Music Ally

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…)

Yesterday we wrote about the BPI teaming up with Virgin Media in an effort to clamp down on illegal file sharing by sending informative letters out.  Well, we have copies of each of them here .

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You thought the Czech Academy of Sciences was focused on funding magnetostratigraphic studies of cenozoic volcanics (didn’t you?), but it seems it was all a giant front for music piracy. Well, kind of. Okay, so the Academy is kosher, but it was the unwitting host of a server holding up to 4 terabytes of pre-release (more…)

Big news in New Zealand, where a new copyright reform bill has taken a liberal approach towards anti-circumvention. The bill allows consumers to bypass DRM if their intended use is legitimate - for example time-shifting and format-shifting (the latter includes ripping music from CD to other devices). “The (more…)

Thinking of launching a streaming mobile music service in China? You better brush up on your administration skills then: new rules for webcasting in the country mean you’ll have to get permits from two separate Chinese government agencies before you can begin. Meanwhile, ownership and control of webcasting operations have (more…)

Getting ISPs to disconnect customers who are repeatedly caught sharing music illegally is the hot new theory when it comes to copyright protection, although ISPs’ willingness to do it varies. However, the European Parliament has now weighed in, narrowly voting to signal its opposition to the idea (by 314-297 votes). (more…)