RIAA to Users: Cash Registers are Ringing. Thanks!

The image below is of unknown authenticity and has been circulating around the net. Its apparently the reciept you get after you’ve have forked over protection money to the Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA), via their recently launched shakedown site. It’s at least good to know that as the RIAA forges ahead on it’s campaign to destroy any connection between the music industry and music fans, they havent forgotten their manners. The last sentence of the receipt is tragically ironic, wrong-headed and yet so very polite.

The original image came from here (Review Lister).

Pirate Bay Bitch Slaps MPAA

“Were winning” they say! I’d have to agree.
Our favorite swashbuckling buccaneers over at the Pirate Bay have done it again. These guys have all the swagger, ambition and balls that their name implies. Its not enough that they want to buy an island to freely distribute the digital goodness we all crave, or that they continually embarrass and poke fun at the luddite content industries, now the merry bandits have started a new site dedicated to the Oscars. Aptly named the OscarTorrents the site has helpfully organized torrents of movies that have been nominated for Oscars in all 24 Oscars categories.

Steve Jobs Steals My Math and uses it to Smacks Detractors

People have been belly-aching about Apple’s iTunes DRM for months, complaining that it’s somehow more restrictive then says Microsoft’s brown brick, the Zune. Steve (El Capitain) Job’s has been largely silent. Until now. Today Apple’s CEO came out swinging. In a letter posted on the Apple site, not only does he lay-the-smack-down on the “free iTunes” contingent but he steals my math to do it. A large part of his argument virtually mirrors the analysis I did way back in April of last year. Namely that most of the music on iPods is not from iTunes. Should I expect a check?

My five sentence summary of Steve’s 1800 word rant is:
iPods rock, DRM sucks. The labels made me put DRM on iPods before they’d license any music to me. If I open Apple’s DRM to every joe-blow company that comes asking Apple’s products would suck as much as Microsoft’s Zune. Only 3% of the songs on most iPods is from the iTunes music store the rest is from other sources.

My favorite quote:

“The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.”

Read the full letter here, to find the first two alternatives.

Thanks to Jake Walker for the news via Pho.

No more Colbert on GooTube?

The good folks at Viacom have sent our friends at GooTube a cease and desist letter, demanding that the service remove 100,000 video clips of the company’s shows. As of this posting Google has desisted from ceasing.

Linden Labs Does Right By Parody Second Life Site

I’ve played with Second Life on and off for a little over a year and have been as underwhelmed by the experience as I’ve been overwhelmed with the passion of its users. Some folks “grok” Second Life and some folks dont. I’m definitely one of the donts. To me SL is just D&D 2.0 with a larger percentage of girl geeks. Enter, GetaFirstLife.com, a great send-up of SL by Darren Barefoot, a canuck techie and Shakespeare fan.

IFPI: Digital Musics Gonna be Big

The good folks at the IFPI released a report (pdf) today which pegged the size of the digital music industry at $2 billion. This is double the size it was in 2005 and while thats great news, but still doesnt cover the homaging in the rest of the industry. Music sales are expected to continue its on going decline by another 3% drop in global music sales this year. Besides the news that “digital is big and growing”, the most interesting bit of info in the report was the split between online and mobile, which music was generally evenly split 50/50 online/mobile. Who knew? The only other bit of the report worth reading was the quotes from various music industry executives.

Copyright Term Creep Killed in UK?

Interesting article from Variety full of rumors and leaked reports and response to rumor and leaked reports. It looks like an independent report, called the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, is being put out by the UK’s trade administration is going to recommend that the copyright term for music NOT be extended. Of course this has got the BPI wining and complaining about protecting the rights of artist, free trade, national economies and and cold beer.