Risk & Safety

Here's a twist - sort of like iTunes and Kazaa in a single package. "While the music industry attempts to shutter peer-to-peer services in court and in Congress, one company is using P2P networks to promote and pay artists," Wired News reports. It's called Weed and it allows file-sharers to download a song and play it three times for free. The fourth time, they pay a dollar (iTunes-style pricing). … [Read more...] about Blending free and fee in P2P

To enlist parents' help in discouraging kids' file-sharing, the film industry will offer free software that detects "P2P files," CNET reports. The Register goes a bit far in its assessment that the Motion Picture Association of America's move "is designed to split families right down the middle. The MPAA hopes that new software will encourage parents to turn their children over to the authorities … [Read more...] about MPAA’s ‘favor’ to parents

To file-sharing kids, a CD that tells you to go ahead, "rip, sample, mash, and store" these tunes to your heart's content, should be no big deal. In fact, the new, "100% legal" Wired CD, bundled into Wired magazine's November issue, is an anomaly - and an important next step for the online music scene. You can copy, share, remix, build on, do anything noncommercial that you want with the music on … [Read more...] about Net music’s next step

The low-key P2P service that file-sharers at your house have at least heard of is true to its name. BitTorrent's users are trading a veritable torrent of data online, accounting for "an astounding 35% of all the traffic on the Internet" and more than all the file-sharing services combined," Reuters reports. Citing the findings of UK Web analysis firm CacheLogic, Reuters adds that this P2P traffic … [Read more...] about Torrent of file-sharing

For a while, in its effort to make it as easy as possible to sue music swappers, the music industry had a practice, with subpoenas, of forcing Internet service providers to reveal their customers' identities without notifying the customers. Verizon was the first ISP to refuse to comply. Last December a federal appeals court said ISPs didn't have to comply with the bulk subpoenas (for which the … [Read more...] about Supreme Court nixes RIAA case