Digital Rights Network

Jean-Baptiste Soufron has posted a useful summary of current state of the French effort to transpose the EUCD into national law: http://soufron.typhon.net/article.php3?id_article=132

Deadline for Submissions: Extended to 28th of February (was: Thursday 19 January 2006)

CULTURE MEDIA AND SPORT COMMITTEE
16 November 2005 No. 11

New inquiry: New media and the creative industries
The Culture, Media and Sport Committee is announcing today a new inquiry into the challenges and opportunities for the creative industries arising from the development of new media platforms. For the purposes of the inquiry, the term "creative industries" includes music, visual broadcasts, sound broadcasts, film, graphic art, design, advertising, fashion and games software.

Testimony by Sam Yagan, President MetaMachine, Inc. (developer of eDonkey and Overnet) September 28, 2005: PROTECTING COPYRIGHT AND INNOVATION IN A POST-GROKSTER WORLD in which he explains his companies 'capitulation' to the RIAA and the conversion of eDonkey to a 'closed' P2P system.

In the rest of hist testimony he argues that major chilling effects on innovation in P2P have already been felt, effects which the Grokster decision will significantly accelerate. More excerpts and comments below:

Putting their music up for free download online has helped new Yorkshire band the Arctic Monkeys sell out concerts across Britain and have their first single go straight to number one. All of this despite the absence of a traditional marketing campaign and only getting a record deal with Domino in July.

Such success would seem to bear out many of the predictions of the benefits for bands of sharing music freely online. It demonstrates that doing so can help sales as well as making a big difference in concert attendance (the band has already had a sell-out UK tour which included headlining at the 2000 person Astoria Theatre in London). It also highlights how such an approach can help in creating a more direct relationship betweens a band and its fans. As the Daily Telegraph explained:

"A new rock group featuring former members of The Clash and Generation X has taken a novel approach to the issue of piracy by urging their fans to copy their music."

2005-07-15
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4683875.stm

"It is enough to make a sceptic believe in life after death. For the past few years the music industry has been predicting the death of the singles market because of the global scourge of illegal downloading.

And what has happened? The latest figures show that 524,000 singles were sold last week in the UK, an impressive 7% increase on a year ago and no less that 44% up on sales earlier in the year, when the sirens of doom were at their loudest.

Oh, I've forgotten a small point. These figures only refer to sales of what is known in the trade as "physical" singles. If (legal) downloads are included, sales have soared by a staggering 88% in the last year to 977,000 last week."

At a conference in the Netherlands on 12 April, attended by the CEO of the International Federation of Phonographic Industries John Kennedy it was announced that for the first time individual users of peer-to-peer networks would be targeted in Finland, Ireland, Iceland and the Netherlands.

Meanwhile a judge in the UK ordered ISPs to hand over the names of a further 31 file-sharers in the second round of lawsuits brought by the BPI.

Concurrently, the BPI released figures in which it claimed that downloading had cost the industry 650 million pounds over the last two years, but it is unclear whether the statistics separate legal and illegal downloading, and whether they control for a decline in sales caused by a lack of fresh talent (the video game and film industries have not suffered similar delines despite their products being open to file-sharing - see
P2P's Impact on Recorded Music Sales by Felix Oberholzer and Koleman Strumpf for more detail on how these figures can mislead).

The basis for suing individual users is the legal right to force ISPs to disclose the identities of their clients, a contentious practice that was at the centre of a WIPO conference on ISP liability on 18th April. Read an informative summary of proceedings with links to further material.

"LONDON -- Apple Computer's three-month-old European iTunes service came under attack Wednesday from Britain's Consumers' Association, which asked the Office of Fair Trading, a business watchdog, to investigate why the service's prices are higher than those in the United States.

British iTunes customers pay 79 pence ($1.40, or 120 eurocents) per song, while French and German residents pay 67.7 pence ($1.20, or 99 eurocents), a difference of 17.5 percent. Americans pay even less: just 99 cents per song"
source: wired news story