RIAA to drop failed lawsuits strategy

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It’s official – the RIAA is giving up on its strategy of suing thousands of individuals for file-sharing. The campaign, which began in 2003, has hit 35,000 people. At no point have the record labels ever won a contested court case, instead gaining masses of default judgements against defendants who never turned up.

It’s failed to stop file-sharing, too. Album sales have gone nowhere but down, even when taking into account digital sales increases. Not to mention the PR disaster it’s caused for the labels – who’ve sued pensioners, 13-year-old girls, and penniless single mothers.

The Pirate Bay hits 15 million downloaders and 3 million registered users

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How appropriate. Just a few days after Talk Like a Pirate Day 2008, the Pirate Bay – the world’s most notorious bittorrent tracker – has announced that it has hit 15 million peers, and 3 million registered users. For those of you unfamiliar with bittorrent terminology, that means that they’ve got 3 million uploaders, and 15 million downloaders. That’s more than the populations of Norway and Sweden put together…

BBC iPlayer and YouTube popularity soars in past year

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Since the BBC’s iPlayer was launched last year, the popularity of web streaming has increased by 168%, according to web usage statistics from PlusNet’s 300,000 customers.

On Monday 30th June, between 9-10pm, 287GB of video content was watched, setting a new record for the company. Factors contributing to this may have included people catching up on other programmes following the Euro 2008 final…

Legit internet TV network hit by denial of service attack from anti-piracy company

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Online media company Revision3 suffered a severe Denial of Service (DoS) attack over the weekend, which brought down the main site, the RSS server, and even its internal corporate email. Although DoS attacks far from uncommon in the modern internet era, the real mystery was who would actually want to close down Revision3. The answer proved pretty disturbing.

QTRAX launches, claiming legal access to 30 million tracks. Server overwhelmed

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QTRAX, which originally launched back in 2002 but closed down due to avoid the risk of legal action, has relaunched today.

It claims that users will be able to find and download between 25 and 30 million copyrighted music tracks, with the blessing of a large proportion of the music industry.

“QTRAX is a magical and game-changing service that revolutionizes the way fans consume digital music,” said QTRAX President and CEO Allan Klepfisz.

Well, possibly not revolutionary. We’ve seen a shift towards “free” ad-supported music streaming and download services recently.

Michael Moore's 'Sicko' leaked to BitTorrent – huzzah!

moore.jpg Please oh please don’t let this mean Michael Moore’s next film – sorry, documentary, will be concerned with the perils of poor struggling artists and filmmakers whose life-long work is exploited on Peer to Peer networks. I don’t think I can handle a documentary which interviews Metallica, the world surely isn’t ready for another grlimpse of James Hetfield’s guitar-antics.

Yep, so Michael Moore’s latest documentary, Sicko, has been leaked to the internets weeks before its cinematic debut. There’s been much controversy over the fact that he filmed parts of the documentary in Cuba without adequate…