Mike McGuire

Tis’ the season for contrition, or so it seems.  First Pirate Bay’s buyers last month claimed that they planned to leave their pirate ways behind and offer a legit online music service. Now, it appears that Altnet, parent company of Kazaa – one of the post-Napster file-trading protocols that hit the market soon after Napster [...]

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Perhaps it’s a bit early for music rightsholders to call this new information a “turning point” in the battle against file-sharing, but it’s interesting. To me, the Guardian story, noting drops in usage of P2P by certain age groups, underscores what we pointed out in several recent documents — How Online Consumers in Italy Find [...]

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Finally, some important and good news on the digital media front: an agreement on royalty rates and revenue sharing for webcasters such as Pandora will pay to music publishers, labels and other rightsholders. This ends a set of negotiations that lasted two years and was either going to eviscerate the online earning power of artists [...]

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By refusing to back content companies drive to block Cablevision from deploying a network DVR capability, the U.S. Supreme Court has, to my way of thinking (skewed though it maybe), done the content companies a favor.
By declining to hear the content companies appeal from a lower court ruling which held that Cablevision’s planned deployment of [...]

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