Mike McGuire

So, since France’s three-strikes law has made it through its legislative hurdles and is going to be enacted. If actually works as intended, we should quickly see significant growth in sales of iTunes and other legitimate online services operating in France, correct?
I’m doubtful of that actually happening but I’ve been accused of being a cynic.  [...]

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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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It appears that Universal Music and Virgin Media – a UK ISP – are going to deploy an online music service, the description of which makes it sound as if it came from one of the white papers I worked on with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, back in [...]

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Nostalgia is death.
So, far be it from me to wax nostalgic about just about anything, but letting the 10-year anniversary of Shawn Fanning’s single-handed destabilization of the media industry go by without mention doesn’t seem right.
In short, my feeling about Napster requires me to paraphrase TV critic Tim Goodman of the SF Chronicle: [...]

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Napster, MGM v. Grokster and now the Pirate Bay. Three court cases brought against defendants accused of building and/or deploying file-trading technology utilized by millions to redistribute content without the rightsholders permission. 
Nobody can honestly believe that this conviction will have any more deterrent effect than the others, do they? Not sure how you could [...]

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It’s special in the sense of “separate” or apart from the crowd, so to speak. The crowd in question being all the regular old channels on YouTube which contain music videos. Essentially, this story describes a meeting of minds (Doug Morris and Eric Schmidt) and motivation (online revenue) between Universal Music and Google’s YouTube video [...]

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Yahoo! Music has been revamped – again – and this one announced (more or less) on April 7 – is clearly inspired by the company’s strategic imperatives of “open” and being the "starting point” for any Internet activity. In this case, online music. 
With the revamp, Yahoo! Music is looking to become the Internet’s mass [...]

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