Culture and Society

Billboard thinks the digital music market is ready to go mainstream: What a difference a year makes to the maturation of the digital music market. In the past 12 months, the major labels have opened the content floodgates, authorizing hundreds of thousands of tracks for Internet distribution. Apple Computer has …

Elements of this sound like they may actually be making some progress toward a blanket license of some kind for file sharing – this could be a big step: The administrators and music executives are trying to solve the piracy problem because both suffer from it. Universities have to deal …

EFF offers an invaluable service whereby file sharing service users can search the RIAA subpoenas to see if they are a target: Concerned that information about your file-sharing username may have been subpoenaed by the RIAA? Check here to see if your username is on one of the subpoenas filed …

This is an amazing sea change reflecting a desire for interactivity and active control above passive reception of one-way communication: The Internet has surpassed television in overall time usage to become the primary medium of choice among teens and young adults. That was one finding from a research study commissioned …

The Protecting Children from Peer-to-Peer Pornography Act would require parent’s permission for minors to download P2P software in an effort to protect them from pornography – but what about every single search engine? Besides requiring parental consent, the bill would allow parents to install “beacons” on their computers that signal …

The RIAA gets serious: Citing lackluster results in its aggressive Subpoena-the-Family campaign, The Recording Industry Assocation of America, or RIAA, announced today it was escalating the war against music file sharing even higher by opening its massive detention facility in the high desert of Movaje, CA. The facility, designed to …

Contradicting the RIAA’s claims that they can only track down individual file sharers via their Internet Providers (see Verizon case), the AP was able to track down a number of the targets of federal subpoenas the RIAA has been churning out: Parents, roommates — even grandparents — are being targeted …

File sharing services are making efforts to hide user identities in the wake of the RIAA sue-the-world campaign: the makers of file-sharing software are fortifying their programs to try to mask users’ identities. Some of the upgrades reroute Internet connections through so-called proxy servers that scrub away cybertracks. Others incorporate …

Dan Gillmor on the RespectCopyrights.org campaign: a campaign (also including TV commercials and in-theater pitches) aimed at convincing us all of a single point — that it’s wrong to infringe on copyrights. Well, of course it is, especially when the purpose is to get something of value for nothing or …

The Dixie Chicks have made a clever political move, buying, I mean supporting their own section of the Rock the Vote site and starting a registration and education campaign called “Chicks Rock, Chicks Vote!” (of course the Chicks don’t exactly “rock,” but “Chicks Pop, Chicks Vote!” doesn’t have the same …