Shareminer is a clownsuit engine that searches for files upped to Rapidshare, Megaupload, SendSpace, ZShare, and other similar one click hosts. A great tool for locating full, rare, and out of print albums.
posted on Mar 21, 2008 - View this thread

Steal this album. "In the dying days of the music business as we once knew it, record labels are waging war on leaks—only to discover that many of the saboteurs come from within the industry itself." It's easy to arrest a geek or lay draconian fines on a single mom; what happens when their witchhunt leads to their own offices? Animal Collective won't always be around to get the culprits off the hook.
posted on Jan 2, 2008 - View this thread

Good Copy Bad Copy is "a documentary about the current state of copyright and culture," featuring Danger Mouse, Lawrence Lessig, Dan Glickman of the MPAA and others. The film's creators are releasing it free of charge, via Bittorrent.
posted on Aug 3, 2007 - View this thread

While Courtney pulled an Albini, Jeff handed out the bread. Are the peasants acting like emperors, or do they still want something shiny, aluminum, plastic, and digital? Debacle or cage, something's got to give (pdf). Alternatively, you can just roll your own.
posted on Feb 4, 2007 - View this thread

Canadian musicians protest file-sharing lawsuits. The Barenaked Ladies, Broken Social Scene, Sloan, Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, and many other Canadian artists have formed a coalition to protest the hard line taken by the recording industry against file-sharers, and call for copyright reform. Is there a better way to protect intellectual property rights than suing file-sharers?
posted on May 5, 2006 - View this thread

With all of the talk and posts about itunes, the RIAA, P2P, etc. I thought that I would take this opportunity to point out that there are hundreds of great, free music files online that are legal to download. Sites like Soundloads which posts links to new music every day, Garageband which features up and coming bands, and CNet's music site that lets anyone and everyone upload their files to share with the masses, all feature some great music. And the creators of the music are asking you to download the files for free and add them to your playlists.

I've also downloaded some good music from epitonic.com, purevolume.com, audiostreet, even blogs can be a good source of new, free, legal music downloads. While you're not gonna find the latest big media pop diva or boy band, you can find good music if you take the time to look a little.
posted on Jan 16, 2005 - View this thread

Three major record labels have inked deals with Peer Impact, a (still-in-beta) "legal p2p service"...this news on the heels of Shawn Fanning's "Snocap plan which involves identifying music files being traded through file-swapping networks and then attaching a price tag to them..." [+]
posted on Dec 2, 2004 - View this thread

Blog Torrent is out, it's been under development for a while now by the good people at Downhill Battle. It's a really simplified way of uploading files for the bittorrent network with an integrated client/server solution. Right now the client side is windows only, but the core functionality works with any client of course. Pretty neat.
posted on Nov 24, 2004 - View this thread

The file-sharing fight continues.
Recording industry associations in Denmark, Germany, Italy and Canada have filed lawsuits or taken other legal action, aiming mainly at heavy users accused of offering a large number of songs online.

In other news, A study of file-sharing's effects on music sales says online music trading appears to have had little part in the recent slide in CD sales.
posted on Mar 31, 2004 - View this thread

Study: File-Sharing No Threat to Music Sales.
posted on Mar 30, 2004 - View this thread

Downloading MP3s via P2P now legal in Canada thanks to an MP3 player tax. Just don't upload anything. In related news, the Supreme Court of Canada began hearing arguments over whether Internet Service Providers (ISPs), both here and abroad, should start paying tariffs for Canadian music downloaded by the public. [macrumors]
posted on Dec 15, 2003 - View this thread

SharingTheGroove.org Trade concerts at this site where BitTorrent tech is combined with DAT concert taping audiophiles. You can read the boards to find music or you can just check their bitTorrent tracker. If you want to go low tech they also have Blanks & Postage or Tree/Vine forums.
posted on Oct 12, 2003 - View this thread

Why the RIAA's lawsuits aren't worth moose droppings. Tech Central Station columnist Jay Currie explains how Canada's copyright law, which instills the right to copy music in exchange for levies on blank media, renders the RIAA's legal precedent against file-sharers useless up north.
posted on Sep 13, 2003 - View this thread

iTunes 4 + iLeech = Napster. iTunes can stream songs over the internet right now. With iLeech or iTunesDL (direct download link, no info available) you can download files from other iTunes 4 users. With ShareiTunes and Spymac Music you can search for available iTunes libraries. Now you have access to hundreds of thousands of songs. Will this mean big trouble for Apple or were they planning for this?
posted on May 14, 2003 - View this thread

Hi! You have the right to remain silent! (wanna cyber?)

The RIAA, bastions of goodness and justice, are sending IMs to nasty file-sharers, telling them that what they're doing is naughty. And that they might just end up in court.
A private company they're hiring plans to send a million messages per week, telling the thieving pirates that the RIAA knows where they live.

Looks like "Hilary Rosen" is one person I'll be putting on my ignore list.
posted on Apr 29, 2003 - View this thread

Bye Bye Ms. Rosen. Hilary Rosen announces a decision to depart the RIAA. Is it REALLY about her children or does the RIAA want to soften it's image. Rosen's tendency to polarize the situation with hard-hitting threats like this may have finally broken the camels back. As a friend said - "Things for RIAAare just going to get worse as music sales decrease, piracy increases, and responses to it alienate listeners of all stripes, who just want to hear some tunes, man."
posted on Jan 22, 2003 - View this thread

Piracy is Progressive Taxation says Tim O'Reilly. Of the 7 lessons in this article, "Free is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service" is probably the best model of how things will progress.
posted on Dec 12, 2002 - View this thread

Finally, a Fair Fight with Big Music From a Business Week Online column..."Telecom giant Verizon is battling the industry's bid to make it name a file-sharing subscriber. It's also defending your right to privacy. On July 24, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) made an unprecedented request of Verizon Communications (VZ). The music industry's trade association served the telecom with a subpoena, seeking the identity of a Verizon subscriber who had allegedly illegally traded digital songs by artists including Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, and "boy band" N'Sync. The RIAA didn't specify why it wanted to know who the user was or what it would do with the information."
posted on Sep 12, 2002 - View this thread

Hosting Provider Bans RIAA - According to this press release, Information Wave Technologies will actively block all RIAA IP space because RIAA is intentionally seeking to invade customer networks / hosts to check for copyright violations. Additionally, they are going to deploy a "honeypot" system (simulates a GNUtella client sharing copyrighted material) in order to log requests for the files and correlate them with attempts to invade the host -- RIAA's stated plan to combate music piracy.
posted on Aug 19, 2002 - View this thread

Open source music? Give away the songs without copyright, sell the audio source files dirt cheap and waive the copyright. That's the idea behind Brad Sucks. Are any bands you know of doing something like this?
posted on Jul 30, 2002 - View this thread

Sharing Eminem tracks on P2P? The "artist" (and I use the term loosely here) describes, in his usual trailer-park eloquence, what he would like to do to you. The real ones in need of a beating are those who made this tard a celebrity IMHO, but then we must take pity on those who know not what they do...
posted on Jul 9, 2002 - View this thread

RIAA sues Audiogalaxy. "After targeting decentralized popular file-sharing services such as Kazaa, Morpheus, Grokster, and Madster, the Recording Industry Association of America took aim at Audiogalaxy in court last Friday..." [via pfm]
posted on May 28, 2002 - View this thread

Big Wigs at Napster Resign And here I thought they were dead long ago.
posted on May 15, 2002 - View this thread

Internet File-Sharing Boosts Music Sales Or so this report by Jupiter/Media Metrix says. Is it true? It's true for me, anyway. Not that Jupiter/Media Metrix gets anything right.
posted on May 5, 2002 - View this thread

Music City (makers of Morpheus) to relaunch Web site as a revenue-generating venue for new artists. Though this site will allow the user only so many test runs before purchase, the company's file-sharing technology still allows users to transfer other songs and files between each other free of charge.This will be part of the Morpheus upgrade, which is crappy so far.I need a new P2P.
posted on Mar 14, 2002 - View this thread

Kazaa asks users to accept new terms and conditions when logging on. Anyone know of any hidden pitfalls to the t&c's? Am I going to get visits from the police?
posted on Feb 4, 2002 - View this thread

Kazaa halts downloading at least until a court decision. Does this really matter, as you're only blocking distribution of the client from the kazaa site. The "servers" still run, and people can still download the client from any other site.
posted on Jan 18, 2002 - View this thread

The New Napster Preview is up. Will you pay for this? I won't.
posted on Jan 2, 2002 - View this thread

Napster refuses to die, promises viable business model which you can now download for free. Someone tell these people that the dot-com "I've got no way of paying you anything other than stock options" boom is over. If I have to pay for the service of downloading software from a central server, the P2P model is useless. Morons.
posted on Aug 22, 2001 - View this thread

Songbird is billed as a Napster anti-piracy tool. It's job is supposedly for an artist to see the many title variations of their material as documentation for copyright violations. I don't know if this is truly a thinly-veiled claim of legitimacy or whether the author is just being earnest - but because it shows what users have what variations, I'm finding it a great tool to track down songs that I couldn't find before because of Napster's filtering and not necessarily being able to think of every possible variation...Neato.
posted on May 10, 2001 - View this thread

Could this be the straw that breaks the Camels back.
posted on May 8, 2001 - View this thread

How to win friends and influence people! Metallica goes after Seattle ISP for copyright infringement. I got this link from a pal-has anyone else heard about it?
posted on Apr 30, 2001 - View this thread

"Indeed, so rare and precious are the fruits of [the music industry's] labor that it, unique among the world's enterprises, deserves to have the rules of decent civil behavior suspended." Illegal (even by Taiwan's laws) search-and-seizure of university students' computers. 14 students will be made an example of and 'prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law'... for mp3s. In East Asia, where apparently the record companies have no one better to pick on than college students. *cough*
posted on Apr 16, 2001 - View this thread

If you are downloading from Napster or some other service, the RIAA is tracking you. Here's a screenshot of the Recording Industry's secret weapon.
posted on Mar 23, 2001 - View this thread

MP3 Translator You deserve the right to privately trade music on the Internet. Napster currently has filters set in place that look for certain words in the Artist and/or Song Title. To get around this, all you have to do is:
posted on Mar 6, 2001 - View this thread

If Napster does die, what then? Industry Standard relays a report that investor Bertelsmann isn't just sitting there waiting for the axe to fall. They may be behind the development of their own Napster clone—Snoopster—to move in on the wide-open territory Napster leaves behind. The catch? Snoopster only searched online services, not your own files. Services like... Napster.
posted on Feb 26, 2001 - View this thread

What the Bertelsmann-Napster deal means.
"Hank Barry, chief executive of Napster, has suggested a monthly fee of about $4.95 might be appropriate, but he stressed that fees had not been set." (NYT article; grow up.)
posted on Nov 1, 2000 - View this thread

Barenaked Ladies use ingenuity instead of lawyers to outfox Napster users. Singer Steven Page can be heard in one download telling users: "Although you thought you were downloading our new single, what you actually were downloading is an advertisement for our new album." In retrospect, it's so clever, it's obvious. We're all smacking our heads thinking, "Why didn't I think of that?" Appropriating the Napster system to recoup valuable advertising targeted to those who actually like the band is so elegant in its simplicity, and everyone but the would-be copier is satisfied. (Until they BUY the album)
posted on Sep 24, 2000 - View this thread

mp3.com ordered to pay Universal $118 million for copying CDs to the Mymp3 service, a service designed for owners of those CDs (mp3.com made distribution agreements with the other record labels trying to sue). On the flip side, Yahoo scored a deal with the RIAA to let them webcast music. It's a wacky week in online music [via davenetics].
posted on Sep 6, 2000 - View this thread

If you can't beat em... Pearl Jam join the bootleggers. Makes me wish I was into them. Hope other bands will follow suit.
posted on Aug 31, 2000 - View this thread

Is it still "file sharing" if you don't share? According to a Xerox Parc study, 70% of Gnutella users are downloading music, but they aren't sharing with others. Some Gnutella developers say this is a self-correcting problem and that new users will step up to fill the gap. Others think this is the start of a growing trend and the whole copyright infringement issue might go away if the greed of users in a peer-to-peer network prevents it from succeeding in the first place.
posted on Aug 24, 2000 - View this thread

If you haven't already read "The Heavenly Jukebox", you should really check it out. The Atlantic Monthly recently posted this great article subtitled "Rampant music piracy may hurt musicians less than they fear. The real threat -- to listeners and, conceivably, democracy itself -- is the music industry's reaction to it". While somewhat long, it's a very interesting read, going into the original copyright lawsuits in England over a hundred years ago to today's ordeal pitting the RIAA against the millions of people downloading Metallica mp3s off of Napster. Well worth reading.
posted on Aug 18, 2000 - View this thread

When Headlines Go... OVERT? (the surrealist headline generator strikes again)
posted on Aug 18, 2000 - View this thread

A new survey of online music aficianados supports claims that the Napster crowd has been making for months: MP3-swappers are more likely to purchase music after listening to it for free.
posted on Jul 21, 2000 - View this thread

"Hatch Warns Labels, Don't Make Me Come Over There and Spank You" Oooh! This is gonna be good. [ From Inside via Dan Lyke's excellent Flutterby. ]
posted on Jul 13, 2000 - View this thread

Wow! Lars Ulrich makes a valid point! Who'd a thunk it? While he still fails to notice the obvious benefits the Nap' provides, or make amends for attacking his own fans (or at the very least realized that it's not Congress' place to meddle), Lars has gone ahead and more clearly illuminated his own point of view. Now if only he could have STARTED his argument a few months ago with such calm and coherent points (as opposed to grandiose posturing), this whole Napster debate would be a bit more...um...SOLVED by now?!
posted on Jul 11, 2000 - View this thread

Napster retains (ahem) counsel. The right move I think. Along with the DeCSS case, this may be setting the precedent for what "intellectual property" and "public domain" mean in the 21st century. Hopefully, things will turn out better than in Sterling's "Distraction". Either way, things will never be the same.
posted on Jun 18, 2000 - View this thread

RIAA, mp3.com & Jack Valenti gang up on napster Media racketeers flex their collective muscle. As long as napster is outside the ring, it's a movement symbol as much as a corporate entity. Where's the money? Where's the music? When will artists just start selling mp3s?
posted on Jun 13, 2000 - View this thread

Hey Napster fans! Pull your pants up, turn your hat around and get a job. "We'll put all the albums we can on the Internet for free download and to hell with the record companies. See how they'll like that! I know this feels good but they're throwing the baby out with the bath water."
posted on Jun 12, 2000 - View this thread

Napster finds financial support Venture capital firm Hummer Winblad are pumping $15m into Napster, effectively taking over the company by placing co-founder John Hummer on Napster's board.
posted on May 22, 2000 - View this thread

An interview with the lawyers from Napster and Metellica. Good points, both.
posted on May 22, 2000 - View this thread

Dr. Dre follows in Metallica's footseps and hands over a list of 239,612 user ID's to Napster to for possible termination of these accounts.
posted on May 17, 2000 - View this thread

Napster throws Metallica a curveball. Napster has been pointing out to its kicked-off users a certain provision of the DMCA: If an ISP kicks a user off a service for violating copyright, that user may file a counternotification if they believe they were wrongly accused. The plaintiff (Metallica) then has 10 days to respond with a lawsuit directly against that user. If they choose not to respond, the ISP must restore the account. If enough users (among the 300,000 blocked) file counternotifications, Metallica may wish it had never begun this process.
posted on May 11, 2000 - View this thread

RIAA backs new copyright law: "Instead of the rights to recordings reverting to the artists after 35 years, as current law states, recordings would be reclassified as "works for hire," with the record labels keeping the rights to them forever. " Let the flame-fest begin...
posted on May 10, 2000 - View this thread

Uhoh! Leggo my napster! So I just tried to load up Napster, and it told me that my connection to the server was refused. None of the people I've talked to have been able to get on either. Could this be the end of Napster? Killed in the night while nobody was watching? The site doesn't say anything, but grrrr, I want my pirated music!
posted on May 6, 2000 - View this thread

Metallica and Napster: The Chat. My favorite quote: "For the doubters out there, Metallica will carry on for the next 20 years," Ulrich said. "Whether you're around for the ride or not, that's your problem, not ours." Oh, really?
posted on May 4, 2000 - View this thread

Another music artist that doesn't get it: Dr. Dre. I knew the Metallica thing could start a rash of followers, hopefully this isn't a trend. Why is it so difficult for artists to see that fans trading their music is a good thing? (including better sales of discs thanks to the people hearing the mp3's and better concert sales from fans buying tickets to see them live)
posted on Apr 19, 2000 - View this thread

Download an Mp3... ...and goto jail. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Of course, you can always DoS attack the Motion Pictures Association of America's website, (which was down as I was writing this.) but that would most likely only land you in even deeper water than downloading the Mp3.
posted on Apr 17, 2000 - View this thread

The warez, mp3-traders, hacker and terrorist industry just got a just got a boost in the arm. the goverment and all the music companies are going to see that the internet is not to be regulated. You cannot stop individuals from sharing files between themselves and everytime you start to ban one program another one more innovative than the last pops up. I am going to stop my little rant here because I don't want to seem like i am anti goverment ...viva la revolution.
posted on Apr 10, 2000 - View this thread

Napster Is this the best thing ever? What's the future of this software?
posted on Mar 21, 2000 - View this thread

Napigator -Your Navigator to internet audio- Napigator lets you see real-time server statistics and ping times. Allowing you to make the decision of which server you connect to based upon the number of users, files, gigabytes, and network lag.
posted on Mar 13, 2000 - View this thread

ABC reports on Napsters usage on University Campuses.
posted on Feb 27, 2000 - View this thread

If you haven't tried out Napster yet, you really should. There's also a Mac port of the program (Macster) and a Linux version. On today's journey into the Napster underworld, I was rewarded with several bizarre gems. Among other things, I found a Japanese version of "Song for the Dumped" by Ben Folds Five, Tom Hanks singing "The Cowboy Song" from the epic film "Joe Versus the Volcano", and finally, a kickass acoustic version of "Everlong" by the Foo Fighters, which sounds like it was recorded from a Howard Stern radio show. You can't buy music this quirky, I'm glad there's a venue for it with Napster.
posted on Jan 19, 2000 - View this thread