this case, have truly been instrumental in their success. We believe that consumer driven filtering has an increasingly influential role to play in the future of the industry enabling talented artists to access an ever widening range of commercial opportunities."

Check the Scars on 45 Myspace page here.

Think you've got an ear for the next saviours of pop? Try your hand at a bit of online A&R at Slicethepie here.

Pirate Bay founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij have been fined a further one million Swedish kronor (£87,500) after failing to heed a court order asking that the torrent site be shut down.

EMI Music, Universal Music, Sony BMG and Warner Music took the pair to court last year for encouraging and facilitating the illegal downloading and sharing of copy-protected materials and won .

As ever Neij remained as nonchalant and un-phased as ever. Already being chased for a 50 million kronor (£4.3 million) fine from last year's court case, he said of the news that " a few million more or less doesn't really affect me."

So torrent sites like Pirate Bay; web liberators, the Robin Hoods of the digital age, or just plain thieves? What do you think? Let us know in the comments section below or via Twitter here.

It seems like a match made in cinema/gaming heaven, but those waiting for a Metal Gear movie better stop holding their breath. According to Hollywood producer Michael De Luca, the project is in no-mans land without any super high-tech stealth gadgets to protect it.

De Luca, who was spearheading plans for the game's silver screen adaptation, said to Collider.com, "I don't think it's going to move forward because I got the sense that there may not be enough of a coordinated will at this point on the side of certain parties to see a movie get made."

He continues "Video game companies are very protective of their property and there are certain things a studio requires freedom-wise to market and distribute a movie effectively in a global marketplace and sometimes getting those two things to match up is really hard, and in the case of Metal Gear Solid, the agendas just....not because the parties weren't amicable, it was just kind of impossible to get the agendas to match up."

The genesis of this rumour has been knocking about for over a decade, way back to when Metal Gear Solid achieved rave reviews back on the original PlayStation. As I remember back then, a genuinely inspired casting move put the late Patrick Swayze as rumoured to take the lead role of Solid Snake, with his brother Don as arch nemesis Liquid Snake. More recently, Christian Bale had been linked with the project.

Paying lip service to the fans, Snake voice actor and Hollywood scribe David Hayter was even said to be on script writing duties. The project even had a director, Kurt Wimmer of Equilibrium fame.

With so much at least rumoured ready to go, what went wrong?

As is always the case, it's looking like money is the real road-block here. Rumour has it Sony Pictures were only willing to cough up something in the region of $60 million for production of a Metal Gear movie. To give some context, the last James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, cost $230 million to make. Metal Gear maestro Hideo Kojima and Konami are said to feel that such a paltry budget could not do justice to Solid Snake's epic adventures.

If it truly is the case that a Metal Gear movie may never see the light of day it truly is a shame; if done correctly and faithfully, the stealthy, black-ops tales of espionage would make for perfect (and surprisingly high-brow) popcorn fare.

Come on Sony! Dig a little deeper! Surely animating the Metal Gear mechs themselves alone would cost 60 million bucks?!

Check the game footage above to see how exciting it all could be.

Via: Kotaku

Two days after the Pirate Bay announced their to-hell-with-the-copyright video service the last thing we were all expecting was for Peter Sunde and Co. to cash in their legendary download service. But they have.

All the comments I've read about the story have been on how the dream is over and that the founders of one of busiest sites on the web has sold its community up the river, but not so, say I and to prove so, here's five reasons why the Pirate Bay was right to sell to Global Gaming Factory, if only for £4.7m:

1) It's legal

With all the announcements around Digital Britain and the constant threats from lawyers and copyright infringement watchdogs, one might have thought it would come as a bit of a relief that you can download anything you want without having to worry about huge fines, bandwidth throttling or jail time?

What's more, just because it's legal, that doesn't mean to say that it's not going to be free. There's been no official word from GGF but we do know that the Pirate Bay founders (perhaps we should forever refer to them as the Founders?) went to great lengths to ensure that their buyers had the right ethos.

If the site really does get as much traffic as they say, then it sounds like GGF can afford to run it with no subscription cost for the display advertising alone, even if they're not prepared to get any more inventive than that. So, legal and very probably free. Sounds ok to me.

You would think that the guys over at the Pirate Bay might lay low for a little while, given the on-going court case and the possibility of jail-time.

But no, their fight against (or should I say, for) copyright infringement shows no sign of relenting - in fact it is showing clear signs of accelerating with the beta release of the Video Bay.

Nothing actually works on the Video Bay at present apart from a couple of test video clips that are a little temperamental. Visitors are presented with a homescreen that states: "This site will be an experimental playground and as such subjected to both live and drunk (en)coding, so please don't bug us too much if the site ain't working properly."

Pirate Bay Spokesman Peter Sunde said it might be a while before the site is launched properly. "It will be done when it's done, in the future, in like a year or five," he said.

The Video Bay will aim to rival YouTube with streaming video content. Unlike YouTube, however, there will be no removal of content that may infringe on copyright legislation.

Considering the huge fan base that already exists at the Pirate Bay and the fact that many of these fans are tech savvy - expect the Video Bay to be huge in the near future.

Related post: Pirate Party wins two seats in the EU elections

(via TorrentFreak)

While most had their eyes on Stephen Fry at the Nokia N97 launch, some keen bods were busy pumping the execs for information and it seems they pumped well. It turns out that Nokia is planning on phasing out the DRM on their Comes With Music package meaning that users will be able to download tracks as MP3s and actually keep their tunes.

It's always been the desire of the mobile giant to go DRM-free but ultimately the decision has always been down to the labels who have never exactly been first to come round to new digital ideas.

It seems, though, that the big wigs have softened/modernised their attitudes since deals like the DRM-free one between Virgin and Universal and it looks as all with CWM will reap the rewards as of 2010.

A Nokia spokesperson said: "Nokia is committed to going DRM free on the Nokia Music Store in 2009".

Labour may have lost serious face but it's been a night to remember for the Pirate Party in the EU elections. The Swedish based political group will have won two seats with a 7.1% share of their national vote when the Lisbon Treaty passes increasing the Scandinavian county's number of MEPs from 18 to 20.

Leader of the party, Rick Falkvinge said:

"This feels wonderful. The citizens have understood it's time to make a difference. The older politicians have taken apart young peoples' lifestyle, bit by bit. We do not accept that the authorities' mass-surveillance."

The Pirate Party polled a total of 200,000 votes, a huge increase on the 2006 national elections when they amassed 34,918 of the Swedish electorate, and a lot of this can be linked to the high profile Pirate Bay court case during which membership of the party tripled.

There was some success of the German branch of the party who managed 1% of the national vote; a good start but not enough for a seat just yet. Looking forward to seeing their name on my ballot paper next time around.

Hard to know exactly what policies the Pirates have beyond the obvious stance against copyright infringement but, regardless, I think it's an excellent step in EU politics to have a member voicing the kinds of opinions that would otherwise never be heard. Even if the Pirate MEPs are unable to swing any major decisions, they'll be able to change a few perceptions on the protection of the antiquated business models of the cinema and recording industries.

(via Torrent Freak)

Seven-million people in the UK use illegal downloads - apparently costing the economy tens of billions of pound according to government advisors.

Researcher found that 1.3 million people use one file sharing site per weekday, which compared to the size of the population hardly seems like an epidemic.

The Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property (SABIP) warned it may be hard to change attitudes - although some say it's not attitudes that need to change but the industry who still charge a disproportionate amount for digital copies.

The government says work must be done internationally to tackle the problem.

Intellectual Property Minister, (a whole minister - is that really necessary?) David Lammy said the report put into context the impact illegal downloads had on copyright industries and the UK economy as a whole.

"This is not an issue confined by national boundaries and I am sure that other [EU] member states and their copyright industries will find this report of use in the development of policy," added Mr Lammy.

An alliance (or "greedy-hoard") of nine UK bodies representing the creative industries joined trades unions to call on the government to force internet service providers to cut off persistent illegal file-sharers. And everyone knows, if there is one sector you don't want to piss off it's the creative industries - imagine a strike, no Doctors, no Eastenders, no Holby, no One Show, imagine the chaos. Imagine the silence. Bliss.

ISPs have gallantly shirked any responsibility reiterating that it isn't their job to police the internet.

What this all goes to show is that the government and people doing the government's research still fundamentally don't understand downloading.

They aren't costing the economy tens of billions of pounds, that is nothing but propaganda and scaremongering. Using the flagging economy to turn the screw on a kid who's downloaded the latest version of Photoshop CS4 so he can put the head of the kid that bullies him at school on a camel seems frankly, a bit much.

What these researchers are suggesting is that downloaders would buy every movie, song or program they've torrented, P2Pd or USBd, and that's just not the case. They'd do without.

And maybe the government have decided now isn't exactly the best time for MPs to be sounding off about freeloading: Because filling in a claims form and taking public money to clean your moat is, undeniably, far more devious, than downloading Space Cowboys.

Clint Eastwood, Donald Sutherland and Tommy Lee Jones - in space! Amazing.

(Via BBC)

What is it with Swedish judges and their obsession with the Swedish Copyright Association and the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property? It turns out that her honour in charge of the Pirate Bay after-trial to decide whether the first hearing was presided over by a biased judge has been removed for, yes, you guessed it, bias. Nice.

Judge Ulrika Ihrfelt was relieved of her position on Wednesday and despite this further set-back and level of ridiculousness, the appellate court's president, Fredrik Wersall, said the case would be sorted "in a few weeks at the maximum" - provided they can find someone with now preconceptions on copyright infringement presumably.

(via Wired)

First Facebook had a go, then the word was that Google made an offer and now the rumour is that Apple plans to buy Twitter and announce it in time for WWDC on 9th June.

The mooted price has jumped a mile from the last supposed offer of $250 million to a far healthier $700 million and according to the quote from an insider, "Apple is in late stage negotiations".

Hard to know how much truth there is in this one. Last time it was just a meeting about advertising, apparently, so if there even is some talking between the two companies, then it could have been about a whole bunch of things. If it is about a deal, then that represents a very interesting move for what is, essentially, a hardware and software company into the world of services.

Google is fast becoming the giant of the tech world and it's their take over of the internet that the waning Microsoft covets. Is this Apple's first steps towards ensuring long term growth or is it just the next big company on the list to be linked with the microblogging darling. A fiver says it'll be Twitter to buy Yahoo! next.

(via @Zee Tech Crunch)

This is currently a breaking story, so we don't have a lot of detail right now, but Pirate Bay defendant Peter Sunde has accused the judge in the Pirate Bay case, Tomas Norström, of bias. He made the accusations on Twitter, claiming "the #spectrial judge seems to be working within the copyright lobby".

Swedish news sources claim that the judge is a member of a couple of organizations that might have compromised his neutrality in the case. Firstly the Swedish Copyright Association (SFU) and secondly, the Swedish Association for Industrial Property. The former body also counts rights holders' lawyers Henrik Pontén, Peter Danowsky and Monique Wadsted, and the latter pushes for stronger copyright.

It's unlikely that this could have a effect on the trial, as it's come to light after the judgement has been passed. The Pirate Bay's lawyers have had ample opportunity to raise this. It does mean, however, that the verdict of the promised appeal could turn out very different.

Several law sources have criticized the judge for taking the case under these circumstances, but the judge has resisted pressure, saying; "My view has been that these activities do not constitute a conflict of interest".

Eric Bylander, Associate Professor of Procedural Law at the School of Gothenburg, disagrees, saying that in such a high-profile case the judge should have been more careful. Peter Sunde is promising more detail later on today, so keep an eye on this developing story.

Updated: Some quotes from thelocal.se:

"The copyright lobby has really managed to bring corruption to Sweden" - Pirate Party chairman Rickard Falkvinge

via @brokep and Sveriges Radio P3 (Google translated)

Anyone considering mobile broadband might want to rethink their decision today, after BT announced that it would henceforth be blocking access to the Pirate Bay for its mobile broadband customers. The company states that it's in "compliance with a new UK voluntary code".

BT's mobile broadband is based on Vodafone's network and it's being claimed that the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) - who were responsible for a block on Wikipedia earlier this year - are behind the move. UPDATE: IWF claim no role in this. See below. Apparently Orange, O2, T-Mobile, Virgin Mobile, Vodafone and 3 have also all agreed to participate.

The move comes after the Pirate Bay's administrators were convinced of assisting the making available of copyrighted content and sentenced to a year in prison. The four are appealing the decision, though I argue that I don't think it'll make the blindest bit of difference.

What we really don't want, though, is an unelected, non-governmental organization like the IWF deciding what content we're allowed to consume online. As OnlineFandom points out, many Swedish labels have found ways to gain considerable commercial benefit out of The Pirate Bay, sharing content on it with full permission. Why should Brits miss out on that?

Update: BT claims that it's nothing to do with the trial, just the fact that people under 18 can sign up for mobile broadband packages and that there's 18+ content on the Pirate Bay. That sounds like a load of baloney to me. Why would they block one site and not a million others that host slightly adult content - starting with YouTube?

Update 2: The IWF have got in touch with us with the following statement:

It's puzzling, therefore, where this has arisen from. We'll dig in a little further and see what we can find.

(via Tech Radar)

The RIAA, BPI, IFPI, MPAA and a million other acronyms, all greeted the Swedish court's verdict against the Pirate Bay on Friday with the utmost of glee. I have no doubt that parties were held, and major label record execs probably had an excellent weekend, but there was one little thing in their reactions that interested me.

"There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that."

Those are the words of John Kennedy, chairman of the IFPI. I've picked them out because they illustrate wonderfully why the major record labels in their current state are still absolutely clueless about how filesharing works.

Trying to chop of the head of the file-sharing Hydra is utterly futile. It's the world's most massive game of whack-a-mole where it takes years for the copyright owners to swing the hammer and it takes hours for moles to pop up and down.

The pointlessness of the fight is illustrated wonderfully by the Pirate Bay's statement today that they're going to appeal. An appeal means that (until it's complete) the court's judgement is essentially worthless. It can't be used as precedent.

That appeal will take several years and thanks to the speed at which innovation occurs in the filesharing community, by the time it's complete The Pirate Bay will likely be a footnote in history. There'll be another massive source of copyrighted content. The difference is that it'll probably be legitimate.

In an interview today, Spotify's UK head, Jon Mitchell, said that his company isn't bothered about Last.fm, iTunes or any other download platforms. What it's really competing against is piracy.

What Spotify knows, that the major labels still haven't figured out, is that price is only one factor in the war for consumer's ears. Catalogue, ease of use and speed are also incredibly important. Until Spotify came along, there was nothing that could touch filesharing networks for all four of those factors.

What Spotify did was to attack file-sharing on all four of those fronts. Spotify is free and it has the largest catalogue of any legitimate digital music service, so it's as close as possible to piracy on that front. It's also considerably easier for non-techy people to understand than Bittorrentm, which can, frankly, be quite confusing to newbies.

Lastly, it's far quicker to start up Spotify, search and hit play than it is to go to The Pirate Bay, get the torrent, then hope there's people seeding it, then wait for people to download before finally being able to play tracks. Consumers want software that just gets out of their way and lets them do what they want to do. File-sharing most certainly isn't that.

The moment that a company comes along doing the same thing for TV shows and movies, piracy figures for those types of content will drop massively. The iPlayer is a great start, but it needs content from every network, every producer and every country.

What will eventually defeat piracy is a shift in people's habits to access over ownership. If you can get content whenever you want, in whatever format you want, then you don't need a copy sitting on your hard drive. That makes it much easier to deliver advertising along with the content, so greater revenues are possible for companies offering streaming.

It'll require a mindset change among consumers, and a roll-out of mobile access to services that trust the user with a decent-size cache for use when out of signal range, but all of those are definitely within reach of the average consumer before a Pirate Bay appeal could ever be concluded.

The Pirate Bay verdict means nothing for record companies because the site stays up. It means nothing for the Pirate Bay's administrators, because they're appealing the verdict and so they'll be stuck in legal limbo for years.

Lastly, it doesn't mean anything for the general public, the downloaders, because they're all slowly moving to services that offer access, rather than ownership. Companies that help facilitate that change will be the ones that I'll be betting on in the next few years.

Ever defiant, the Pirate Bay has resolutely stated in a blog post on its website that it won't be paying any fines. The post, titled "TPB FTW", explains how the administrators of the site will be appealing Friday's court decision, which will take another two to three years:

"You, our beloved users, know that this little speedbump on the information super highway is nothing more than just, a little bump. Todays verdict has already been appealed by us and will be taken to the next level of court (and that will take another 2 or 3 years!)"

The site also pleads with its users not to send them any donations. They provide a list of things to do if you want to support the site:

* Seed those torrents a little bit more than you usually do! * Buy a t-shirt and show the world where your sympathy is. * If you live in Europe, vote in the election for the EU parliament in June. * Continue to build the internets! Start more bittorrent sites, blog more, start your own lobby group, create, remix, mash up and continue to grow more heads on this amazing hydra that we know as the internets! * Do not be afraid of using the network. Invite your friends to this and other file sharing systems. Calm people down if they're upset. We need to stay united.

Meanwhile, protests erupted in several Swedish cities over the court's decision. 1,000 people turned up in Stockholm insisting that the ruling be overturned. The leader of the protest, Malin Littorin-Ferm, said:

"We young people have a whole platform on the Internet, where we have all our social contacts -- it is there that we live. The state is trying to control the Internet and, by extension, our private lives,"

The generation that live 'on the internet' are going to become more and more important, because for them, the rules of everything - just starting with attitudes to copyright - are completely different.

(via TheNextWeb)

It's taken two months to get here, and now a Swedish court has jailed the four men responsible for The Pirate Bay for one year.

Despite the fact that The Pirate Bay's servers don't host any copyright material themselves, merely acting as a gateway for users to torrent material from others' machines, the court has ruled that they must also pay £2.4m in damages.

A representative of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), John Kennedy, said that, "There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that."

If this month's news of Skype all over mobile phones of the world got you thinking how hot the VoIP company is right now, then you might be pleased to hear that eBay is letting the communications service loose on the stock market with an IPO all of its own.

Skype generated a cool $551 million in revenue in 2008 and, although they are beginning to run into the old market saturation problem, it doesn't take a genius to see it's all about the services they'll be offering in the future rather the number of accounts.

So, if you think the future is sky blue, then you might want to set aside some cash for next year. Buy low in 2008, sell high peaking some time around 2013. That's my completely inexperienced and entirely non-culpable piece of financial advice for the day.

Press Release

S2 Skypephone Review:

Yahoo! looks to be continuing it's slow slide into total meltdown with rumours of a third round of lay offs within the last 12 months.

An insider told the NYT that cuts could come as quickly as next week and there's every reason to think that the next one will be well in excess of 1,000 jobs with the first thousand leaving in early 2008 and a further 1,400 at the end of last year.

Yahoo! still gets 500 million or so eyes over its pages each and every month but, with the internet still booming, it's the growth where they're missing out. While Google was out buying Blogger and YouTube, Yahoo! missed opportunities to pick up Facebook and last year had to spend an awful lot of resources in talks with Microsoft. The offer from Gates, Ballmer & Sons will be starting to look very good right about now.

The EU has voted overwhelmingly in favour of a report that heavily criticises the 'three-strikes' law implemented in Frace that would kick filesharers off the internet after being caught downloading copyrighted content three times.

It's been massively unpopular with everyone except the content industries, with ISPs in particular fighting against having to cut off their own customers. Greek MEP Stavros Lambrinidis fought back against the idea too, with his report being overwhelming voted in - 481 votes in favor, 25 against and 21 abstentions.

Whether or not this will force France to back down is yet to be seen. Sarkozy doesn't have a great track record of obeying the EU parliament. Still, it should lessen the pressure on Irish ISPs who are being forced by their content industries to enact similar rules.

(via TorrentFreak)

As the Pirate Bay trial comes to its conclusion, bit torrent has once again been dragged, kicking and screaming into the light. The defendants of the case could spend their time worrying about the outcome, but instead they've channeled their efforts into adding more protection to keep the long arm of the law away from those who use the service for nefarious purposes. They've developed a new service called IPREDATOR, which promises to be better at keeping users' details a secret than current VPN services.

The service is currently in private beta, and will be gradually rolled out to all users some time around April 1st. The significance of the date isn't thanks to April Fool's Day, but because that's the date when Sweden's contraversial new Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) comes into effect, which grant copyright holders more rights to get their hands on file sharers' details. You've got to hand it to the Pirate Bay - they've got a lot of chutspa.

Currently, many bit torrent users around the world use VPN to protect their details. Costing a few pounds per month, the user protects their internet connection while pulling data in via the servers of a VPN provider. The torrenter's IP address is hidden, and will show the IP of the VPN service of choice instead, meaning their personal details are one step further away from copyright holders.

I always thought that a whole new battery technology would be the way to enhance our mobile power supply experience of techno-gadgetry, but it turns out it's going to be good old Li-ion all along. Apparently, we've been doing it wrong all this time and that we'll have one that can charge up in less than 20 seconds in two to three years' time.

We know this because a crack team of battery bods at MIT has already managed to get one to work. The deal is that the lithium ions are stored in the non-chargeable areas of the battery and it was thought that the slow speed of power up was because the ions themselves were sluggish.

As it turns out, the ions are not slow at all, we are. They'll move quickly but, so far, in battery design they've had to position themselves into small tunnels in the substrate, which has taken a very long.