A band, called the Allman Brothers, which I have to admit up until now I've not heard of, have taken the unprecidented step of suing their own label over their lack of earnings from digital distribution.

They claim, and rightfully so, that allowing music to be distributed digitally costs the label virtually nothing, yet the artists see the same tiny share of the profit they get from physical music.

US$10million is what they are looking for in compensation, and as the contract, being signed in 1985, obviously had no mention of digitial distribution, I feel they have an honest chance of winning this

We'll keep you up to date.

A new bill, requiring all college campuses to fight p2p on site by giving them notice consistantly of the consequences of sharing copyrighted material, and punish them if they do, is getting very close to becoming law. The Higher Education Opportunity Act is set to detract colleges from their primary aim; to educate their students, and force them to spend time trying to filter pirated content, which although in legal terms is a good thing, it certainly is not if it in any way impacts the education of students.

It just needs the president's signature to become law, and it will probably get it...shame...

Youtube frequently seem to get threatened with massive lawsuits by companies which have had their property uploaded, so today is no exception. Mediaset, an Italian media company, have decided that they are going to sue the Google owned company for half a billion euros, a phenominal amount of money in anyones eyes.

Will it be successful? No. None of the suits ever make it anywhere near court as people realize they are stupid to try and sue an american company in a foriegn court.

It's taken them a while, but the folks at the MPAA have worked out that people actually do like watching movies online (videos, on a computer?! what is this?!), and so, in an attempt to combat piracy, they are setting up a website where you can put in the title of a film, and it will give you all the possible ways you can watch it on the net, or alternitively where you can buy it. Seems a good idea really, a possible first for the MPAA?

The legendary set of servers on the eDonkey/eMule network, razorback 3...have died. Finally, after years of being one of the biggest set of safe servers available, the anti piracy organization BRIEN have taken them out after finally working out where they were hosted.

It's a big loss for users, but there are still plenty of other safe servers around if you run a whitelist.

Firstly, hi all, I'm back from holiday, and ready to blog again.

The first story I have for you is another one of those typical piracy surveys conducted by a big company, where the end results come out with the fact that shock horror, people, in particular young poeple, like to pirate things.

This time it's Microsoft's turn and they have figured out that 54% of the young people they surveyed actively pirate material, in comparison to the 19% of adults they talked to.

Apparently the main reasons for piracy, are, as we all already know, as the real product is too expensive and the fact that you just don't gain anything extra by buying it (except the packaging, which some people just don't care about)

Hi all.

Just to let you know I'm off on holiday for a week from tonight, so there will be no updates from me until the 30th or so of this month, when I'll try and do a load of catchup posts on any interesting news that has occured.

Hopefully we'll be able to find a temp editor from the network to go in my place but I'm not sure.

Sorry all.