THE COPYRIGHT POLICE ARE WATCHING

The conventional wisdom has been that the record companies would target services like Napster with threats and lawsuits, but they would never attack individuals – for practical and PR reasons. Forget it. The copyright police are watching. The new services...

DIGITAL COPYRIGHT

There’s a lot to learn about the copyright issues symbolized by the war against Napster. Copyright owners are waging a concerted battle with a single-minded goal: to make your every exposure to copyrighted material into an event that costs you money. In 1998 the...

MEDIA JUKEBOX 7.0

I’m a fan of Media Jukebox for playing, recording, and organizing .mp3 files. Each of the main players – Windows Media Player, RealJukebox, and MusicMatch Jukebox – have annoying quirks or shortcomings that drove me to distraction. Media Jukebox does...

DEATH TO MP3’s

A fascinating article in today’s Wall Street Journal discusses some of the ways that software manufacturers are going to cooperate with the recording industry and attempt to kill the .mp3 format. The competing formats – Microsoft’s Windows Media...

JURORS MISCALCULATE MP3.COM DAMAGES

My lawyer friends will appreciate this story. Last week jurors in a federal court trial in New York awarded $300,000 to an independent record label for copyright violations – delivered as 145 individual awards, one for each infringed song. The defendant,...

MUSIC INDUSTRY FOLLOWUP

Here’s a good article that explains all the issues about file formats and pricing for downloadable music from the record labels – and concludes that they stand a good chance of getting it completely wrong.