Search Results for: AVOID

As chatter abounds regarding the urgency of digital distribution, major music conglomerates are moving quickly to demonstrate their eagerness to make their content available online. Further evidence comes with this week’s pact between media giants AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann and EMI and digital behemoth RealNetworks to create MusicNet, a platform for downloadable and streaming services. MusicNet will provide a pool of licensed music from the participating rights holders, with a technology infrastructure by Real. The label groups collectively have a 60% stake in the venture, while Real has 40%. Once the platform is established, any digital music provider satisfying the… Read more »

Like concertgoers reluctantly heading home as the lights come up, many Napster users are heading for greener pastures as the company’s court mandated filters block more than a million copyrighted music files from the service. According to data from entertainment research firm Webnoize, the number of Napster users on the system at any given time has dropped from 1.5 million in mid-March to 1.1 million as of Friday a one-week decline of more than 25%. At the same time, however, Webnoize found that the average number of files shared by any one user, which had tumbled by 60% after Napster… Read more »

File-sharing service attempts to comply with court order, but downloaders concoct ways to avoid blocks. Despite Napster’s promise to do everything in its power to comply with a court order to remove copyrighted songs from its system this week, users can still find – and download – plenty of tunes by Metallica and other artists. And those users are working just as hard, if not harder, to foil Napster’s efforts. Napster won’t say how many songs it has already filtered, but searches for top-selling artists such as Joe, ‘N Sync, Britney Spears and Eminem all turned up dozens of matches… Read more »

On Monday (February 12), the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the wildly popular song-swap service Napster to stop its millions of users from trading copyrighted material. Calling the decision a major victory, recording industry officials and legal experts said the ruling by a three-judge panel could destroy Napster as a free song-swapping service. Napster, a company formed around a computer program developed by a teenage college dropout, was gloomy. “Napster is not shut down, but under this decision it could be. We are very disappointed in this ruling by the three judge panel and will seek appellate review,”… Read more »