What the world has been missing lately is a big, all-stars-on-deck charity single to benefit a needy cause (casual racism optional). So we're really glad that Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Diddy, Chris Brown, Floyd Mayweather (Floyd Mayweather?) and others have joined together to release the "Megaupload Mega Song," to…
The villainous Recording Industry Association of America, which loves to sue children for millions of dollars for downloading songs that deprived wealthy entertainers of a penny: what is their latest outrage? Pissing on the U.S. Constitution, naturally.
Software company LimeWire shut down its file sharing services on the order of a federal judge after being found liable for "a substantial amount of copyright infringement" in case brought against the company by the RIAA. RIP, peer-to-peer.
Earlier this month, pranksters from 4chan's /b/ board launched an attack on anti-pirating forces like the Motion Picture Association of America. One side-effect: a list of over 5,000 alleged Internet porn pirates was leaked on the Internet.
Harvard Law Professor Charles Nesson has humiliated Village Voice plagiarists, conducted frightening YouTubes in his Second Life persona, and successfully litigated on behalf of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. He's found another person to bring justice to in Joel Tenenbaum, a Boston University student who is…
Justin Ouellette's music trading site Muxtape, shut down after failed talks with the RIAA, the music labels' copyright cops, may not have earned him a fortune. But it has secured him a modicum of infamy. He got invited to speak earlier this week at the WebbyConnect Summit in Laguna Niguel, explaining to others on how…
Arizona's Jeffrey Howell did several dumb things on his way to being ordered to pay the RIAA a $40,500 fine for downloading songs such as "Waiting For A Girl Like You," "Money For Nothing," and "Sweet Child O' Mine" using peer-to-peer file-sharing service Kazaa. The first was downloading Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child…
Following the shutdown of Muxtape, a site for posting online mixtapes, in a dispute with the music industry, someone has launched Opentape.fm, where you can download code to easily create your own Muxtape-like online mixtapes of MP3 files. And if the creators of Muxtape aren't directly responsible, they probably fed…
The best way to judge a society is to judge how well it takes care of those unable to take care of themselves — like music and film executives, for example. Motivated by profit and self-interest, they have been helpless to stop digital piracy from eroding their relevance and profit margins at home or abroad.…
What can you do when your expensive iPhone with the expensive monthly plan just doesn't work? Class action lawsuit! Class action lawsuit! And that's exactly what one Alabama woman did. Donk In A Box, today's featured commenter, calls the case as he sees it:
Hipsters must be quite sad that Muxtape is down but we have RIAA to blame. Today's featured commenter, pepelicious knows the other problem with Muxtape though:
Muxtape founder Justin Ouellette says he's shut down the mixtape-hosting website because of a problem with the Recording Industry Association of America. A statement from the RIAA itself seems to confirm the story. Bu we hear another reason Muxtape is shutting down is that it got too expensive for Ouellette to keep…
The days of marveling over online music service Pandora's ability to know that you hella heart Oakland's own Digital Underground may soon be over. A court decision adored by the recording industry doubled the royalties Web broadcasters have to pay. Radio stations pay nothing to for rebroadcast rights to recordings,…
Muxtape, a New York-based online-music startup much favored by the Tumblr set, has shut down its website, citing a "problem" with the RIAA, a music-industry organization which polices copyright. Could it have anything to do with the ease with which users can download music files from the site, despite founder Justin…
Justin Ouellette's Muxtape, a site which hosts online mixtapes, is on shaky legal ground — and not just over the way Ouellette left his former employer, IAC-owned video site Vimeo. Making a mixtape for personal use is clearly accepted; but posting it online, for everyone on the Internet to listen to? Unclear at best…
Jim Louderback, the CEO of Revision3, is jumpin' mad. A denial-of-service attack brought down the online-video network over the weekend, and it wasn't the work of a freelance hacker with a distributed network of compromised machines, he writes in the company blog. It was, he says, the deliberate act of…
Can you legally create MP3s from your CD collection, or not? That's all we want to know. News has circulated since early December that the recording industry believes it is illegal to rip your music library . The genesis of this waas an RIAA lawsuit against a chap for tossing ripped files into his Kazaa sharing…
The Washington Post has reported that the RIAA views the ripping of CDs to MP3s as illegal. Not quite so. The RIAA isn't thrilled with the practice, but that's not why they're suing Jeffrey Howell. His offense against the recording industry was "putting those ripped files into a shared Kazaa folder," notes Techdirt.…
Reuters is reporting that EMI, one of the world's four big music-label groups, wants to cut its funding to industry lobby groups, including the RIAA and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. EMI's "looking at ways to 'substantially' reduce the amount it pays trade groups," as a source puts it to…
Colombian rock star Juanes sold more than 6 million songs during his new album's digital prerelease. The sales set a record, according to Universal Music, which distributed the songs via legitimate Internet and mobile vendors. People actually paid for music. Good for Juanes; better, hopefully, for the digital…
