Slashdot | ISP Rise Against P2P Users

Especially ISPs who are leasing their bandwidth by the megabyte are more inclined to resort to 'shaping your traffic' by throttling ports, setting bandwidth limits or even classifying accounts according services used.

TechCrunch » Most Popular P2P Files: PeerMind

It’s a regularly updated list of the most popular music, movies, games, software and ringtones being downloaded on theEDonkey 2000 and Gnutella networks. Once this includes BitTorent, which is apparently coming soon, PeerMind’s lists will be a much more interesting indicator of consumer demand for media than other top lists determined by more indirect methods.

Wired News: The Man Behind Scrambled Hackz

König says Scrambled Hackz was designed specifically to infringe copyright. But it has substantial non-infringing uses, so it passes the main litmus test for whether a piece of software is legal.
Bzzt! That defense was out with Grokster.  Sorry.  But I don't really see how this was designed specifically to infringe copyright.

Wired News: Tech Firms: Don't Fence Us In

Media and technology companies warned Tuesday that new European Union broadcasting rules could restrict the growth of emerging media formats such as video broadcasts through the internet and mobile phones.

HD-DVD Review: The Last Samurai | High-Def DVD Digest

Now, at last, the results. Watching 'The Last Samurai' at 1080i via HDMI on the HP was certainly an impressive experience. Quite simply, it delivered the best video I've ever seen on a pre corded consumer format.

Furdlog » Technology, Culture and Journalism

Every few days, I get an RSS feed that lists the new books added to the University of Pennsylvania Library’s catalog of online books, and I go foraging.

iTorrent alpha-1 Released :: iPod Hacks :: The Latest and Greatest News and Info for Your iPod

iTorrent alpha-1 has just been released for Mac OS X and Windows. iTorrent allows you to download BitTorrent podcasts from iTunes. The application transforms BitTorrent podcasts such that you can update them as you would any "normal" podcast from within iTunes.

FT.com / Asia-Pacific / China - Skype says texts are censored by China

Skype, the fast-growing internet communications company that belongs to Ebay, has admitted that its partner in China has filtered text messages, defending this compliance with censorship laws as the only way to do business in the country.

TechCrunch » Mozes: Secure Your Keyword

Hear a song on the radio that you like and want to bookmark? Text the radio station (ie, KROQ) to 66937 (which translates to “Mozes”). Mozes will note the time and station name and bookmark the song title in your Mozes page (and sms you the song information).

Television Stations Are Urged to Break a Few Rules - New York Times

"In media today, I don't think there is a single rule that can't — and frankly, probably shouldn't — be broken. "This isn't just about driving growth," she added. "It's about staying in business."

EMI finally sees music sales increase

For the first time in five years, EMI is reporting an increase in sales from the pervious years. One of the factors in the increase was sales of downloaded music. Revenues from sales via online music stores doubled from the previous year, and now account for over 5.5 percent of the label's sales and £110 million in sales.

The RIAA vs. the EFF: who will redefine copyright for the digital age

In a recent editorial, an attorney representing a defendant in one of the RIAA's 19,000 lawsuits over P2P technology made the case that the RIAA's arguments in Elektra v. Barker, if accepted by a judge, have the potential to undermine the very nature of the Internet. Here at Ars, we've previously touched on the RIAA's radical notion, first introduced in this case, that simply making files available on a shared folder constitutes infringement (regardless of whether the files were actually accessed by another party).

Philips files for patent to force ad viewing

Flush with heady optimism after successful products such as the digital compact cassette (DCC) and the super audio CD (SACD), the redoubtable European giant has developed a way to keep television free for the masses for the foreseeable future—a patent application for a device which prevents a user from changing the channel during commercials.

Warner tackles Chinese piracy with cut-price DVD - Financial Times - MSNBC.com

Warner Home Video has begun trial sales in China of a movie DVD priced at just Rmb12 ($1.50), a move likely to anger consumers in developed markets such as Europe and the US, who typically pay $20-$30 for a recently released film on DVD.
Not sure I agree with the analysis here.  Price discrimination across country borders takes a long time to rile people (e.g. pharmaceuticals).

Slashdot | Music Downloads = Expensive Concerts?

Before the advent of illegal downloads, artists had an incentive to underprice their concerts, because bigger audiences translated into higher record sales, Professor Krueger argues. But now, he says, the link between the two products has been severed, meaning that artists and their managers need to make more money from concerts and feel less constrained in setting ticket prices.'

Slashdot | Porn Industry Trials Burnable DVDs

The LA Times has an article discussing porn giant Vivid following the likes of King Kong in allowing users to download and burn movies to DVD. Unlike in the Hollywood plan, these DVDs will be viewable on other DVD players.

Slashdot | FCC Commissioner Wants To Push For DRM

Techdirt reports that 'Newest Commissioner Deborah Tate has apparently announced that while she knows its outside the FCC's authority, she's a huge fan of copy protection and hopes to use her new position as a "bully pulpit" on the topic.'

Slyck News - CRIA Falling Apart

Shortly after, 6 of Canada’s leading record labels quit the CRIA.

Apple Adds New iTunes Features For TV Fans :: iPod Hacks :: The Latest and Greatest News and Info for Your iPod

Two new features / song categories have been added to the iTunes Music Store that help cut out the manual searching for such great tracks. "Commercial Success" is a collection of songs used in various TV commercials from companies including Apple, Old Navy, Anheuser-Busch, Cingular, and Hilton. Right now there are 26 songs in this list, complete with description. We expect the list to rotate over time. "As Heard On American Idol" is a week-by-week collection of the original versions of songs performed by contestants on TV's American Idol. A handy resource for fans of that show.

Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » HDCP: Why So Weak?

Why did they choose the weak system? The academic paper on HDCP, by Crosby et al., says that HDCP’s designers were given a “budget” of 10,000 gates.
A much more plausible answer is that HDCP encryption exists only as a hook on which to hang lawsuits. For example, if somebody makes unlicensed displays or format converters, copyright owners could try to sue them under the DMCA for circumventing the encryption.
Great article; well worth reading in full.

p2pnet.net - the original daily p2p and digital media news site

"More than one-third of college students illegally download music," says a new 'study'. CRIA is short for the Canadian Recording Industry Association of America and CAAST equals Canadian Alliance Against Software Theft. And both industry organizations say Canadian students are wicked thieves, bent on doing the honest, hard-working corporations ill.

Miro Heirs Quash Google Tribute. Copyfight: the politics of IP

Fair use saves us from the sanitized world where only authorized tributes or commentary are permitted. Moral rights, applied in many European countries but not the U.S., protect the "integrity" of artists' works -- but even that was hardly under threat.

Open Access News

has made the full text of its $24.95 hardcover edition available for free download. Will that hurt sales? "We want people to share the ideas," says Gil Student, president of Yashar Books. "We are convinced that an open give and take of ideas will create the right atmosphere for more learning and more book buying."

Open Access News

The Williams house’s apparent invisibility is caused by the eagerness of the Post Office and Ordnance Survey (OS) to sell their postcode and geographic address data sets respectively.
I prefer examples where the difference is not just one of price but of the ability to manipulate the data itself (or include it in free CDs, for example), but this is pretty egregious.

License adoption estimates | Creative Commons

The small change appears to be in the direction of using more liberal licenses.

Open Access News

One that caught my ear recently was this interview with J. Scott Armstrong, a Wharton School professor whose interests include scientific peer review and transparency in medicine. At one point he discusses his own experience with prostate cancer. This guy is clearly not a typical patient. He regards his personal physician as an adviser who points him to relevant medical literature, discusses it with him, and helps him reach decisions.

Furdlog » FCC Looking Into Pay-For-Play

The Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday launched formal investigations into pay-for-play practices at four of the nation’s largest radio corporations, the biggest federal inquiry into radio bribery since the congressional payola hearings of 1960.

--Ari