Radiohead’s Thom Yorke says the band won’t be repeating the band’s digital deal which allowed users to download a version of its most recent album for free. “I don’t think it would have the same significance now anyway, if we chose to give something away again,” he said, describing it as a “one-off response to … Read more
Nokia faces a crippling financial bill for its strategy of bundling free music with handsets, which will give users unlimited song downloads with Nokia phones.
The world’s biggest label, Universal Music, joined the “Comes With Music” initiative at launch last December, and Sony BMG joined last week. The Register has learned that Nokia must pay the wholesale per-unit rate for downloads over a certain ceiling – believed to be 35 songs per user per month.
Music’s best-known “futurist” has admitted his latest business idea has flopped and the service will close. Gerd Leonard of “Music 2.0” fame, who popularised the phrase “music flows like water”, has discovered that on the internet, revenue flows like set cement.
His company Sonific, which allows bloggers to embed a widget that plays music, will suspend its service on May 1. The founder blamed “lack of solid revenue modelling”
(Translation 2.0: no income).
Billy Bragg interviewed. With audio, it’s all here.
Serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson is embroiled in a legal fight against the recording business – and not for the first time. His MP3Tunes locker service has raised the ire of EMI in a case that continues this week. But isn’t it weird, he asks, how the Big Four divvy up the litigation against music start-ups between them so neatly?
Timing is everything in business, and having a visionary idea too early can prove fatal. So it is with Shawn Fanning’s Snocap, which has formally announced today that it’s being acquired by Imeem. Or what’s left of it – most Snocap employees were laid off last year, with Fanning long gone. Snocap was created to … Read more
A US Judge on Monday upheld the view that sharing copyrighted music is infringement. It’s a defeat for defendant Denise Barker and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a victory for the four record labels in the case, led by Warner’s Elektra.
The Copyright Act is fairly clear. It defines “publication” as “offering to distribute copies or phonorecords to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution, public performance, or public display” – but sensibly separates out performance or display itself from the definition. The legal code defines five exclusive rights of copyright: reproduction, adaptation, publication, performance, and display.
Now, digital media blurs the distinction between performance and distribution in lots of interesting ways, but unfortunately, none of these were raised in the case. The EFF instead homed in on the technical point of whether publication was distribution.
“one last fag, then bop, bop, bop”
– Wolfie Smith
London School of Economics I saw one of the most disturbing of all. If you thought people don’t behave in real life like they do online, think again. Here were all the most unpleasant aspects of online behaviour – ignorance, rudeness, groupthink, and a general sneering moral superiority – but made flesh. By the end, it had degenerated into farce. So what was it all about?
The event was billed as “Music, fans and online copyright”, and hosted in co-operation with the British Berkman clone, the Oxford Internet Institute.
Music and copyright are subjects that everyone has a stake in. But the speakers had been hand-picked by a fanatical anti-copyright Jacobin, Ian Brown. Brown drew from a narrow, ideologically homogenous group of friends. That didn’t make for an enlightening debate, but it made for a good lynching party – and the afternoon would culminate in a ritual lynching, with Mr John Kennedy of IFPI lined up for the noose.
With a selection like this, unpleasantness was guaranteed.
US colleges and their alumni may be offered the right to P2P file-sharing under one of the most radical copyright reforms in a hundred years, The Register has learned.
The amnesty would be part of a “covenant not to sue”, covered by a collective licence that offers the right to exchange major label repertory over a participating college’s campus network. Rights holders would be compensated from a pot of money drawn from students’ tuition fees.
Today, many US universities participate in a compulsory Napster or Rhapsody program; these only offer time-limited DRM-encumbered songs, though, and students are still liable for prosecution by the RIAA or its biggest members. Unexpectedly, the deal would extend outside the campus network to college alumni, too.
However, the proposals, which are still at the planning stage, have already drawn concern from publishers and smaller labels. Digital deals, and specifically collective licensing deals proposed by major labels typically offer songwriters little or no compensation, and leave the burgeoning independent sector as an afterthought.
Feargal Sharkey needs little introduction. A chart-topper in his own right, and as the lead singer of one of the greatest pop groups of all time, The Undertones, he subsequently crossed into regulatory and policy work – constantly agitating for musicians, songwriters and performers. At the start of the month he joined British Music Rights, … Read more