Ars Technica reports that, contrary to their claim of ending all new lawsuits, record labels affiliated with the RIAA are now filing new lawsuits against named individuals. They argue that these lawsuits were in process before the decision to halt the tactic.

The group’s own definition of “new cases” does not include those that were already in process as “John Doe” cases or where settlement letters had already gone out.

This was the case in March, when the RIAA filed a case against an Omaha resident for file-swapping. Those hypocrites! But the case had been detected in 2007, a John Doe lawsuit was filed months later, and once the necessary account information was subpoenaed from the ISP, the John Doe suit was replaced with a named lawsuit in March 2009.

An RIAA spokesperson told us at the time that the issue was about fairness (though we raised some obvious questions about just how fair it was). “We’re obviously pleased to transition to a new program going forward but that doesn’t mean we can give a free pass to those who downloaded music illegally in the past,” we were told. “How fair would it be to the thousands of individuals who took responsibility for their actions and settled their case while others are let off the hook? We’re still in the business of deterrence and it must be credible.”

Surprise, surprise.

• Ars Technica
• Digg

Michael Geist reports that the Songwriter’s Association of Canada, which in 2007 proposed a blanket music license, has changed their proposal so that the new license is now voluntary rather than compulsory.

The foundation of the proposal remains the same – the creation of a new right of remuneration for music file sharing in return for the consumer freedom to share an unlimited amount of music across all platforms including peer-to-peer networks, mobile devices, instant messaging, and even email. The SAC notes that downloading music for non-commercial purposes is arguably already lawful in Canada due to the private copying levy, but that its proposal would cover more broadly all music file sharing activities.

The most important change to the SAC proposal is that it would now be voluntary for both creators and consumers. Artists could choose to participate, thereby addressing international copyright law concerns about mandated participation. The proposal also envisions providing consumers with the right to opt-out of the plan if they do not share music files. The voluntary approach – which resembles elements of a plan the Electronic Frontier Foundation began promoting in 2003 – should remove the consumer concerns associated with stiff monthly fees for non-music sharers. While some artists may reject the plan, the SAC is betting that most will participate given the opportunity to benefit from a new source of revenue.

Voluntary or compulsory, my feelings on such a license remain the same. See my Choruss post for my commentary on such licensing.

• Michail Geist
• Slashdot

Last.fm has decided to charge everyone outside the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany €3 a month for Last.fm radio access. Everything else is still gratis.

Today we’re announcing an upcoming change to the way Last.fm Radio works in some parts of the world. In the United States, United Kingdom and Germany, nothing will change.

In all other countries, listening to Last.fm Radio will soon require a subscription of €3.00 per month. There will be a 30 track free trial, and we hope this will convince people to subscribe and keep listening to the radio. Everything else on Last.fm (scrobbling, recommendations, charts, biographies, events, videos etc.) will remain free in all countries, like it is now.

This is a shame. Last.fm’s advantage over Pandora when it came to radio was the lack of restrictions on where you could play it. While this is better than an outright block, it still places limits on who can stream from Last.fm (namely, whoever has a credit card otherwise has the means to pay online). It’s good to see that everything else is gratis, but the radio is a big feature of Last.fm, and charging for it could cause a serious change in their customer base, even if the price is relatively low.

PS: there is a follow-up announcement explaining the rationale for this.

• Last.fm blog
• Slashdot

TorrentFreak reports that Nine Inch Nails has launched their own BitTorrent tracker to handle the bandwidth of their official lossless tracks.

[W]hen they released the album ‘Ghosts‘ for free last year their server couldn’t handle the high traffic numbers and downloads, so the linked to the torrents they had uploaded to The Pirate Bay instead. Thanks to The Pirate Bay, many fans didn’t have to wait till the server recovered, and the torrent quickly became one of the most downloaded files on the tracker.

With the release of their tour promo NIN/JA today, NIN decided to prevent similar server troubles, and the band now offers .torrent downloads for the higher quality (and size) downloads. The tracker used for the torrents is hosted by the band itself on the tracker.nin.com subdomain. The tracker is already being used by thousands of fans just hours after it went up.

I wonder what license the promos are under.

• TorrentFreak
• Digg

AppleInsider reports that FBT Productions sued Universal in an attempt to gather more royalties from online sales, due to the significantly less effort necessary from labels to distribute online. The court ruling sided with Universal.

The jury’s decision means record labels will continue to control most of the revenues from album sales. Artists and production companies have called for more proceeds from the online music marketplace as the record labels’ overhead is much lower since companies like Apple are responsible for the marketing, management, delivery, and so on.

The production company had argued their contract entitles them to more proceeds for songs sold online. It reasoned that the tracks the label provides to services like iTunes and Amazon are music “masters”, used for reproducing endless digital copies. FBT, owned by brothers Mark and Jeff Bass, said their contract entitles them to higher royalties on music “master” sales, but the jury did not agree.

Good thing a record label is completely optional to be successful online. My advice: leave Universal and sell directly.

• AppleInsider
• Digg

LA County Courthouse. Credit: "courthouse wide angle" by maveric2003 on Flickr (CC-BY)

US Federal Prosecutors are seeking a 6-month prison term for Kevin Cogill, the owner of a music website who pleaded guilty to uploading pre-release tracks of the Guns N’ Roses album Chinese Democracy:

The sentence being sought — including the calculation of damages based on the illegal activity of as many as 1,310 websites that disseminated the music after Cogill released it — underscores how serious the government is about punishing those for uploading pre-release material.

[...]

The government claimed the amount of infringement equaled $371,622. The higher the number the larger the potential prison term. The government said it produced a “reasonable estimate” and gave the defendant the “benefit of the doubt” in its calculations, which were based on each infringement being worth 99 cents on iTunes.

The Recording Industry Association of America, however, told the judge overseeing the case that the defendant’s conduct resulted in more than a $2.2 million loss based on a “$6.39 legitimate wholesale value” for the nine tracks the RIAA claims (.pdf) were downloaded about 350,000 times.

Regardless of the phantom figures, the numbers floated by the government and the RIAA assume that the music would have been purchased had it not been downloaded for free.

This illustrates the problem with the concept of “intellectual property theft”; they have no real way to determine what the value of what was “stolen”, and so they are forced to make assumptions, like everyone would have bought an album if they wanted the one song, or that people all shop at iTunes.  Putting people in prison based on these half-fantasy models don’t make much sense either.

• Wired article

Torrentfreak reports that Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, infamous for his crusade against Napster in 2000, has downloaded his band’s own album illegally.

“I sat there myself and downloaded ‘Death Magnetic’ from the Internet just to try it,” he said. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is how it works.’ I figured if there is anybody that has a right to download ‘Death Magnetic’ for free, it’s me.”

Ulrich went on to say that he and half a dozen friends were enjoying a bottle of wine at his house and used a file-sharing client (the name of which eluded him) to download the album.

“We found it – this was like two or three days after it leaked. I was like, ‘You know what? I’ve gotta try this.’ So we sat there and thirty minutes later I had ‘Death Magnetic’ in my computer. It was kind of bizarre.”

I’m hoping that this means that he will see things in an entirely different light from now on. Earlier in the article he was quoted as not being near as upset as his label when the album leaked, and I remember reading earlier about possible plans to try a Radiohead-style release in the future, so hopefully we can see some change of heart soon. Still, I’m surprised that he had never tried the technology until now.

• Torrentfreak
• Slashdot

Closed. Source: Gaetan Lee on Flickr. License: CC-BY 2.0

TechCrunch reports that the advertisement-based, student-targeted subscription service Ruckus has shut down.

At around 5 PM EST today the site went down with a notice stating that it was undergoing an update. As of 5:30, it was displaying the shutdown notice seen above.

We’re told that music that has not passed its “renew date” still works, but that music that has expired will no longer work because the DRM licensing server has apparently shut down.

I feel sorry for everyone who will lose all of their music in the next month.

• TechCrunch
• Slashdot

Free - Credit: alicepopkorn on Flickr (CC BY)

January 1st was Public Domain Day.  Many works from authors who have died a long time ago have just entered the public domain.

Australian politician (and sheep breeder) James Guthrie (“A world history of sheep and wool”)
American film composer Edward H. Plumb (“Bambi” and many other Disney films)
American hymnist George Bennard (“The Old Rugged Cross”)
British painter and illustrator Lucy Kemp-Welch (the original edition of “Black Beauty”)
American screenwriter Jack Henley (“Bonzo Goes to College”)
American writer J. P. McEvoy (“Dixie Dugan”)
American author Betty MacDonald (“Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle”)
British poet Robert Service (“The Cremation of Sam McGee”, etc.)
English poet Alfred Noyes (“The Highwayman”)
English music scholar Percy Scholes (“The Oxford Companion to Music”)
American artist and author Marjorie Flack (“The Story About Ping”)
American writer Johnston McCulley (creator of “Zorro”)
British aircraft manufacturer Alliott Verdon Roe (as in Avro, as in the Arrow)
Serbian geophysicist Milutin Milanković (early proponent of ice ages)
British author and translator Lionel Giles (translator of the most widely-published English edition of Sun-Tzu’s “Art of War”)
Romanian-British rabbi and scholar Shulem Moshkovitz (the Shotzer Rebbe)
American financial analyst John Moody (of Wall Street fame)

…

Danish bacteriologist Hans Christian Gram (of Gram staining fame)
British-Canadian author, conservationist, and literary fraud Archie Belaney (Grey Owl)
Latvian-born ethnologist and musicologist Abraham Zevi Idelsohn (to whom the lyrics to “Hava Nagila” are attributed)
American cartoonist E. C. Segar (creator of “Popeye”)
American illustrator Johnny Gruelle (creator of “Raggedy Ann”)
American lawyer Clarence Darrow (of “Scopes Monkey Trial” fame)
American songwriter James Thornton (“When You Were Sweet Sixteen”, written in 1898)
Japanese martial artist Kano Jigoro (founder of judo)
American industrialist Harvey Samuel Firestone (of tire fame)

Sorry that this is late and that there has been no activity lately.  Remember, all the posters here are currently students, so when break rolls around, a lot of us lose touch with our computers.

• publicdomain

Beware of the Gavel - Credit: brymo on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

Ray Beckerman of Recording Industry vs. The People, with the help of other contributors, has done some research and found that the RIAA’s press release in the Wall Street Journal was not entirely truthful.  The article said that the lawsuits had ended a while ago, while Ray claims that they continued all the way up to last week.

According to a report on Wired.com, the RIAA spokesman claims that the RIAA has not filed any new lawsuits “for months”; according to the Wall Street Journal report the RIAA stopped filing mass lawsuits “early this fall”; and the Associated Press was apparently told that the RIAA had stopped bringing new lawsuits in August.

Being very familiar with the RIAA’s penchant for “misspeaking”, even when under oath, I investigated the matter a bit, and learned that a large number of suits have been brought by the RIAA quite recently, one as recently as this Monday.

I knew that there was something suspicious about that article.

• Recording Industry vs. The People
• Slashdot