NeuLion announced a deal a few days ago to bring “a brand new service for UFC offering the most interactive, far-reaching digital experience yet.” Last night’s UFC 126 was the first pay-per-view event to receive the NeuLion treatment, so I decided to check it out to see what all the fuss was about. Fair warning: There will be spoliers.

First, who’s NeuLion? The company describes itself as “a leading IPTV company providing a comprehensive suite of technology and services to content owners and aggregators.” Its partners include MLS, the NHL, the NBA, Bellator Fighting Championships, and now UFC, which is by far the biggest mixed martial arts promotion in the world. Non-sport clients include Dish Network and several international organizations I’m not too familiar with, including Latin America’s JumpTV and Scandinavia’s ScandiTV.

UFC 126, broadcast live from Las Vegas, featured Anderson Silva front-kicking Vitor Belfort into next Tuesday, fast-rising sensation Jon “Bones” Jones guillotining Ryan Bader, who’s an altogether excellent wrestler, and the UFC debut of Norifumi “Kid” Yamamoto, Japan’s most famous mixed martial artist—excepting Kazushi Sakuraba, of course. Too bad he lost.

What do you get for your $44.95? (Fun fact: The event was free on ufc.tv in Germany and Austria. Gotta build that audience somehow: UFC was thrown off the air in Germany about a year ago.) Naturally there’s a high-quality Flash livestream—there was a noticeable bump in quality once Jones vs. Bader began—but that’s always been available on previous official UFC streams; it’s nothing to brag about. That the steam jumped around in bitrate was annoying but to be expected. (I should think my Internet connection, with 101 mbps down, can handle a mere Flash stream!) The NeuLion-ness begins with the ability to choose from multiple camera angles: the standard broadcast camera, cameras from each fighter’s corner, and an overhead camera. These disparate camera angles can be viewed simultaneously in a “quad view” mode. Similarly, there’s a picture-in-picture mode that allows you to hover a secondary camera angle window on top of your primary camera angle window, which remains at full-size. English and Spanish-language audio feeds are available, as well as each fighter’s corner’s audio feed. If you, like me, studied Portuguese in college for seemingly no reason then you could have listened to Anderson Silva’s corner bark orders at him for the duration of the fight. Well, the duration of the round.

Good, clean fun, but I think I’m correct in noting that Strikeforce launched a multi camera angle online stream last year, too.

On the right-hand side lies an “enhanced view,” which contains a live chatroom where you can talk to other folks about the on-screen action. Fans can also score rounds in this panel. Will you, unlike pretty much every judge out there, be brave enough to give a round a 10-8 score, or perhaps the even rarer 10-10?

A built-in Twitter panel follows the #UFC and #UFC126 hashtags.

Now the question on everyone’s mind: is this better than a traditional pay-per-view that you’d buy from your cable or satellite TV provider? I’m going to say no, it’s not, but it’s getting there.

First off, I can’t imagine too many people will want to huddle around a laptop to watch a sports event, though I suppose you could connect your computer to your TV and watch it that way. I’d imagine the number of people who know how to day that, much less are willing to do that, is effectively zero. UFC tends to be a communal viewing experience: you invite your friends over, order a couple of pizzas, the whole nine yards. You stand to lose that here. For $10 more I could have ordered the HD version of the event from DirecTV and watched it on my 50-inch TV.

That said, I did enjoy the experience. The livestream was of a high enough quality that I didn’t feel like I was watching a YouTube video in 2006 (or an illegal stream), and the same can be said of the audio quality: top-notch. It’s not Dolby Digital, but what are you gonna do? The multiple camera angles certainly added the the whole experience—I believe “immersion” would be the word to use—but I often found myself sticking with the standard broadcast camera. The chat room was largely No Buys (read: lame), but that’s to be expected: people in live sports chatrooms tend to be rather prickly. “So-and-so sucks” and so forth. Stop trying to get yourselves over, sirs.

It should also be said that if usage-based billing were to ever make its way to the U.S. this service would wither and die. (And you need more evidence why cable companies would love to charge by the gigabyte? It makes things like Internet pay-per-view streams prohibitively expensive, pushing people back to plain ol’ pay-per-view where they get a nice cut of the action, sharing that revenue with the likes of UFC and WWE.)

My biggest concern is price: $45 is simply too much money to ask for a livestream of sometimes dubious quality, particularly when a proper HD pay-per-view from the cable company (in my case, DirecTV) is a mere $10 more. As much as people like to hate on Comcast and Time Warner and the like, the fact is your HD pay-per-view isn’t going to “buffer” at inopportune times. Until all of the kinks have been worked out, UFC would do well to experiment with their stream prices. The card last night was one of the deepest in history, so $45 doesn’t sting as much as it would have stung for, say, last September’s UFC 119. Why not price some of the “B” events at closer to $30 and make them impulse buys?

Then again, UFC fans tend to be among the most affluent in all of sports, so maybe Dana White & Co. are right to charge whatever they want.

Another annoyance is the fact that you’re only given a 24-hour window to watch the event. That’s in direct contrast to Dragon Gate USA and Ring of Honor Internet pay-per-vew (iPPV) events found on GoFightLive.tv. There, you buy the event (typically $15) and can watch it on-demand forever, usually beginning the very next day.

If nothing else, UFC should be commend for trying to bring its product into the Internet era. While it’s true that the company is suing everyone under the Sun in an effort to eliminate illegal Internet streams—a difficult task at best—at least it’s offering viable alternatives to would-be customers. (Kid Yamamoto’s fight aired on the company’s Facebook page for free, as seen in the above grab.) The RIAA used to sue everyone, too, but it never really offered a legal alternative to sate the obvious demand for digital downloads. No, Apple had to drag the music industry kicking and screaming for that to happen.

Man, they’re still fighting, aren’t they? ChillingEffects‘ stats, by way of TorrentFreak, reveal that the “international music industry,” in the form of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, has sent the most DMCA takedowns notices in 2010, with some 1,272 notices sent in the year. In third place is some Brazilian hardware site, Clube do Hardware. In third place we have Twentieth Century Fox, the movie studio that brought us hits like Knight and Day, Predators, Machete, and Wall Street: The Kid From Even Stevens Edition. Oh, and Avatar.

What does all of this mean? Eh, not a whole lot. We learn that the music industry, hilariously, still hasn’t quit going after people who share pop-trash nonsense. (There was a big operation a few days ago targeting music sites who are accused of engaging in “willful copyright infringement,” but it’s a whole lot more complicated than that, particularly with respect to hip-hop marketing and promotion.) But beyond that, there isn’t much to digest here.

What’s perhaps a little surprising is the lack of movie studios in the upper tiers of the list. Twentieth Century Fox is the only non-pornographic film studio in the top 20.

The RIAA itself is in 7th place, issuing “only” 203 takedown notices.

What to watch: I’m going to guess that Amazon sold and boatload of Kindles this year, so it wouldn’t surprise me to see an increase in e-book piracy in 2011. Lord knows there’s already 8 million sites dedicated to sharing PDFs and EPUBs.

The RIAA, still fighting the good fight. LimeWire as you knew it was shut down a few weeks ago because of an RIAA-secured court order. So LimeWire says, “OK, we’ll alter the application so that it complies with your wished, RIAA.” Today we’ve learnt that a new LimeWire has started to circle around the Internet, and now the RIAA is having another fit. Again: let’s just ban music altogether. It’s the best solution to this mess.

A site had popped up called Meta Pirate (ugh, grow up, people) that had started offering a new version of LimeWire, called LimeWire Pirate Edition. It’s this edition that has the RIAA all bent out of shape, saying that someone connected to LimeWire is behind the site, and that someone needs to be held accountable.

LimeWire, of course, has denied any involvement with LimeWire Pirate Edition, and that it is fully complying with the previous court order.

Apple has posted a cryptic message on its Web site, teasing the world about an “exciting” iTunes announcement that’s coming tomorrow. What could it be? I saw that someone had suggested The Beatles were finally coming to iTunes, but really, who cares? If you want The Beatles on your iPhone you can grab the newly remastered albums that came out last year, “rip, mix, burn,” then off you go. Not very exciting, no. What could be exciting, though, is a streaming music service. In an instant, Apple would have killed the MP3 once and for all. You hear that? That’s the sound of the RIAA thanking Apple over and over again.

A streaming music service would make all kinds of sense for Apple, and it wouldn’t be too bad for us consumers either. Streaming services have already seen much success, chiefly with Spotify in Europe and Rdio here in the U.S. But an iTunes Streaming service, probably given a slick name like “iTunes Stream,” would instantly take the idea of streaming from something only techie geeks care about to something the whole family can enjoy.

Think about it. Every song ever (deals with record labels permitting, of course), right there on your iPhone, your iPad, your Apple TV, your MacBook, on-demand and always at the ready. If you can access the Internet (“the Cloud”), then you can listen to your tunes.

And just like that, your MP3s are worthless. Why would you maintain a giant collection of hard drive-eating MP3 and AAC (the file format iTunes uses) files when you can access the same songs from a handy App?

Let’s see… gigabytes upon gigabytes of music files versus a single App that can stream any song with the touch of a button. Well, the touch of a screen, as it were.

It’s a no-brainer, and everybody wins.

Apple collects $10 per month (or whatever) from you, you get access to an entire Cloud’s worth of music, and the record labels no longer have to worry about pesky kids “trading files” any more. Not because illegally trading iTunes-purchased music was ever a problem for the record labels, but that iTunes Stream would represent a very clear change in the culture of music consumption. Kids wanting to listen to Kanye West’s “Monster” won’t think to look for an “MP3,” they’ll grow up learning to fire up iTunes Stream on their iPhone.

I can see audiophiles not particularly caring about any of this, complaining about the compression used in the streaming, never thinking to listen to music on a phone, but the number of people who listen to 24bit lossless vinyl rips (give me FLAC or give me death!) using Foobar2000 and $500 headphones is non-existent compared to people who are cool with listening to Nicki Minaj on YouTube (read: rubbish quality) using $10 earbuds.

And now we play the waiting game, waiting for Apple to kill the MP3 once and for all.

Hopefully.

In an offense called “Operation Payback,” members of the Internet collective Anonymous have organized what seems to be anti anti-piracy movement. Dubbed by Torrent Freak as the ”protest of the future” the group has been pretty busy over the past 36 hours launching DDoS attacks on the MPAA, Indian anti-piracy site AiPlex Software and today both RIAA.com and RIAA.org. The attacks are apparently in retaliation for comments the CEO of Aiplex software made about his firm being hired by the film industry to take down The Pirate Bay.

The original call to arms below:

How fast you are in such a short time! Aiplex, the bastard hired gun that DDoS’d TPB (The Pirate Bay), is already down! Rejoice, /b/rothers, even if it was at the hands of a single anon that it was done, even if ahead of schedule. now we have our lasers primed, but what do we target now?

We target the bastard group that has thus far led this charge against our websites, like The Pirate Bay. We target MPAA.ORG! The IP is designated at “216.20.162.10″, and our firing time remains THE SAME. All details are just as before, but we have reaimed our crosshairs on this much larger target. We have the manpower, we have the botnets, it’s time we do to them what they keep doing to us.

REPEAT: AIPLEX IS ALREADY DOWN THANKS TO A SINGLE ANON. WE ARE MIGRATING TARGETS.

From the Anonymous media kit:

Operation:Payback is a bitch.

DATE \September 19, 2010\

To whom it may concern,

This is to inform you that we, Anonymous, are organizing an Operation called “Payback is a bitch”. Anonymous will be attacking the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), the MPAA (Motion Pictures Association of America), and their hired gun AIPLEX for attacks against the popular torrent and file sharing site, the Piratebay (www.thepiratebay.org). We will prevent users to access said enemy sites and we will keep them down for as long as we can. But why, you ask? Anonymous is tired of corporate interests controlling the internet and silencing the people’s rights to spread information, but more importantly, the right to SHARE with one another.The RIAA and the MPAA feign to aid the artists and their cause; yet they do no such thing. In their eyes is not hope, only dollar signs. Anonymous will not stand this any longer.We wish you the best of luck.

Sincerely,

Anonymous,

We are legion.

Both RIAA sites currently offline (they went down 5 minutes before schedule), as people continue to mobilize through the 4Chan message boards and Twitter, using the LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) DDoS tools to initiate independent attacks, and continuing to make what would seem unlikely for a group of people called Anonymous, celebratory tweets.

For all the “future of cyber protest” rhetoric, it remains to be seen how much effect a flood of traffic and a few hours of downtime will have on changing RIAA or MPAA piracy policy. After all, despite yesterday’s sustained attacks, the MPAA site is back up and running, snow owls and all.

Famous rock band Radiohead released an album a few years ago called In Rainbows. The band initially released the album online for free. Well, not for “free,” per se, but you were given the option to pay whatever you wanted. That promotion only lasted a little while, as the band later teamed up with traditional record labels (like Warner and Sony) to release a physical album.

Here we are, almost three years later (good God, three years…), and the RIAA and IFPI are now issuing takedown requests to sites that are offering the album online for free. Think Blogger sites and the like.

The question becomes, how does the RIAA and IFPI know that the editions of the album being offered online for free today are the editions that they own the rights to? What if some enterprising youngster downloaded the album for free back in 2007, and now wants to offer it on his or her blog for all the world to download?

How would that even work in court, I wonder? “Your honor, I downloaded the album for free, legally, and then put a copy of it on my Web site. Is that a crime?”

Maybe, I don’t know. I don’t remember the terms under which Radiohead released the album online.

It’s basically a question of, is the RIAA (and IFPI) trying to protect something it doesn’t even have the rights to?

Mm.

Famous rock band Guns N’ Roses released their latest album, Chinese Democracy, in November, 2008. It had been in development for an astonishing 15 years. That’s partially why Kevin Cogill got into so much trouble. You’ll recall that he was caught uploading tracks from the then-unreleased album in June, 2008. While he managed to doge jail time, Cogill was given a year of probation and two months of home confinement. He was also supposed to take part in a public service announcement on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America&mdas;public enemy number one in the eyes of young people around the country.

So here we are in July, 2010, and we’re left wondering: what happened to that PSA?

Cogill tells Wired that the RIAA never bothered creating the PSA. The RIAA says it would have been too expensive and time consuming to create a PSA. (The where did all of the money won in various copyright infringement lawsuits go? Certainly not to the artists…)

Cogill was not entirely unrepentant, telling Current TV last August that file-sharers would get “f’d in the A,” getting it “right in the butt” from the RIAA.

Not the most eloquent speaker, no.

It’s a shame, too, since you can almost picture what the PSA would look like. It would be shot in black-and-white, of course, to convey the seriousness of the situation: sharing Justin Bieber songs online. The camera would hover menacingly over the shoulder of an anonymous youth fiddling around with an antiquated peer-to-peer application. Think LimeWire. As soon as the youth goes to download “One Time,” the computer monitor shuts off, and a flashing “pirate” symbol appears. Then the narrator says, “Stop stealing music! It’s, like, not cool, dude!” (Gotta have the youth vernacular in there.)

Never mind that copyright infringement != theft.

“It will be only a matter of time—months rather than years—before the music business establishment completely folds. [It will be] no great loss to the world.” So says Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke, a man who knows a thing or two about how the music industry works.

Yorke made the comments, bizarrely, in a new British textbook about citizenship. My civics textbooks had quotes from the likes of George Washington and Voltaire, so clearly the books in Britain are a little more current.

But is he right? I actually think the music industry has been doing pretty well for itself in recent months. Granted, it took the industry ten years to get its act together, but not everyone is perfect.

How much of the music on iTunes is now DRM-free? Don’t like iTunes? You have options, and options that work well: Amazon MP3, specialized digital music stores à la BeatPort, the Zune Marketplace, etc. Certain countries in Europe even have access to Spotify, which is about as perfect a music-delivery service as I can think of. Will Spotify ever be released in the U.S.? Hard to say, but let’s not pretend that there aren’t alternatives to buying whatever Wal-Mart wants to stock on its shelves.

You’ll also recall that Radiohead, a few years back, released an album online for a whatever-you-like price. (A physical album was eventually released as well.) It was very much a success, but not every band is Radiohead, a band with dedicated fans and who are, I would imagine, more technologically savvy. (I base that on the fact that everyone I ever knew who said Radiohead was their favorite band certainly knew their way around the Internet. Plus, I think I read something to that effect in the book Ripped.)

I do agree with his last bit, that the “loss” of the music industry will be of not great loss to the world. Pretty sure music existed before the RIAA showed up.

There really isn’t any particular point to the following story other than to get you riled up as your begin your weekend. The U.S. government is actively trying to figure out how best to handle intellectual property rights, so it has asked the concerned parties to submit all sorts of information in order to better understand what’s going no. The person in charge of this is the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, and what the RIAA and MPAA have submitted borders on the insane. Well, it would border on the insane if it weren’t totally their modus operandi. The most glaring “suggestion”? That computer users install software that would scan the contents of their hard drives, looking for examples of “infringement.” If the software discovers what it thinks it infringement, bam! Deleted! I’d be surprised if this were the year 2001, but after so many years of insane RIAA/MPAA stories it’s hard to be shocked anymore.

The exact verbiage of the suggestion reads:

There are several technologies and methods that can be used by network administrators and providers…these include [consumer] tools for managing copyright infringement from the home (based on tools used to protect consumers from viruses and malware).

So, the same technology that protects you from Internet nonsense—”hey, knucklehead, that 1MB DVD rip of “Avatar” you’ve got there is a trojan, delete it—would instead be used to spy on you. A sort of, “Well, look at that, the new LCD Soundsystem album before its official release date? Where did you get that from? No worries, we’ll just delete it right now… OK, as you were.”

That’s not a world I want to live in.

Then again, this is a world where volcanoes are exploding left, right, and center; meteorites are falling from the sky; and Manchester City might actually get fourth place, so who knows what’s going on anymore.

The funniest is that the RIAA/MPAA expects federal agencies, like the FBI, to keep an eye out for pirates on opening weekend.

Yes, because our nation’s law enforcement officials have nothing better to do than make sure people aren’t recording Kick Ass for later CAM distribution…

Again, it would be funny if weren’t utterly predictable.

via Tom’s Guide

Flickr’d

That’s $6 billion in damages if the industry plays by its own rules (or more), and so far they’ve admitted that they do in fact owe $50 million. It’s not quite an admission of guilt, but let’s say that during a rash of candy store robberies, you admitted to robbing half. You better believe the other half will be on the judge’s mind as he raises that gavel.

Actually, to be honest, I don’t expect the $6bn figure to fly, given that this is not only a different court but a different country from that where the RIAA’s ridiculous damages were awarded. Even if they end up owing “only” fifty mil, I’ll be happy to see them pay it.

The suit is in Canada, and has to do with Canadian royalties law, but I guarantee there are people scouring the RIAA’s records right now looking for a willful oversight like this. Oh man, I would die laughing if the RIAA went under on piracy charges.

[Correction: $6bn not $60bn. Still.]

It has come to my attention that the music industry now wants royalties for those 30-second clips of music you hear in iTunes. That, I think you’ll agree, is bullshit. Seeing as how we’re a solution-oriented blog here at CrunchGear, I want to offer a completely fool-proof way to save the music industry and put an end to the years and years of nonsense we’ve seen since Napster was first released: let’s ban music. That’s right, let’s pass a law that says “the creation or performance of music, in any form, is hereby banned. Any violation of this law will be punishable by death.” Problem solved, let’s all play Hungry Hungry Hippos.

It’s clear that there’s at least two sides to this argument: one, people who think music should be free, and that includes bands that give their music away or sell it for mad cheap, and kids who have grown up with Kazaa and BitTorrent; and two, people who demand to be paid for their work, which includes organizations like the RIAA and musicians like Lily Allen.

I say screw all of them. You like being paid for music? Too bad, it’s banned. Go work at the post office. You think you’re being altruistic by releasing a few songs for free? Too bad, it’s banned. Since both you guys can’t agree on whether or not you think it’s a good idea to sue a single mother for more money than she’ll ever see in her life let’s shut the whole damn industry down.

All music radio stations will be scuttled, and we’ll mine the Sirius XM satellites for the useful metals they contain. Instrument stores will be transformed into Chuck E. Cheese’s or Discovery Zones. All music gadgets—iPod, Zune, you name it—will be placed on a boat and sunken halfway into the ocean.

Anyone caught humming a tune or whistling melodically will be thrown into the nearest state prison. (That’s right, state prison, not the country clubs known as federal prison.)

This is the punishment for 10 years of the RIAA, its dunderhead henchmen and mollycoddled musicians. It pains me to do this, but it really does seem like these stupid issues will never go away. So it’s gone. Music is gone. Now nobody has to worry about “piracy” or “marketing” or any of that garbage. We’ll be a society completely devoid of music. No more lawsuits, no more rootkits, no more nothing.

It’s a perfect world. There’s no piracy, there’s no sons-of-bitches illegally listening to unauthorized 30-second sound clips—think of the lost revenue!—and no reason to sue single mothers because their dumb kids downloaded three Britney Spears songs in 2001.

You will all receive letters in the mail detailing our plans to ban music forever. I look forward to your cooperation, and I look forward to huge consultancy check from the RIAA. I literally just solved all its problems; pay me.

And now, the 900th note on Internet piracy written in the past week. It would appear that the UK is inching closer to a law that would require ISPs to disconnect people who download music, movies, etc. illegally. The proposal, currently making its way through the back rooms of the British Government, could well be placed before the Parliament during its next session.

An MP there, Tom Watson, has written on his blog (apparently he was the first MP to have a blog) that people do have the opportunity to affect any such legislation. For one, people who’d be affected by the legislation—British CrunchGear readers; we’re huge in Sunderland for some reason—should contact the Department of Business Innovation and Skills.

Tell it this: how will it benefit the UK to target 6 million citizens and throw them off the Internet? Who’s to say how many of these people don’t improve British society on a daily basis? Doctors, teachers and professors, you name it. And for what, to appease the record labels, which are most concerned with improving their own bottom line? It’s just something to consider.

(In fact, in the book that I mentioned the other day, Ripped, the author estimated that if the RIAA truly wanted to “go after” everyone who’s ever downloaded a song, it would have to sue nearly 50 percent of the U.S. population. And if we’re treating copyright infringement as a criminal matter, then you’d have to build an awful lot of prisons to accommodate all those people.)

Maybe if the music labels had spent more time figuring this Internet thing out than it did suing single mothers? Because things like that wacky file format we mentioned last week are far too little, far too late.

There’s not else much to say. The big labels brainstormed (for several years, apparently), and eventually decided that they would sell a single file, which included tracks, lyrics, album art, and music videos. What a great idea that would have been in 2003! But it is 2009, and the labels have been abusing consumers for so long that any format solely originating in them will be distrusted and ridiculed. They’re not even putting a lot of weight behind it!

We are not going out in force. What you are going to see is a couple of releases thrown out there to see what people like.

Sorry, people like what they’ve got, which was the technology that arose in the vacuum you guys created by not addressing this years ago.

While I respect the initiative being shown by our friends in the music industry (a few years late, but still), I have a question: how exactly do you see this little foray succeeding without that music device which has risen in prominence since the day of the compact disc — I think it’s called an i-Something?

Another day, another RIAA trial victory. Joel Tenenbaum was ordered to cough up $675,000 to the record labels. It works out to $22,500 per song he downloaded off Kazaa years ago.

And while it’s so, so easy to say, “Boo, RIAA,” Tenenbaum sees the verdict as a sort of admission by the jury that his defense worked. (He was facing up to $4.5 million in damages.) He told Ars that he was “disappointed, but not surprised,” with verdict, recognizing that, yeah, things could have been much worse.

His lawyer, Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson, wasn’t happy with it, noting that it’s a “bankrupting award,” because Tenenbaum doesn’t have a cool $675,000 to pay for a couple of songs.

I never did understand how you could walk into a Best Buy, physically steal a CD, get caught, and still not have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. My guess is that RIAA lawyers have convinced juries and judges that for every song you put in your shared folder, and for every person that downloads, that represents lost sales. Still, it seems excessive.

Tenenbaum will appeal, of course, so there’s no point in freaking out just yet.

And, frankly, RIAA stories have lost all heat.

Remember yesterday when I noted, by way of TorrentFreak, that the RIAA had all but considered DRM to be dead? Not true! Not true at all.

Long story short, and in the interest of protecting sources and so forth, the RIAA rep who supposedly went on record saying “DRM is dead, isn’t it?” didn’t actually say that. The rep, one Jonathan Lamy, had actually alluded to the fact that, yes, the big music download services (like iTunes) no longer have DRM. That doesn’t mean DRM is “dead” or anything—try watching a movie you buy in iTunes on Linux! (Not that the RIAA has anything to do with movies, mind.)

That is all.

The chief spokesman for the RIAA, one Jonathan Lamy, has gone on record to say what any normal, not-on-the-RIAA-payroll person has been saying for some time now: “DRM is dead, isn’t it?” Yes. Yes it it.

This phrase—“DRM is dead”—appears in an upcoming SC Magazine article. Mr. Lamy references things like the now DRM-free iTunes which, at least in the U.S., “is” downloadable music.

There’s really not too much to add here: DRM is great at getting in the way of legitimate users; pirates will always find a way around it. And not just music, either. In fact, in my opinion, it’s been the video game industry which has been most egregious with DRM. Games are DRM’d to no end, then legitimate users can’t get the thing to work. Meanwhile, someone like RELOADED will have cracked the game two days before its official release date.

I don’t know, good riddance, DRM.

It’s safe to say that I shed no tears yesterday when, for all intents and purposes, The Pirate Bay ceased to be. Suffice it to say that if Usenet comes under attack next I will not be a happy camper. (I know, I know: The first rule of Usenet is not to talk about Usenet, but bear with the story for a minute.) The RIAA just won a lawsuit against usenet.com, which, as you might guess, is a premium Usenet provider.

The court case, in the Southern District of New York, found usenet.com guilty of “direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement.” And perhaps more worrying is that usenet.com cannot defend itself using the ol’ Sony Betamax decision. In a nutshell that says that so long as there is a significant, non-infringing use of a device/service you can’t sue it into oblivion.

For those not in the know, Usenet, which is as old as the dinosaurs, can be described, in a very dumbed-down way, as a big, decentralized message board, but one where you can attach files. I’ll leave it at that.

Of course, this is “only” a district court’s opinion, so make of it what you will. And it’s worth stressing, of course, that usenet.com != Usenet. (For the record, I use newsdemon.com, and my brother uses giganews.com. They’re pretty comparable based on our unscientific “let’s see how long it takes to download SomeFile” tests.)

The second rule of Usenet…

via Slashdot

Stan Lee couldn’t have created a more hated super-villain than the Recording Industry Association of America. It’s the ultimate heel stable. Get this: a woman in Minneapolis, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, has been ordered to pay $1.92 million in damages for downloading and sharing 24 songs. That works out to about $80,000 per song. Clearly the RIAA deserves props. Mad props.

To the woman’s credit, she’s reacting much the way I would, if faced with such a bill: good luck getting that kind of money because I patently don’t have it. Says Ms. Thomas-Rasset:

I have no means of paying the fine. There’s no way they’re ever going to get that. I’m a mom, limited means, so I’m not going to worry about it now. The only thing I can say is good luck trying to get it, because you can’t get blood out of a turnip.

Let’s play a game. Let’s say you wind up in the same situation as this woman, faced with an enormous bill for downloading a bunch of piece-of-garbage songs. Now, I don’t have that kind of money, obviously. Nor would I really be inclined to pay a lesser fine, somewhere in the low thousands of dollars. To paraphrase Sir Alex Ferguson, I wouldn’t give that mob [the RIAA] a virus, let alone a single dollar. Where does that leave me, jail? What is the ultimate punishment a court could hand out here? (You’d think I’d contact the EFF or something to ask this question.)

And another thing!

Let’s talk hypothetically for a moment. Let’s say you’re the average American (or wherever you’re from), going to school or working for The Man. Let’s say that you occasionally download an MP3 or FLAC from wherever you get such things. Now, do you have $150,000 to give to the RIAA for every song you’ve downloaded? I sure as heck don’t! (I’d need a government bailout, lol!) More importantly, why is $150,000 an appropriate amount to ask for, as Sony seems to suggest? If I can buy a song off iTunes for $1.30, how is it that “finding” that same song could cost me $150,000?

There’s another one of the RIAA vs. Some Guy court cases going on right now, and the defense attorney asked Sony’s lawyers to put a number on per-infringement damages. Sony wouldn’t, instead saying that, under the law, damages can range from $750-$150,000.

Now, I’m not a doctor, not even in the Dr. Nick sense, but on what planet does Some Guy downloading a song, or an album, or 100 albums, equate to $150,000 in damages? It just seems so ridiculous to me.

Even more to the point, is anyone else a little tired of the RIAA? Like, even reading about it, and its wacky exploits, its insane monetary demands, just doesn’t have the same punch as it did in 2004. The Internet could use a new boogeyman.

Before posting Erick reached out to the RIAA, Last.fm and parent company CBS for comments. The only response was from CBS – “To our knowledge, no data has been made available to RIAA.” The CBS spokesperson, Katie Gunion, subsequently emailed us to say “would you please attribute the statement to Last.fm, it is currently reading as though CBS issued the statement” Gunion’s email lists her title as Public Relations, CBS Interactive, and her first statement did not name Last.fm (this is important, see below). A subsequent statement by Shannon Jacobs, VP of Communications at CBS: “this is a last.fm issue, as far as I am concerned. It is not a corporate issue. This is a last.fm issue, not a corporate issue. The posting represents last.fm’s response.”

After the story broke all concerned parties had no problem commenting publicly.

Last.fm cofounder Richard Jones said “I’m rather pissed off this article was published, except to say that this is utter nonsense and totally untrue.” He followed up with a blog post “Techcrunch are full of shit, “I denied it vehemently on the Techcrunch article, as did several other Last.fm staffers. We denied it in the Last.fm forums, on twitter, via email – basically we denied it to anyone that would listen, and now we’re denying it on our blog.” One blog called us a “tabloid masquerading as a legitimate news outlet.” Lots of others piled on.

Apart from updating the original post we’ve been quiet on this story. The person who first leaked the news was terminated from CBS for the leak, says our original source, and threatened with legal action. He understandably went very quiet. But the outrageously shrill denials by Last.fm just didn’t ring true. Once you got past the personal attacks, the denial language itself was too carefully worded.

Now we’ve located another source for the story, someone who’s very close to Last.fm. And it turns out Last.fm was telling the truth, sorta, when they said Erick’s story wasn’t correct.

Last.fm didn’t hand user data over to the RIAA. According to our source, it was their parent company, CBS, that did it. That corresponds to what our original source said in conversations we had after our initial post and before CBS lawyers became involved. But we didn’t want to update until we had an independent source for that information, too.

Here’s what we believe happened, based on our sources: CBS requested user data from Last.fm, including user name and IP address. CBS wanted the data to comply with a RIAA request but told Last.fm the data was going to be used for “internal use only.” It was only after the data was sent to CBS that Last.fm discovered the real reason for the request, say our sources. Last.fm staffers were outraged, say our sources, but the data had already been sent to the RIAA.

Here’s an email from the original source, partially redacted. A screenshot of this email is here.

Re: touching base

From: [redacted, a CBS employee]
Sent: [redacted]
To: [redacted]

[ _____] We provided the data to the RIAA yesterday because we know from experience that they can negatively impact our streaming rates with publishers. Based on the urgency of the request they probably just wanted to learn more about the leak but who knows. Seriously, can you blame them? [______] Our ops team provided the usual reports along with additional log data including user IP addresses. The GM who told them to do it said the data was for internal use only. Well, that was the big mistake. The team in the UK became irate because they had to do it a second time since we were told some of the data was corrupted. This time they transferred the data directly to them and in doing so they discovered who really made the request. Shit really hit the fan, I even got a call [______] Obviously, I can see their POV but what they don’t understand over there is that we are in the analytics business and it’s not like this is the first time we’ve provided this data to a third party. Someone over there should be more forthright with users about the data policy instead of complaining about BD to upper management like I’m here trying to destroy the business. We’re just trying to help them stay afloat here it’s not like Pro memberships are earning any revenue! [______________] So if you hear of anything, I’m even open to possibly moving West now for the right opportunity, let me know.

Our new source, which hasn’t seen this email, says much the same: that Last.fm didn’t know the nature of the CBS request until after the data was sent and that the data was in fact subsequently sent by CBS to the RIAA. This source’s information comes directly from Last.fm employees who he has spoken with.

It’s important to note that while sources are in agreement that it was the RIAA that made the request, it may have been one or more music labels acting independently. The suggestion in the email above that the compliance was made because of the ability for the requester to negatively impact streaming rates suggests it was a label request. But the end result is the same. So if CBS/Last.fm deny sending data to the RIAA but don’t say anything about the labels, they’re being shifty again. Also, there are whispers that someone may have put a stop to the data transfer before it left CBS – that gives them a denial out if they paint with broad strokes. Much better would be if they simply, honestly, told us what really happened and we could move on.

We believe, based on information supplied by our sources, that CBS lied to us when they denied sending, or at least intending to send, the data to the RIAA, and that they subsequently asked us to attribute the quote to Last.fm to make the statement defensible. Last.fm’s denials were strictly speaking correct, but they ignored the underlying truth of the situation say our sources,, that their parent company supplied user data to the RIAA, and that the data could possibly be used in civil and criminal actions against those users. We believe that the outrage they aimed at us for reporting the story, which we believe was materially correct, should have been aimed at CBS instead. But Last.fm never spoke publicly of the real facts of the story.

We believe Last.fm and CBS may have violated their own privacy policy in the transmission of this data. We also believe CBS and Last.fm may have violated EU privacy laws, including the Data Protection Directive, and should be investigated by the appropriate authorities.

And to the CBS employee who was, according to our original source, fired and threatened based on this story – we believe certain U.S. Whistle Blower laws may protect you from retaliation from CBS in this matter. We’d like to provide you with legal counsel at our cost.

Update: Last.fm denial.