Music Labels Claim Fees from Hotels and Prisons

December 31, 2008 by · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Legal P2P News & Issues 

Recording industry want to remove Ireland’s copyright exemption in court as sales drop

As CD sales decline dramatically while more people download music over the Web the record labels prove a rather “wicked” inventiveness in trying to make up for their alleged losses. Music companies have found another target to quench their thirst for lawsuits with and their everlasting need to find culprits for their bad business.

This time around the offender is none other than…the government, yeah, the government for giving hotels and prisons an exemption from royalties when they broadcast songs into bedrooms and cells.

Phonographic Performance Ireland (PPI), revenue collectors for the music industry, initiated the High Court proceedings just before Christmas. According to TimesOnline its purpose is to have part of the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000 declared in breach of European directives.
It seems that music industry executives want to establish a fee for bedrooms in hotels and it has come up with the suggestion of a weekly fee of €1 per room to cover royalties for music from CDs, TVs and radios.

The music corporations went on claiming that, by exempting hotels from this fee, Ireland is asynchronous with Europe. “We believe the Irish government has erred in putting in an exclusion in the Copyright Act,” Dick Doyle, PPI chairman pointed out. “In nearly every other jurisdiction in Europe, music played in bedrooms has to be licensed.”

The Irish Hotel Federation (IHF) made no comment to this. Hotels as well as nightclubs have been involved in a prolonged legal fight over royalties paid for playing music.

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New Web Service to Search for Trackers with Open Signups

December 30, 2008 by · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, File-Sharing Programs, Networks & Services 

Many Internet users and especially file sharers are probably familiar with BTracs.com and TrackerChecker.org when it comes to searching for an online service that checks private trackers for open registrations. However, the downsize of this services strikes right away – the visual aspect is very poor. This is where OpenTrackers.fr steps in: a spanking new attractive online tool that happily combines the functional with the visual in finding private trackers that are open for registrations.

The service came into existence publicly in November, and it’s increasingly promising. Though the site is originally in French, there is a built-in ‘Google Translate’ tool that can be accessed from the right sidebar to opt for various languages.

Here are the most interesting features of OpenTrackers.fr as inventoried by FileShareFreak:

Percentages — For each tracker, percents are used (i.e. – 99.4% | 0.6% ) which indicates the uptime for a signup page. The higher the percent is in green, the more often a particular tracker has open signups (when compared to when they close them; or remove the /signup.php page, for example). A good working example of this is Demonoid, which is reportedly open 11.1% of the time. Thus, when a tracker is being reported with a down signup page, a quick glance at the percentage stats allow users to gauge the likelihood of whether or not a particular tracker is due to open signups in the future.

Refresh Button — Each tracker link is checked approximately every 10 – 15 minutes, and refreshing your browser window at OpenTrackers.fr will not update the stats. However, there’s a neat little “refresh” feature for each tracker that does update the statistics in real time. (Currently it doesn’t work when running OpenTrackers through the Google Translate, though).

MouseOvers — Hover over a tracker to view a thumbnail of the signup page.

Flags — Country flag icons are used to denote the native language used on each tracker.

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Download Free Tunes from the Garritan Music Community

December 29, 2008 by · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Downloads, Movies, MP3, Digital Audio & Games 

With the winter holidays in our mind and spirit a few dedicated songs to the event would be just the right thing now – so give your iTunes playlist some winter flavor and waste not a penny while doing it with almost 20 classic holiday recordings offered as free download from the Garritan music community.

The Garritan Community Christmas album includes tunes from Oh Holy Night to Auld Lang Syne. How this tunes got to be recorded we say is amazing:

A community of musicians from all over the world met on the Garritan community forum and agreed to submit their own recordings of holiday music, to be freely distributed. Each of these orchestral recordings were made not with large live orchestras in vast recording studios at huge expense, but rather were created by a single person working on their own desktop or laptop computer. What they have in common is the use of Garritan libraries representing software musical instruments based on samples of real instruments.

Garritan Music Player

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File-Swap: File Sharing with a Surprise

December 27, 2008 by · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, File-Sharing Programs, Networks & Services 

I wonder what I’ve downloaded…

File-Swap is an interesting online service whose concept is this: upload a file and download a surprise one in return. Well, it does have the thrill of a blind date. Users don’t need to register and can upload photos, audio, video, text or pdf files and receive a file of the same formats in return. It’s all very easy and fast.

If you want give this service a try you just need to choose a file from a specific location on their computer systems and hit Swap. After you upload the file you will able to view a link of random file ready for you to download and …be surprised by. Besides that you can also rate the file in question.

On the whole the site is worth a try and we think you’ll find the idea quite funny and interesting (However, there are less pleasant surprises like the fact your uploading might sometimes not work properly and the current file size limit – 500kB).

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Sweden’s Pirate Party: High Hopes for the Upcoming Elections

December 27, 2008 by · Comments Off
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Legal P2P News & Issues 

Swedish Pirate Party seems to be quite confident in its chances to the 2009 European Parliament elections. As TorrentFreak points out more than half of all Swedish men under 30 are likely to vote for them.

The website for the Pirate Party was opened on January 1, 2006 (at 20.30 CEST), starting the foundation of the party and apparently the Internet is accountable for the increase of its membership by 50 percent during the last quarter, beating that of the recognized Green Party. “We couldn’t have done this without the dialog infrastructure that the Net provides. Oldmedia has lost control of the discourse,” Swedish Pirate Party Leader Rick Falkvinge stressed out.

Although most people involved in mainstream media received the foundation of this new party three years ago as a bunch of Swedish file sharers having nothing better to do but forming their own political party, now as the government is struggling to enforce stringent copyright laws and others that may be labeled as a serious threat the privacy of the average Swedish, the Pirate Party is starting to get considerable acknowledgement and recognition.

In order to assure itself a seat for the upcoming European election, the Pirate Party needs 100,000 Swedish to vote for them, something which is totally achievable given the present political environment in the country. Falkvinge showed enthusiasm in his comments for the future: “We need to grow by another 50%, counting from the Swedish election two years ago, to get seats in the EU parliament and shake the political copyright world at its core. It’s hard, it’s supposed to be hard, but the numbers show we can do it. We can do this, and the charts are going stratospheric.”

Introduction to Politics and Principles

The Pirate Party wants to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens’ rights to privacy are respected. With this agenda, and only this, we are making a bid for representation in the European and Swedish parliaments.

Not only do we think these are worthwhile goals. We also believe they are realistically achievable on a European basis. The sentiments that led to the formation of the Pirate Party in Sweden are present throughout Europe. There are already similar political initiatives under way in several other member states. Together, we will be able to set a new course for a Europe that is currently heading in a very dangerous direction.

The Pirate Party only has three issues on its agenda: Reform of copyright law, An abolished patent system, Respect for the right to privacy.

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