Music Ally

We reported yesterday on how Virgin Records is suing 30 Seconds To Mars for $30 million for alleged breach of contract. Now the band has responded with a post by its movie-star singer Jared Leto on its website. He describes the suit as “ridiculously oversized, totally unrealistic and pretty silly”, and claims that it’’s due to (more…)

A new report from Envisional claims that just three British ISPs are responsible for 65% of illegal peer-to-peer downloads in the UK. Based on tracking 28,000 unique IP addresses making illegal downloads in June, the research claims that 22.6% of them were from Carphone Warehouse customers (including AOL and TalkTalk), with 21.6% coming from Virgin Media, and 21.2% from BT. (more…)

It’s emerged that the BPI was rapped by UK government minister Baroness Vadera on the day its recent memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed by the government and various labels, ISPs and film industry bodies. (more…)

If YouTube has been slow to respond so far to the technical gremlins in its audio compression (see story earlier), it might be because it’s got legal issues on its mind. Specifically, another heavyweight media firm is suing YouTube for alleged copyright infringement. This time it’s Italian broadcaster Mediaset, which is owned (more…)

The Telegraph has an interesting interview with Universal Music Group International boss Lucian Grainge, which appears to say he disagrees with the BPI’s desire for persistent file-sharers to have their broadband chopped. (more…)

Yesterday’s European Commission decision to revamp the way collection societies work in Europe has been predictably controversial. In brief, it means that composers should be free to join up with foreign collecting societies rather than go with the local one, while allowing music services to get pan-European licences from any of the 27 EU countries. (more…)

Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube rumbles on, and it’s currently in the discovery process. As part of that, Google has been ordered to give Viacom a complete set of every video ever removed from the site for copyright infringement (more…)

A report in The Register suggests that the UK may see its first `legal’ broadband subscriptions including file-sharing by the end of this year, with the UK government pressuring ISPs and the music industry to launch a P2P licensing system along the lines of South Korea. However, as far as we understand, this initiative is more about education - ISPs sending out `educational’ letters to users caught file-sharing, as Virgin Media is doing. The most telling sentence in The Reg’s piece is this: “No deals have been signed yet and significant details have yet to be addressed. These include the royalty share between mechanical, sound recording and publishing rights holders, and administration issues.” Sorting those by Christmas is optimistic, to say the least. We think labels are more likely to sign their own individual deals with specific ISPs rather than come up with a pan-industry Korean style approach. These ISP deals could materialise within a few weeks.

Remember we recently published links to the BPI / Virgin media letters? Well, it looks as though UK ISP BT are following suit-but taking a tougher line.  Interestingly, the story appeared  as an exlusive on The Register  at the same time as the story above. BT appears to be threatening to disconnect users who are caught file-sharing. One customer was recently sent a letter reproducing evidence collected by the BPI, indicating that they’d shared Girls Aloud’s `Biology’ using P2P client Ares. (more…)

So can you sell promo albums on eBay or not? The finest legal minds on both sides of the Atlantic are figuring it out. So, in London a DJ and music critic has been arrested on suspicion of theft and money-laundering, after allegedly selling 150 pre-release albums on eBay including Kelly Rowland, Foals and Grand (more…)