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Music Industry Wants Royalties From iTunes 30 Second Samples

Dear music industry: go fuck yourself.

Music royalty groups ASCAP and BMI are harassing online music stores such as iTunes to pay performance fees not only for the songs that they sell, but for the short clips that they use as previews. You know, the things that entice people to pay for music. They want to be paid for advertisements for their product.

Just how backwards is this industry? How many years can they continue to just not get it in such an extreme way? You would have thought that maybe it would have taken a few years for them to figure out the internet, but we're way beyond that. This entire industry seems to be run by people who don't just not understand the internet, but are aggressive about not understanding the internet. They have their old way of doing business and the old way the world works, and they'll be damned if any new fangled thing like a complete upheaval in the way people acquire and listen to music is going to change that.

It'd almost be funny if the people who were really being harmed by these jackasses weren't the artists. Bands aren't the ones pushing for something that will only end with their best form of advertising being pulled from the iTunes Music Store (because make no mistake, that's what will happen before Apple pays for fucking song clips). It's these royalties idiots, the same people who almost killed off Pandora.

So here's the bottom line, guys: you're doing it wrong. And you've been doing it wrong for a while. You need to figure out a new way of doing business, and that doesn't mean just shifting fees around and charging where you clearly shouldn't be charging. Earn your paychecks, because unlike the bands you purport to be representing, you're still getting them. [CNET via Electronista]

Second Degree Murder and Six Other Crimes Cheaper than Pirating Music

I'm outraged that the Obama administration is supporting the RIAA on the case against Jammie Thomas, a single mother of four who has to pay them $1.92 million for downloading songs. That's more expensive than murder and six other crimes:

• Child abduction: Fine of $25,000 and up to three years in prison, which can be accounted as $50,233 per year (that was the median household income in 2007, probably down because of the economic crisis). Total: $175,699.

• Steal the CDs: A total of $275,000, $52,500 fine for the CDs.

• Steal a lawnmower from your neighbour: A total of $375,000.

• Burn someone's house while playing The Doors: Another $375,000.

• Stalk a Gizmodo editor (yes, you know who you are): A Class 4 felony that will result in just $175,000.

• Start a dogfighting ring: $50,000.

• Murder someone on the second degree, a Class 1 felony: $778,495, which accounts for a $25,000 fine and four to 15 years in prison.

Heck, you can do all these crimes, and the total amount will be only $2.2 million. Of course, you can't really quantify years spent in prison using dollars, but I don't care. The case of Jammie—and many like hers—is still absolutely outrageous.

Ms. Thomas got fined $1.92 million for downloading 1700 songs songs. For some reason, a popular jury thought that was fair. That's ok. There are mentally disturbed people everywhere. But I don't care if it's 1700 or 17000 songs, nobody can be punished like this for downloading songs. It may follow a draconian law to the last comma and period, but that doesn't make the verdict just. The law is what is at fault here, with a punishment that is not proportional to the magnitude of the "crime." This goes against the most basic sense of justice.

I know that el Señor Presidente has more serious issues to worry about that this case, but something needs to be done about it. Something drastic. Unfortunately, nothing will happen, given the "class" of people now at the Department of Justice:

What a crying shame. [Gapers Block]

Ahoy! Cloned Pirate Bay Site Sets Sail

Remember that Pirate Bay user who archived the site's entire torrent index earlier this week? It's available for all to download, but he's now used it to create a full replica site. You can check it out at BTArena.net. [TorrentFreak]

According to the site: "tracker.btarena.org" can be used to track new torrents.

The torrents available from the BTArena.net copy still carry the announce URLs from The Pirate Bay's tracker but since all torrents were updated with the OpenBitTorrent tracker, they will remain functional even when GGF's version of the site takes over at the end of this month

Get The Pirate Bay’s Torrent Archive With One Massive 21.3GB Download

With the Pirate Bay set to close in the next few days, one anonymous user has put together a single massive archive of all 873,671 torrent files hosted on its servers.

Remember: this is a torrent file index, not the petabytes of data they link to.

The anonymous uploader who compiled this huge torrent told TorrentFreak that he wanted to have a backup of the site in case all torrents mysteriously disappear after the site is sold. "I suppose I want us to have assurances. If the TPB deal disappoints us, we can just put it up again," he said.

Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay is also hosting what it calls "the $675,000 mixtape"—a collection of the 30 songs that student Joel Tenenbaum was found guilty of sharing, and then fined that amount for.

[The Pirate Bay via TorrentFreak –Thanks Mark!]

Greg Kot: The Music Industry Caused Piracy, and iTunes Isn’t the Way Out

Greg Kot, music critic for the Chicago Tribune and others, wrote a book called Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music. In a recent podcast interview, he enumerates the precise downfall of record labels and why iTunes isn't their savior.

In his interview on the fantastic podcast The Sound of Young America, Kot states that the music industry was actually one of the primary causes of piracy. The explosion of boy bands and bubblegum pop in the late 1990s was due to the labels' insistence on pouring a huge amount of money into just a few dumbed-down, impersonal, lowest-common-denominator acts, which meant in turn that commercial radio was almost completely garbage. There was little room for genuine weirdo geniuses like, say, Prince or David Bowie, and devoid of good music, the market was bound to react—hence Napster.

Kot goes through the standard points all dedicated pirates know—artists have never made money on record sales, the mp3 revolution encouraged the indie movement and a huge variety of new and exciting acts, the RIAA's insistence on trying to sue piracy out of existence led to the public having absolutely zero guilt about pirating music. But what's nice is Kot's recognition that iTunes, the much-applauded champion of legal music downloads, is still far inferior to pirate options.

I'll toss this out there: I think the dear departed OiNK, an invite-only torrent site that was forcefully shut down in late 2007, was the greatest music distribution service ever created. It was leagues ahead of iTunes: Faster downloads, better mandated sound quality, an incredibly vast library, vibrant forums full of knowledgeable music dorks, and, of course, totally without DRM. Even now that iTunes has abandoned DRM, it can't hold a candle to a service that hasn't even been operational in nearly two years. Record labels seem to have pinned their hopes to iTunes, but Kot stresses that iTunes is far from perfect, and the labels should be busting ass trying to come up with a viable business model that attracts, not polices, customers, and can at least hold pace with the illegal options.

Cue the "screw the RIAA" comments. [The Sound of Young America]

Student Forced to Pay $675,000 to RIAA for Sharing 30 Songs

Joel Tenenbaum admitted to sharing 30 songs with Kazaa back in 2004 (Kazaa! So quaint!) and was originally fined $150,000 per song. He worked that down to "only" $22,500 per song, but that's still $675,000 in total.

This is the second big victory for the RIAA this month, after the even-more-ridiculous decision that filesharer Jammie Thomas should pay $80,000 per song. But unlike Thomas, Tenenbaum hasn't come out and said he will outright refuse to pay the fine, and it looks like this is a more concrete win for the RIAA dirtbags.

The RIAA specified to TorrentFreak that the money won will go to more lawsuits, not to the artists the RIAA supposedly represents. It looks like yet another episode in this long public relations attack in which the organization mercilessly kills any sympathy for their cause that might have existed. [TorrentFreak]

RIAA Member Settles Suit After Defendant Proves She Did Even Not Own a Computer

RIAA member Universal Music Group was forced to settle a piracy suit it had brought against Mavis Roy after suffering a bit of a setback in their prosecution: Mavis Roy did not own a computer when UMG first brought suit.

Roy, a New Hampshire resident, actually thought the letters she received from UMG's lawyers were either a joke or a scam and didn't respond for several months. Her reaction is pretty understandable; the RIAA simply directed her to a site where she could pay her "debt" with a credit card (which certainly seems like a scam) and, again, Roy did not own a damn computer.

UMG had mistakenly sued her due to the vast deficiencies in MediaSentry, the anti-piracy software the RIAA uses to track down pirates. MediaSentry incorrectly pinpoints IP addresses with not uncommon frequency, and this is obviously one such case. Roy mounted a case and UMG was forced to settle out of court, for fear that any decision at all would result in a precedent that could mean future suits could be thrown out as well. Unfortunately, the settlement does not include UMG paying Roy to apologize for being such a-holes about the whole thing, and neither side will receive any money. [Recording Industry vs. The People via Electronista]

Court Orders File-Sharer to Pay $80,000 Per Song to RIAA

A delusional Minnesota court has ordered Jammie Thomas, wanton criminal Kazaa user, to pay a total of $1.92 million for sharing 24 songs. As my own little protest, I'm going to illegally download Metallica's entire discography. And I hate Metallica.

The decision has taken a ton of twists and turns—even after the jury had decided what Thomas had done was in fact illegal filesharing, the punishment wasn't at all clear. Originally she was to be fined for over 1,700 songs, which was then whittled down to 24 "representative" songs, and the per song fine has shot up from the initial $750 (the legal minimum) to the current $80,000.

Apparently Thomas "gasped" when the number was read out loud. We don't blame her, although our reaction was more fist-shaking and muttering about old white men in suits than sheer surprise.

The ordeal isn't over, of course—Thomas will appeal the decision and it'll probably be heard by a few more judicial levels before any final say is had. Jammie, we're pulling for you. Stand tall. Or sit down, it's easier to steal music that way. [Ars Technica]