In a climate where many artists are struggling to find income streams every avenue helps and one area worth exploring is music placement in film and TV.

The ‘gatekeepers’ to these type of gigs are the music supervisors. The music supervisor is a person who coordinates the work of the composer, the editor, and sound mixers. Alternately, a person who researches, obtains rights to, and supplies songs for a production (namely films and television programs).

TV viewers (particularly those who are geeky about music) tend to notice what songs get used on shows, and those touches can be credited to the music supervisor.

If you want to find out who the music supervisor is on any given movie or TV show you might not have earmarked the Amazon owned Internet Movie Database as a go-to  music industry resource but the site is packed with info on cast and crew members, including music supervisors.

Look up movies that have really great soundtracks then scroll through the credits and you’ll find out the names of the person responsible for music supervision.

(more…)

Its been a while since we featured any posts on musical mash-ups here. Since the last mention (the excellent Green Day mash) the word mash up has taken on a slightly different meaning. Now the term is more likely associated with the latest Google Maps Api mash up rather than the latest frankenstein pop remix flying out of some digital DJ’s laptop studio.

Latest renegade remixers to join the fray are the Brooklyn based DJ duo Sound Advice who have ironically (see DJ Dangermouse) chosen to weld the music from the ubiquitous Gnarls Barkley album ‘St Elsewhere’ to the vocals from deceased rapper Biggie Smalls biggest hits.
The result is Gnarls Biggie a hit and miss collection of eleven tracks (all available as MP3′s naturally). ‘Smilie Faces Hypnotize’, ‘Gimme The Online Loot’ and ‘The Last Nasty Boy’ are worth more than one spin but the simple A vs. B formula is not nearly as inspired as the more elaborate examples of the ‘art’ like DJ Dangermouse’s (half of Gnarls Barkley) groundbreaking Beatles vs Jay Z mash up the ‘Grey Album’ or the aformentioned Green Day (or Dean Gray) remix project.

The guys have already got themselves banned from MySpace (though another ‘fan page’ has already sprung up). The cease and desist is in the post.

Related Reading

Gnarls Barkley Mashed Up with B.I.G (Spin.com)
Green Day Mash Up Leads to Cease and Desist Order, Grey Tuesday Style Protest (MTV News)
Grey Album Poducer Danger Mouse Explains How He Did It (MTV News)
Gnarls Barkley (Wikipedia)
Sound Advice Blog (Blogspot)
Party Ben (PartyBen.com)
Mark Vidler (GoHomeProductions)
Grey Tuesday:A Quick Overview of the Legal Terrain (EFF.org)
Grey Tuesday-Free the Grey Album (GreyTuesday.org)

The brilliant Green Day mash-up album we mentioned a few days ago has already had the plugged pulled by Warner Bros music officials apparently.

You can follow the subject at mashers hang out Get Your Bootleg On. Naturally the old download link is now dead but there’s a growing groundswell of support for the project just as there was for the famed (and similarily outlawed) DJ Dangermouse mashup, ‘The Grey Album’. You can, as of this minute grab the album here and read up further on the planned music activism set for December 13th.

Elsewhere this week we’ve stumbled across a Madonna mash-up project (‘the Immaculate Concoction’), one from Radiohead and a 50 Cent/Queen ‘co-lab’. Of course the artists themselves are blissfully unaware of all the DiY remix activity going on.

Related Links

Dean Grey Tuesday (Alt.fm)
RIAA Targets Mash-Ups (BoingBoing.com)
Grey Tuesday, Online Cultural Activism and the Mash up of Music and Politics (FirstTuesday.org)
Raiding The 20th Century, the History of the Cut-up (Musicalbear.com)
The Grey Album by DJ Dangermouse (BannedMusic.org)

A free new Open Source music samples database has been launched by the Barcelona, Spain based Music Technology Group (MTG), part of the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF). The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings and bleeps all released under the Creative Commons sampling plus license.

The project is also part of the forthcoming International Computer Music Conference hosted in Barcelona this coming September where sounds taken from the database will be part of live performances at the event.

There’s an increasing amount of audio projects adopting the Creative Commons licence idea including ‘Wired’ magazine who issued the ‘Rip.Sample.Mash.Share’ compilation CD with the November issue of the tech geek bible in association with Creative Commons. Readers were invited to remix and mash-up artists including David Byrne, the Beastie Boys, DJ Dangermouse and the Thievery Corporation.

Creative Commons also have a collaborative community music sharing /remixing site CC Mixter featuring songs licensed under Creative Commons, where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want. There is an ODB remix contest coming up soon and a Magnatune remix contest, with a recording contract for the winners.

Related Links

Creative Commons [CreativeCommons.org]
The Wired CD [Creative Commons]
CC Mixter-The Remix Family Tree [CCMixter.org]

New York based ‘culture meets technology’ activists IPac are , according to their website, dedicated to preserving individual freedom through balanced intellectual property policy. Their latest project is Jailed For A Song which looks at the US Congress’s brushes with copyright law in 2004 and examines several of the craziest items on Big Content’s wish list.

Being Jailed For A Song is what a proposed law would allow. “Skipping commercials is stealing? That’s what some copyright holders think. And spending millions of taxpayer dollars to hunt down file-sharers? Congress nearly passed not one, but two bills that would have done just that in 2004.”

Included in some of the scary looking all encompassing law’s was, S.B. 3021. The bill (passed by the U.S. Senate on November 20, 2004 though still not passed as law due to procedural problems) specifically said that sharing a single pre-release work (song, movie, etc.) carried a possible five-year prison term for even first-time offenders. The two others we all read about last year were ‘The Piracy Deterrence and Education Act’ (PDEA, H.R. 4077) and ‘the PIRATE Act ‘(S.2237) which would have diverted law enforcement agencies to the pursuit of file-sharers at a time when the RIAA’s suits are paying for themselves.

“Copyright infringement is a problem, but the radical political agenda of copyright holders is far beyond what normal Americans want. We need constructive proposals for how to pay artists, protect technical innovation, and end the record & movie companies’ crazy litigation campaign. Congress isn’t listening to the public, and we need to be loud if we want to be heard over the Hollywood lobbyists and record label flunkies.” Points out the site. IPac are urging supporters to get involved and make a stand in the 665 days leading into the next federal election and make every day count.

Related Links

Electronic Frontier Foundation [EFF.org]
Banned Music [BannedMusic.org]
Downhill Battle [DownhillBattle.org]

Major Hollywood studios, through the US. film trade industry body the MPAA ( a conglomerate of Universal Studios, Disney, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros, MGM, 20th CenturyFox and Paramount ) stepped up their anti piracy action against online distributors of illegally copied feature films today with the announcement that 100 individuals had been targetted in a new international campaign targeting the BitTorrent, Direct Connect and eDonkey file-swapping networks, technologies widely used to trade movies online and designed specifically to speed downloads of very large files.

The MPAA said that people who download copyrighted movie files were not the targets of its latest legal actions. Instead, the group is working with law enforcement agencies in the United States and Europe to target and arrest individuals who provide key roles in the functioning of each type of network. The BitTorrent and eDonkey P2P programs differ from traditional file-sharing programs like Kazaa and Grokster in that they use what has been called a “swarming, scatter and gather” file transfer protocol in which files such as movies and songs aren’t transferred in one piece from one person’s hard drive to another. Rather, small bits of a file are pulled from many user’s hard drives and reassembled by the program on the requester’s computer. The Direct Connect network is widely used across the high speed i2Hub college P2P network in the USA.

“The operators of these servers exercise total control over which files are included on their servers and even determine if some kinds of files aren’t allowed,” said John Malcolm, the MPAA’s Senior Vice President and Director of Worldwide Anti-Piracy Operations.

“For instance, some operators won’t post pornography on their systems, but they have no compunction allowing illegal files of copyrighted movies and TV shows to flow through their servers. We are moving to stop that. The message today is clear: if you illegally trade movies online, we can find you and we will hold you accountable.”

“These kinds of P2P networks rely on servers to index and efficiently deliver files of all kinds. The operators being targeted by these actions have helped online pirates steal hundreds of millions of illegal copies of movies and TV programs.” The MPAA and local rights-holder organizations are also sending cease-and-desist letters
to Internet service providers worldwide that host eDonkey servers and DirectConnect hubs.

According to Net monitoring firm BayTSP, eDonkey recently passed up Kazaa as the most popular file-swapping network in the world, measured by number of users. Other network monitors have said that BitTorrent has long been the most popular measured by the amount of data transferred between users. BitTorrent is distributed freely under an open source license and was created three years ago in the Python programming language by Bram Cohen who came up with the idea while working on an open source content-distribution project called Mojo Nation.

Since September 2003, recording industry lawyers have sued more than 6,100 people suspected of stealing copyrighted music. The film industry held off on suing individual downloaders until last month, when the MPAA announced that the major Hollywood studios would sue about 200 people as the first wave of a legal blitz modeled on the music industry campaign.

Official MPAA press release (PDF)

Related Reading

Studios Step up Fight Against Online Piracy [Washington Post]
MPAA to Serve Lawsuits on BitTorrent Servers [the Register]
Hollywood Fights Illegal Downloads by Targeting Servers [Reuters.com]
MPAA Targets Core BitTorrent, eDonkey Users [ZDNet.com]
Hollywood Wants BitTorrent Dead [Wired.com]
BitTorrent Gives Hollywood a Headache [Newsday.com]
MPAA Eyes Internet2 P2P Traffic [MusicbizNews24.com]
Music Downloads Overtaken by Movies [MusicbizNews24.com]
MPAA Enters P2P Wars; Is BitTorrent In Trouble? [Copyfutures]
How-To: BroadCatching using RSS + BitTorrent to Automatically Download TV Shows [Engadget.com]
File Sharing Thrives Under Radar [Wired.com]
P2P Traffic Analysis [Cachelogic.com]
BitTorrent Accounts for 35% of Traffic [Slashdot.org]
Bram Cohen on BitTorrent [NWFusion.com]
A Comparison with BitTorrent [Konspire2B]
Is BayTSP a Cyber Trespasser? [Freedom-to-Tinker.com]
MPAA:Meet BitTorrent, the File-sharing Network that makes Trading Movies a Breeze [MSN-Slate]

Musicians believe the internet is an essential tool to help create and market their work, but at the same time more than half of artists say file sharing of unauthorized copies of music should be illegal, according to a new report. The study titled, “Artists, Musicians and the Internet,” by US. researchers suggests that musicians do not wholeheartedly agree with the tactics adopted by the music industry against file-sharing, artists are divided on the issue but not deeply concerned. 60% said they did not think the lawsuits against song swappers would benefit musicians and songwriters.

In Spring of this year, the not-for-profit Future of Music Coalition and the nonprofit, non-partisan think tank the Pew Internet & American Life Project worked with an array of other musician and songwriter organizations including Just Plain Folks, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, CD Baby, the Nashville Songwriters Association, Garageband.com, and the American Federation of Musicians. to conduct an online survey to gauge musicians’ opinions of copyright and the internet in general. Over 2700 musicians completed the survey, the results of which were revealed yesterday.

“Even successful artists don’t think the lawsuits will benefit musicians.” “We looked at more of the independent musicians, rather than the rockstars of this industry but that reflects more accurately the state of the music industry,” research specialist and author of the report Mary Madden told the BBC News website.

52% of all artists and 55% of Paid Artists believe it should be illegal for internet users to share unauthorized copies of music and movies over file-sharing networks, compared to 37% of all artists and 35% of Paid Artists who say it should be legal.

Songwriters Eric Lowen & Dan Navarro, who wrote the Pat Benatar hit “We Belong” said free file sharing can have tremendous promotional value, but artists should be able to decide if they want to give away their music. “I want the ability to choose whether it goes out there for free or not,” Navarro told Wired. “When people start taking (the music for free), it takes the control away from us. I don’t think that’s fair.”

Makers of file-sharing software like Kazaa and Grokster may be unnerved to learn that nearly two-thirds said such services should be held responsible for illegal file-swapping; only 15 percent held individual users responsible.

The report continues to say that 87% of the musician respondents say they promote, advertise or display their music online, and 83% provide free samples or previews of their music on the internet. 69% of the respondents say they sell their music online. 63% say that they sell their music online someplace other than their own Web site.

56% sell CDs through online stores like Amazon.com or CDBaby, 28% sell downloadable files through digital stores like iTunes, and 18% sell their music someplace else online.

“Some in the policy community and in media companies have feared that the internet would bring financial Armageddon to musicians and other artists,” said report author Madden, “What we hear from a wide spectrum of artists is that, despite the real challenges of protecting work online, the internet has opened up new ways for them to exercise their imaginations and sell their creations. To many, this feels like a new Digital Renaissance rather than the end of the world.”

For independent musicians, in particular, this newfound ability to bypass traditional distribution outlets and geographic boundaries has been a watershed. One musician explained that having the ability to sell music online was the most significant impact of the internet.

“A huge positive benefit is being able to have my music available for sale to anyone in the world who wants it. Ten years ago there was absolutely no way to sell your CD except through major distribution deals or at your own shows.”

The survey found that musicians were overwhelmingly positive about the internet, rather than seeing it as a threat to their livelihood. Almost all of them used the net for ideas and inspiration, with nine out of 10 going online to promote, advertise and post their music on the web.

The survey is the first large-scale snapshot of what the people who actually produce the music that downloaders seek (and that the industry jealously guards) think about the Internet and file-sharing. The Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group for the major music labels, declined to comment on the study.

Download the 61page PDF. report.
‘Artists, Musicians & the Internet’

Related Reading

Study:Musicians Dig the Net [Wired.com]
Musicians ‘Upbeat’ About the Net [BBC News]
Pew File Sharing Survey Gives a Voice to Artists [NYTimes.com-reg. req.]
How do Musicians Feel About File Sharing? [USAToday.com]

Further Reading

The WIRED CD: Rip. Sample. Mash. Share.[CreativeCommons.org]
File-Sharing Getting Bad Rap? [Rolling Stone] April 2004
Download This! Chuck D Interview [CBCNews.ca] March 2004
Grey Album Fans Protest Clampdown [Wired.com]
Killing the Music [CommonDreams.org] Feb. 2004
An Eagle Almost Gets it [A Networked World blog]
Musicians United for Strong Internet Copyright [MusicUnited.net]
RIAA Radar [Magnetbox.com]
Downhill Battle-Music Activism
[DownhillBattle.org]
Feeding the Mouth that Bites [ChrisVreeland.com]
Let the Music Play [EFF.org]
Recording Industry Association of America [Wikipedia.org]
Model & History of File Sharing [InfoAnarchy.org]
Tracking the Downloading Revolution [BigChampagne.com] PDF
Privacy & Piracy: The Paradox of Illegal File Sharing on Peer-to-Peer Networks and the Impact of Technology on the Entertainment Industry [US.Senate Study] 169pg PDF
Rappers in Disharmony on P2P [Wired.com] Oct. 2003
Changing Industry:Moby [Moby.com] Sept. 2003
Moby on File Sharing [Moby.com] Aug. 2003
the Internet Debacle-An Alternative View [JanisIan.com] May 2002
Lars Ulrich’s Death Wish: Metallica v their Fans [Disinfo.com] Oct 2000
Chuck D: Gotta Share the Tunes [Wired.com] Oct 1999
Downloading the Future. The MP3 Revolution & the End of the Industry as We Know It [LAWeekly] March 1999
Negativland and the RIAA
[Negativland.com] 1998

Jean-Ren� Fourtou, the CEO of Vivendi Universal met in Paris last Friday with more than 70 business executives, brought together by the International Chamber of Commerce from a broad range of companies and trade associations to unveil a plan to create an international organization called BASCAP, or Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy.

Vivendi are the parent company of Universal Music Group who have had high profile battles against piracy and Fourtou’s message was stern, “”This illegal activity is spiraling out of control. It is a major threat. It’s like a cancer”. Fourtou and the International Chamber of Commerce are trying to initiate a global offensive to combat the darker side of commerce and promised that the new initiative would “take the fight against intellectual property theft to a new level”.

“Globally, it’s hard to believe,” Fourtou said, “but two of every five recordings are pirate copies.” One of his ambitions, he said, is to explain to customers the devastating results, particularly in countries like Germany or Brazil, where the fakes have drained away local investment in music. Fourtou wasn’t just talking to music industry executives but an eclectic and global mix of industries. Piracy is practically the only issue that could draw a tobacco manufacturer and a music producer like Vivendi, to the same meeting.

Fourtou took over the helm of the then flailing Vivendi from the ousted Jean-Marie Messier in 2002 after the company recorded losses of 23.3billion euros ($30.8billion), a record for a French company.

more [International Herald Tribune]

Related Reading
Corporate Anti-Piracy Battle Goes International [GlobeandMail.com]
BASCAP Programme 16pg PDF [Iccwbo.org]
Who Owns What:Vivendi Universal [CJR.org]
Speaking of Music Piracy.. [Wired.com]
Federation Against Copyright Theft [Fact-UK]
What is Piracy? [IFPI.org]

The long running saga of the music industry’s copyright battle against the worlds most popular peer to peer file sharing software Kazaa moved to Australia today as case number NSD 110, Universal Music Australia Pty Ltd v Sharman License Holdings Ltd got underway in the Federal Court of Australia in Sydney.

At the start of a trial over the legality of Kazaa software, the court was told today that Kazaa had 100 million users worldwide, sharing three billion music files a month. Five major Australian record companies-Universal, EMI, Sony BMG, Warner Music, Festival/Mushroom and 25 other North American, European and Australian record companies -are suing Sharman Networks, which develops and distributes the software, for copyright infringement.

The labels contend that Sharman was fully aware of how the software was used and did nothing to stop copyright infringements. Lawyers for Australia’s recording industry branded the popular Kazaa file-swapping network “an engine of copyright piracy to a degree of magnitude never before seen”. Kazaa’s owners, Sharman insist that while they urge users not to commit music piracy, they have no control over what people do with the popular “peer-to-peer” software they provide.

Tony Bannon, representing Australia’s major record labels dismissed Sharman’s defense, saying Kazaa’s owners actively take steps allowing users to filter certain files from the network such as those that could contain viruses or pornography but not the files containing copyrighted songs. Bannon said the owners of the P2P software were seeking to get rich from advertising revenue based on the volume of traffic on the Kazaa network, while painting themselves as crusaders for music fans. Mr Bannon said Sharman’s actions were “all a charade” because it was interested only in making money from the copyright-infringing behavior of its users.

Each file traded on Kazaa has a unique digital fingerprint in the form of an MD5 hash a mathematical signature produced by running an algorithm across the contents of a file. This signature allows Kazaa to identify how many users are sharing the same file so that it can be downloaded from many places at once with complete integrity. If Kazaa were really trying to become a legitimate service, an obvious first step would be to block the MD5 hashes for known pirated files, argues the music industry. The reliability of P2P filtering technologies are still conclusively unproven however and are still under constant development.

Kazaa already has one major court victory under its belt, with the Dutch Supreme Court ruling in December 2003 that Kazaa’s then Swedish owners could not be held liable for copyright infringement. A possible difference in the Australian case is the recording industry’s invocation of the controversial, Anton Pillar Law that allows litigants in civil copyright cases to gather evidence. An Anton Piller order is granted when a judge is persuaded that there are reasonable grounds evidence may be destroyed if advance notice is given.

In February, after a six-month inquiry by the Music Industry Piracy Investigation unit of the Australian Record Industry Association, the record labels, organized under a cloak of absolute secrecy secured the Anton Piller order permitting a surprise search of Kazaa premises, to avoid any potential loss or destruction of evidence and legal authority to gather evidence without police being present. The information gathered has yet to be revealed.

The true owners of Sharman remain a mystery. Although it has offices in Australia, Sharman was formed in the island state of Vanuatu, a no-tax haven where the secrecy of private companies is sacred, improper disclosure of financial information to others is subject to criminal prosecution and tax information is not shared with any outside jurisdiction.

The Federal Court case, before judge Murray Wilcox, is expected to stretch over three weeks.

Related Reading

Universal Music Australia Pty Ltd v Sharman License Holdings Ltd (March-Copyright Suit) [Federal Court of Australia]
Anton Pillar Order [Wikipedia.org]
Kazaa Trial [Google News]
Trial to Unmask Kazaa Owners [Wired.com]
Net Music Swop Firm a ‘Pirate’ [the Australian]
Australian Music Industry Decries Kazaa [ABCNews]
Huge Music Piracy Encouraged [HeraldSun.com]
Kazaa Gears for Next Showdown [News.com.au]
Kazaa Heads to Court for File Swop Trial [CNet.com]
Hide and Seek (July) [APCMag.com]
Sharman Fails to Deliver Evidence Again:MIPI (May) [ZDNet Australia]
Kazaa Tripped up in Aussie Court (March) [Wired.com]
Telstra Attaks Music Industry Raids (Feb) [ZDNet Australia]
Kazaa Fights Court Order (Feb) [PCWorld]
Record Industry Commences Court Proceedings Against Kazaa for Breach of Copyright (Feb)[IFPI press release]
Inside the Kazaa Raid (Feb) [APCMag.com]

Little over a week ago rumours were circulating that the MPAA, which consists of seven Hollywood studios, were preparing lawsuits against file sharers of movies, in an action. Then ‘the Register’ claimed their source said that the MPAA were readying to file ‘John Doe’ suits against over 200 people seeking damages up to $150,000 for each movie placed online.

Today the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed the first wave of legal actions against individuals they say are offering pirated copies of films using Internet based peer-to-peer file sharing programs. The film body also said it would soon make available a computer program that sniffs out movie and music files on a users computer as well as any installed file-sharing programs which would be available from their Respect Copyrights website, newly established to educate consumers about copyrights.

The trade group said it would also join with the Video Software Dealers Association to place educational materials in more than 10,000 video stores nationwide. Jason Schultz, an attorney at Electronic Frontier Foundation said the MPAA messages seem contradictory: “They are placing these in locations where people are paying money for movies. They are sending the messages to people who are buying their products.”

MPAA Chief Executive Officer Dan Glickman said in a statement. “The motion-picture industry must pursue legal proceedings against people who are stealing our movies on the Internet. The future of our industry, and of the hundreds of thousands of jobs it supports, must be protected from this kind of outright theft using all available means.”

In an earlier interview with USA Today (Nov 5) Glickman commented, ” We believe we’re losing $3.5 billion yearly. Someone sneaks into a theater with a camcorder, films a movie, puts it online for the world to see for free, and it gets duplicated into DVDs that are getting sold on street corners from New York and Los Angeles to China. If this is allowed to continue, it will sink our industry.”
In the same article it was pointed out by journalist Jefferson Graham that 2003′s box office figures were $9.5 billion, the second biggest in history.

Related Reading

Movie Studios Sue File Traders [Wired.com]
MPAA Touts Lawsuits, New P2P Fighting Software [ZDNet News]
Movie Studios Start Suing Web File Swappers [Reuters.com]
Film Industry Files Wave of Anti-Piracy Lawsuits [TechNewsWorld.com]
P2Pers Ask Supreme Court to Reject RIAA Ban Request [the Register]
Stealing Movies, Why the MPAA Can Afford to Relax [the Register]
New MPAA Boss a Comedian [P2PNet.net]
Exit Valenti [Lessig.org]
A Long Time Ago, in an Industry Far, Far Away [EFF Blogs]
Respect Copyrights [RespectCopyrights.org]
Federation Against Copyright Theft [FACT UK]

Music activist website Downhill Battle are developing their own ‘RIAA-proof’ P2P file sharing client. The ad free Open Source app is based on the multi protocol instant messenger client Gaim and plugs into instant messengers like AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, or Jabber.

DB say on the projects homepage that, ” Making a program that only geeks can use won’t cut it. The goal, after all, is to keep people out of jail. What’s great about integrating filesharing into an IM client is that the interface will be familiar and non-threatening to everyone. And the interface itself explains the security advantages of the program in simple terms: you share with friends. ”

They go onto explain: “We propose an extension to the GAIM chat client that lets users do Gnutella style search & download filesharing, where search requests propagate out to trusted buddies, buddies of buddies, etc. This approach has several advantages. First, people will be more altruistic sharing with friends and won’t be as worried about RIAA/MPAA lawsuits. At the same time, because they can share with friends-of-friends, and friends-of-friends-of-friends, they’ll often be searching a very huge library. This software will be just as simple as an IM client, and it will be easy for people to invite friends (so it spreads virally).”

The software is still in development. Downhill Battle sees P2P/IM-integration with Gaim as a way to stop US P2P file sharers from landing in prison. Proposed legislation is looming in Congress in the US. ( the Intellectual Property Protection Act ) that could see major file sharers jailed if passed.

Gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. It is compatible with AIM and ICQ , MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, GroupWise Messenger, and Zephyr networks.

Gaim users can log in to multiple accounts on multiple IM networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on AOL Instant Messenger, talking to a friend on Yahoo Messenger, and sitting in an IRC channel all at the same time.

In the light of thousands of lawsuits by music industry watchdogs like the RIAA, file sharers are leaving high profile (and usually spyware laden) file sharing clients like KaZaa in their millions and looking at more ‘secure’ and trusted underground software networks like Mute, Ants and Waste which offer more secure, anonymous protocols.

Related Links

Downhill Battle Labs [DownhillBattle.org]
Downhillbattle.org Bounty For P2P Gaim Plug-in [Slashdot.org]
Block RIAA File Share Jail Plans [P2PNet.net]
Ants P2P A New Approach To File Sharing [Slyck.com]
Trusted Computing, Peer-To-Peer Distribution,and the Economics of Pirated Entertainment [Harvard.edu] 11pg PDF
Jail File Sharers Bill Passed [P2PNet]
Congress Moves To Criminalize P2P [Wired.com]
Instant Messenging Planet [InstantMessengingPlanet.com]
Instant Messenger [Wikipedia.org]

The Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) today appealed a court ruling in which a judge ruled that peer-to-peer file sharing was legal in Canada.

Like its American counterparts the RIAA, the Canadian group is trying to sue file-swappers who are trading copyrighted music online. But in March, a court blocked the label’s trade group from obtaining the identities of alleged file traders, saying that trading music over programs like Kazaa did not appear to be illegal.

The Federal Court of Appeal should set a date for arguments in the appeal in several weeks. CRIA said in its appeal that the lower court should have allowed its cases against alleged copyright infringers to go forward, and reiterated its stance that unauthorized file-sharing constitutes copyright infringement.

Full story:CNet News

Related Reading

Canadian Downloaders Less Likely to Buy Music [MusicBizNews24]

Despite entertainment industry attempts to curb online song and movie swapping with lawsuits and education campaigns, more people than ever are using peer-to-peer services.
BigChampagne, which tracks Internet file sharing, says 8.3 million people were online at any one time in June using unauthorized services like Kazaa and eDonkey — up 19% from 6.8 million in June 2003.

The majority of files being traded were music, BigChampagne says. Porn videos and images were the second-biggest category
Since September, the Recording Industry Association of America has filed 3,500 lawsuits against music sharers who uploaded songs to the Internet. It has settled about 600 of them for fines ranging from $2,000 to $15,000.

Phil Leigh, senior analyst at research firm Inside Digital Media, says the findings are the strongest evidence to date that the lawsuits aren’t scaring people away from so-called P2P programs. “Many just don’t think they’ll be caught,” he says. And users have become savvier about adjusting software so they can’t be traced.

After the initial wave of lawsuits, research firms released studies suggesting people were spending less time on the peer-to-peer services. “What people say and what they do are two different things,” says BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland. “People were not willing to be forthright and admit to something that might get them sued. The fact is, peer-to-peer usage is much more widespread than it was a year ago.”

Full story:USA Today

Related Reading

Poll Shows Opposition to Download Suits [MusicBizNews24]
Music Downloads Overtaken by Movies [MusicBizNews24]
RIAA vs. the People [Electronic Frontier Foundation]

William W. Fisher III is the Hale and Dorr Professor of Intellectual Property Law and Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

Next month Fisher’s book “Promises to Keep: Technology, Law, and the Future of Entertainment” is published by Stanford University Press and promises to provide the first comprehensive, accessible overview of the conflict surrounding music distribution and the emergence of digital communications networks.

The book looks at how changes in the technology used to make and store audio and video recordings,in the last 15 years, combined with the communication revolution associated with the Internet, have generated an extraordinary array of new ways in which music and movies can be produced and distributed. Both the creators and the consumers of entertainment products stand to benefit enormously from the new systems.

And how we have failed thus far to avail ourselves of these opportunities. Instead, much energy has been devoted to interpreting or changing legal rules in hopes of defending older business models against the threats posed by the new technologies. These efforts to plug the multiplying holes in the legal dikes are failing and the entertainment industry has fallen into crisis.

The provocative book chronicles how we got into this mess and presents three alternative proposals each involving a combination of legal reforms and new business models for how we could get out of it.

One of those is ‘An Alternative Compensation System’, which takes up the whole of chapter 6 and is downloadable as a PDF preview, pre publication (August 9th).

Further Reading

Chapter 1:Promises To Keep:Introduction (PDF)
Alternative Compensation Systems [CrossCommons.org]
A Better Way Forward: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing (PDF) [Electronic Frontier Foundation]
A Full, Fair And Feasible Solution To The Dilemma of Online Music Licensing [Quicktopic.com]
Private Copying, Levies and DRMs against the Background of the EU Copyright Framework [Europa]