Rhapsody has opned a DRM-free store, with the first 100,000 albums free.

Rhapsody, known for its subscription music service, just opened a DRM-free MP3 store. The MP3s are encoded in 256kpbs CBR, and run $.99 per track and $9.99 per album. Shoppers can preview 25 full-length tracks a month from the standard 5 million song catalog, which is extra sweet if you ask us. To kick things off, the first 100,000 sign-ups to the store until July 4th get one album for free, so give it a try and let us know how it stacks up against the big boys.

Jamendo is still cooler.

• Gizmodo
• Rhapsody

Daniel Dove has been convicted by a jury of his peers for criminal copyright infringment. Other admins, Scott McCausland and Grant Stanley pled guilty.

“The jury was presented with evidence that Dove was an administrator of a small group of Elite Torrents members known as “Uploaders,” who were responsible for supplying pirated content to the group,” the Department of Justice press release states. “The evidence showed that Dove recruited members who had very high-speed Internet connections, usually at least 50 times faster than a typical high-speed residential Internet connection, to become Uploaders. The evidence also showed that Dove operated a high-speed server, which he used to distribute pirated content to the Uploaders.”

The press release goes on say the case is the “first criminal conviction after jury trial for P2P copyright infringement.” Most would agree, however, that Daniel stands in a league far removed from the overwhelming majority of file-sharers. The overall impact of this conviction breaks little new ground, as uploaders have always been the historical target of copyright enforcement.

Sentencing is scheduled for September of this year. He faces up to 10 years in prison, far longer than the 5 month stay of his fellow administrators.

Dude, if you are guilty, just plead guilty.

• Slyck
• Slashdot

Bungie’s free game (GPL), Aleph One, reaches 0.20.

A new version of Aleph One is available from http://source.bungie.org/get/ and http://marathon.sourceforge.net/.

Highlights include a vastly improved Lua API, TrueType font support, major updates to themes and dialog layouts, enhanced Find Internet Game metaserver functionality, as well as lots of other features and bug fixes.

Read the full release notes here

Does anyone know how the content is licensed?  Looks proprietary.

• Aleph One

The RIAA has been ordered to pay Tanya Andersen $108,000 in legal fees.

Judge Redden ruled (.pdf) that RIAA’s arguments against legal fees were “misplaced.”

“An award of attorney’s fees to the prevailing party are ‘the rule rather than the exception’ under the Copyright Act, and ’should be awarded routinely,’” Redden wrote.

…

In response to the lawsuit against her, Andersen has countersued the RIAA in a case seeking class-action status to represent what her attorneys say is thousands of persons wrongly sued by the RIAA. That case has been dismissed three times, and its fourth try is pending.

Andersen attorney Lory Lybeck requested $300,000 and the RIAA suggested $30,000 was more appropriate. The award is upwards of $190 a hour.

I read about this the other day, but I didn’t realize that the RIAA had to pay her.  Awesomesauce.

• Wired

Creative Commons is collecting stories on how using the licenses have contributed to the success of people and organizations:

Over the past few months several of us at Creative Commons have been collaborating with our colleagues at Creative Commons Australia to create a collaborative system for promoting the great CC stories that will help the world understand how great Creative Commons licenses are for creative works. To highlight the global nature of this launch, it coincides with the CC Australia’s conference today (June 24, 2008), “Building an Australasian Commons” where this project is to be presented.

CC’s CEO, Joi Ito, said in the press release for this project that its important to realize that CC is not just a “cute idea,” but a crucial fact in the success of many businesses, artists, authors, and professionals. So, highlighted in the Case Studies Project are examples such as the Blender Foundation and their success with applying Creative Commons Attribution license to both of their Open Source 3D animations. Also, there are specific highlights on authors like NYTimes bestselling author Cory Doctorow’s overall usage of CC to support the dissemination of his books, all the way to detailed casestudies about Luxembourg-based (but global!) Jamendo and of course studies on Nine Inch Nails Ghost I-IV and The Slip album releases. Remember: The goal is to focus on the story of these successes.

The best part is that they are taking submissions from the community at large. Check out the case study page and contribute to the project.
Disclaimer: I, Brian Rowe, work at CC as the Legal Intern.

Insecurity, a hacker film, has been released under CC BY-NC-ND.

Insecurity is a hacker film, but rather unlike any you’re likely to have seen before. Almost everyone involved in its creation are, to one degree or another, involved in the IT industry or some other nerd subculture – and we’ve done our best to keep as technically accurate as we can.

Wanky blurb from the back of the DVD:

“When offered four thousand dollars to break into a computer network, Leon(Peter Love) and Greg (Kurtis Wakefield) aren’t concerned with something as petty as morality.

“The only real questions are what complications can arise from hacking into a small home business, what’s wrong with the twenty year old daughter Madison (Zoe Tarling)…

… and what should Greg do when his friend can’t stop watching the girl on her own webcam – and without her knowledge.”

Not my favorite license, but I can’t wait to see it.

• Insecurity
• Creative Commons

HP has freed AdvFS, its 64-bit filesystem, under the GPLv2.

The code contribution coincides, for example, with the current implementation of a Linux-enabled supercomputing grid environment on HP Integrity servers in southern Italy at the Southern Partnership for Advance Computational Infrastructures (SPACI), a previous user of Tru64 AdvFS on Unix.

Also built-in to HP’s Tru64 Unix OS, AdvFS is designed to provide 64-bit performance benefits such as a transaction journaling environment for file recovery in seconds, regardless of the size of the file system, and volume configuration on a single disk partition, an entire disk, or an aggregated volume.

Hopefully this will help free platforms gain ground in the 64-bit realm (as if they weren’t already ahead).

• Beta News
• Slashdot

IsoHunt and Jamendo have partnered, adding 10,000 albums to the torrent search engine.

…isoHunt has announced a partnership with Jamendo, a site that deals in Creative Commons licensed music. Reaching the 10,000 album milestone only days ago, content available on Jamendo is growing quickly and when you grow, it helps to be able to get the content out there. This is why isoHunt decided to partner with several BitTorrent sites. isoHunt’s owner, Gary Fung, has been a long time supporter of Creative Commons and public domain works, and has stated that there is a strong future in Creative Commons material at isoHunt.

…Jamendo is also partnering with SumoTorrent, and torrent.to, and has been experimenting with mininova. In addition, their torrents are also available through Vuze. What better way to “stick it to the **AA” as so many of our commenters put it, than to ignore their memberships product, and use sites like this instead.

I love Jamendo. I can’t wait until I get some time to browse through it more.

• TorrentFreak

Revolution Void, has released a new album, Summer Solstice

I’d just like to announce that I am releasing a new Revolution Void album, The Politics of Desire, today, June 21 2008. This album was truly a labor of love and has gone through many iterations, both in production/recording and post-production (mixing, mastering), but it’s finally ready to go. Of especial significance to me is that today is the summer solstice, so I felt it would be an auspicious time to release the album.

It’s currently uploading to Jamendo so check back later in the day and I’ll post a link (or check the Jamendo Revolution Void page).

Can’t wait to listen to it.

• Revolution Void

The University of Bath has created a self-replicating 3D printer which they have GPLed.

RepRap itself stands for Replicating Rapid-prototyper and works by building up the component in layers of plastic to produce something akin to a Lego brick in terms of robustness. Sure, there are other 3D printers out there but most are hellish expensive. RepRap did not cost tens of thousands of pounds but less than a thousand.

Best of all, it’s open source. The developers say that “following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machine, you can make another and give it to a friend…”

I’m not sure if they are just doing this to be funny, but it’s pretty cool.

• Daniweb