TechCrunch » New Features at MusicStrands

They launched new features recently (including some today) that make it an excellent side service to whatever music player you use.

Wired News: Podcasting Roils NPR Fund Raising

Her local Las Vegas affiliate, KNPR, kicked off its spring membership drive last week with program interruptions pleading for donations, so Michaels is bypassing that semiannual annoyance by loading up her MP3 player with various National Public Radio programs available in whole or in part for free as podcasts.
I think few who have sat through April sessions of CarTalk would argue that "piracy," in this case, is a huge social good.

Wired News: No. 1, Thanks to Downloads

"Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley sat atop the British singles chart Monday, the first track to reach No. 1 based solely on computer download sales.

The song, by producer Danger Mouse and hip-hop artist Cee-Lo, went on sale in record stores Monday, but it had already sold 31,000 copies through the internet, making it the previous week's best-selling track.
Danger Mouse is doing pretty well these days, post-Grey Album.

Slashdot | Frustration With Oblivion Mod Costs on Xbox Live

For example, I would expect to pay $20.00 for the soon to come Perfect Dark Zero maps or new cars for Project Gotham. On the other hand, I would expect any additional costumes for PDZ to be free. I imagine there is good arguments on both sides, but one can see that the potential is there to exploit an eager fan.

Slashdot | Google Music Store Inches Closer?

Forbes is once again reporting on Google plans to launch its own competitor to iTunes, a Google music store. From the article: 'The music industry is broadly unhappy with the fixed pricing and lack of subscription options at the market-leading iTunes Music Store and likely to support alternative services.

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

Hollywood will for first time "allow" Americans to pay up to $27 for 'new' flics, and $10 to $20 for older ones - and keep them.

Decoding the Drivel. Copyfight: the politics of IP

Actually, what they're selling is the ability to download and view a copy of the movie. So a better headline would be "Hollywood studios sell additional movie viewings via the Web." Let's call a spade a spade and refer to these as "tickets" because that's the model at work here.
Nice term.  As with "Intellectual Property," the metaphor is important.

Prime Time No More: The Television Industry Struggles Against Digital Distribution Upstarts - Knowledge@Wharton

Broadcasting, as we know it, is an artifact of historical limitations on distribution, which are increasingly irrelevant in the digital broadband age.

TechCrunch » Let’s Buy Some Music: Part 1

The choice for best overall service is dead simple. The best service by far is AllofMP3.com. Music costs $0.02 per MB (about 9 cents per song), and it can be downloaded in any common audio format and quality level. It is so cheap and easy to use that many people choose to download music from AllofMP3 in lieu of ripping their own CD collection.

Wired News: We Want More From Our Phones

The survey conducted last month found that 6 percent of cell phone users play music on their device, for example, while 19 percent wish their phone had that feature. A mere 2 percent watch mobile video or TV, but 14 percent said they would like to. The study also found unsurprising differences between the generations, with younger adults more likely to use their phones for entertainment. For instance, nearly a quarter (23 percent) of those ages 18-29 wanted to watch TV on their cell but only 15 percent of the 30-49 age bracket, 4 percent of users between 50-64, and 6 percent of those 65 and over were interested in that capability.

Verizon threatens heavy EV-DO users with higher prices

BroadbandAccess' increased usage is starting to raise warning flags for Verizon Wireless, which is threatening to implement a tiered pricing structure to punish the service's heaviest users of bandwidth. Verizon would prefer its customers limit their BroadbandAccess usage to checking e-mail and non-bandwidth-intensive web browsing.
Yet another reason the US lags in broadband adoption.

HD DVD and Blu-ray drives cost over US$400 to build

The report starts off by analyzing a bill of materials for "blue laser players" and came up with a round figure of about US$400. This includes not only the hardware, but royalty licenses for the various codecs included in the players.

RIAA crying wolf all the way to the bank

One is the overall decline in sales of physical media (e.g., CDs, CD singles, vinyl, music videos, and DVDs), from 860 million units in 2002 to 749 million last year—almost 13 percent. More importantly, legal downloads have gone from zero to 554 million in two years. Perhaps most telling is that despite a decline of 151 million units of physical media sold since 2002, revenues have only dropped by US$340 million—about 2.7 percent.

Microsoft leverages P2P technology to create BitVault

BitVault is a distributed application that runs on multiple PCs, called "bricks." Each brick is a bare-bones PC with a large hard drive, and hundreds or even thousands of bricks can be connected together to run the application. BitVault then allows users to search for information that is stored anywhere on the brick network, and guarantees that the data will be valid even if it has been modified or deleted on some of the bricks.
More SNIU from Microsoft.

Britannica attacks Nature in newspaper ads

Britannica's biggest gripe, though, has still not been addressed. They mention several times in their advertisements that Nature has been unwilling to turn over all of the documentation behind the study, and Nature's response does not indicate that they will do so.

Netflix awarded business model patent, immediately sues Blockbuster

Netflix contends that Blockbuster knew of the pending patent application, but "willfully and deliberately" launched a copycat service anyway.
Have I mentioned I despise business method patents?

Slashdot | RIAA Recommends Students Drop out of College

the RIAA has been known to suggest that students drop out of college or go to community college in order to be able to afford settlements.

Slashdot | RIM Chairman Wants Changes to U.S. Patent Law

The Globe and Mail is reporting that James Balsillie '... called on U.S. lawmakers yesterday to fix a system that he says boxed the company into one of the largest legal settlements in U.S. history.

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

While copyright wasn't listed as a top priority of Canada's new Conservative government, there have been indications that the new Heritage Minister wants to table a copyright bill soon.

PodTech.net: Silicon Valley, Technology, & Media Podcast » Blog Archive » BET CEO Lee Says Media is a Wireless Business

Steve Jobs of Apple forged the first major deal with the record labels and even he admitted, in apparent frustration, that the deal was in danger of unraveling because content owners were pushing too hard for too much. “Digital distribution initially posed a huge threat in the form of peer-to-peer file sharing,” said Debra Lee, Chairman and CEO of BET Networks and a keynote speaker at CTIA Wireless 2006. “But ironically, digital distribution has fueled a great comeback story.”

Daniel Brookshier's Blog: JXTA at 5 Years Old

The market for P2P is still growing and JXTA is still the only viable multi-purpose solution. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of P2P out there, but mostly for file sharing and not writing business critical applications. The only alternative is Groove and that's owned by Microsoft. It also costs quite a bit. JXTA is open source and it is simple to set up your own P2P network for pennies on the dollar.

'Stageside' in different P2P arena

Taking the concept even further, the soft drink giant is bypassing traditional television to get "Stageside" out to its target audience. Island Def Jam R&B star Ne-Yo is the first artist to be showcased on "Stageside," which is being distributed from its own Web site and via peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent in formats optimized for viewing on computers and on such portable devices as iPods and PSPs.
SNIU

The Patry Copyright Blog: No Fleas on Grokster

on contributory infringement, the court rejected the relevance of an inducement claim outside of the Grokster context.

The One-Eyed Man is King. Copyfight: the politics of IP

In this view, Apple & co are helping people "take media away from the media business itself." Which would be nice if it were, y'know, true. It's not.

Open and Shut?: Interview with Lawrence Lessig

Having enrolled to study economics and management at the University of Pennsylvania, Lessig rapidly concluded that business studies were really rather dull. He did, however, enjoy the history of economics.

--Ari