Pandora pony up for pre-72 recordings

Before 1972, recorded music in America wasn't "protected" by copyright. Some streaming services have been taking advantage of this to stream vintage tracks without feeling the need to pay for the rights.

The RIAA wasn't happy about this, and so threatened Pandora with court to demand payment.

Before it came to this, Pandora was bullish:

In response, Pandora issued a statement to The Hollywood Reporter: "Pandora is confident in its legal position and looks forward to a quick resolution of this matter."

The resolution was pretty quick, but, erm not in Pandora's favour:

Pandora Media Inc. will pay $90 million to record labels to settle a dispute over oldies, the Internet radio giant said Thursday.

The agreement with the group of labels -- composed of Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Capitol Records and ABKCO Music & Records -- resolves yet another major battle over royalties for recordings made before 1972.

So, are Pandora upset? Apparently not. Oh, no. This is, honestly, the outcome they were hoping for:

Pandora Chief Executive Brian McAndrews, in statement, said the company was "excited" to have the dispute resolved. "We pursued this settlement in order to move the conversation forward and continue to foster a better, collaborative relationship with the labels," he said.

Yeah. Thank god, eh? All they wanted to was make a massive payment and knock a fifth off their share price. That was all Pandora ever wanted. All they asked for. They're excited. Real excited.

Judge suddenly changes US copyright status on pre-1972 recordings

There's no copyright on recordings made before 1972 in America. Except now there is, as a judge in California has told Sirius that it needs to pay when it plays such recordings.

Sirius aren't happy:

SiriusXM disagreed. "I think everybody should get paid, and I think everybody should pay," David Frear, the company's chief financial officer, said during a banking conference, as quoted in the New York Times. "But to get there, there needs to be a change in the laws. And it shouldn’t be coming from the bench. It should be coming from the legislature."

You might wonder if David Frear really wants to pay everyone why he chose not to pay everyone, but instead fought a legal case to stop paying anyone. 'I really want to pay but think there ought to be a law compelling me to pay' isn't a coherent position.

The record companies - who, rather than musicians, will pocket most of the cash - are happy:

"It's increasingly clear that SiriusXM, Pandora and other digital music firms who refuse to pay legacy artists and rights holders are on the wrong side of history and the law," Cary Sherman, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the labels, said in a statement. "It's time for that to change."

The RIAA are charmers, aren't they? Every time a business finds a way to help them hold onto revenue streams in the 21st Century, rather than work with them, they're there, demanding more and effectively calling those businesses crooks.

If Sherman was ever in an accident and needed a transfusion, you suspect he'd be demanding to know where the blood taken from him was and why he wasn't getting the usual donation fee for it.

BPI, RIAA ignore licence terms on their website until it's pointed out to them

Interesting: copyright farmers the RIAA and their remote-controlled UK equivalent the BPI have been caught using code on their websites which violates the licences of that code.

TorrentFreak has been poking about in the source:

The websites of music industry groups RIAA and BPI also use infringing code.

On both sites we found open source JQuerys scripts that are released under the MIT license. This license permits any person or organization to use, copy, modify, merge, distribute, or even sell copies of the software. There’s only one condition users have to agree to; that the original copyright notice stays intact.

Ironically, the scripts used on the RIAA and BPI websites have the copyright licenses removed.

BPI uses the depreciated template script jQuery.tmpl.min.js, and as can be seen below, yesterday there was no reference to the MIT license or the copyright holder listed at the top of the file.

Oddly, after TF contacted the RIAA, the copyright line appeared magically on the RIAA and BPI sites.

iRadio: Can you feel the excitement?

Can you hear the world, holding its breath, for the launch of Apple iRadio?

Nope, me neither.

The sheer lack of people who say "you know what I wish? I wish I could stream music through the iTunes interface" has always been noticeable.

It's likely that Apple will make the service a success, simply through plonking the iRadio button on homescreens of devices, and maybe there'll be something to the service unveiled today that makes it essential, or desirable, but it's hard to see the problem with music streaming that needs Apple to solve it.

AllThingsD tries to describe what we can expect:

[It] should function like an enhanced version of Pandora — that is, it will be a free streaming music service that gives users more control of their songs than standard Web radio, but less than full on-demand services like Spotify.

That's... uh, clear. The idea is that the tracks you hear will be half-determined by you telling it what you want to hear, and half it scanning your iTunes history. You know that time you bought the Crazy Frog to burn onto a CD for a joke for your brother? THAT will be the guiding light that iRadio seizes on to build your playlists. That, and the thirty unplayed episodes of OpenSouceSex.

Even so, I'll bet Spotify and Pandora are feeling uncomfortable this morning.

Interestingly, Apple have only just managed to pull Sony on board. Are the majors happy?

The majors publishers had looked like they were going to be the holdout because Apple initially offered to pay them a rate of 4.1% of its advertising revenue, while the publishers had been withdrawing digital rights from the U.S. performance rights organizations BMI and ASCAP because they wanted higher rates. BMG, Sony/ATV, UMPG and Warner/Chappell executives had privately said they were seeking rates of 10%-15% of iRadio’s advertising revenue. But when Apple agreed to a 10% rate, Warner/Chappell last week signed the deal and now so has Sony/ATV.

Getting more than double Apple wanted to pay. That's quite a strong move by the majors. Let's hope they don't do that thing where they suddenly get insanely greedy.

While publishers will get 10% of revenue, they privately are calling this an introductory rate, meaning that after the iRadio service establishes itself, they expect that rate to increase. Likewise, they also say they expect Pandora to match the deals they are doing now with Apple.

"We won't hold our ground when we have the advantage and Apple really needs us for launch. Oh, no. What we'll do, right, is wait until the service is established, and carrying itself along under its own sheer weight of numbers. At that point, when we've got massive sums of cash flowing in from Apple, we'll be in a really strong position to threaten to refuse to take that money any more unless they give us more. At the same time, with Apple crushing Pandora into near-obscurity, that'd be exactly the moment to ask Pandora to give us more of the less money it's making. Genius plan, eh, guys?"

Bookmarks: Napster, iTunes and beyond

In the Wisconsin Law Review, Mike Masnick explains why the war on Napster didn't only fail to stop piracy, but also put the brakes on innovative new companies working in online music. In short: Had the RIAA been less keen to kill Napster, perhaps Apple wouldn't have ended up stealing their business:

This should have been obvious from the fact that people would flock to these new services, yet failed to show up to the record labels’ own attempts to innovate or provide something new. However, as soon as any service showed any kind of promise, even if “licensed,” the labels would seek to kill the golden goose by claiming that the rates were unfair, and the innovators were making money unfairly off the backs of the copyright holders (by which they meant the labels, not the musicians, of course).

Take, for example, the brief heyday of music video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. For a year or two, the recording industry fell head over heels in love with these games, because people were playing them quite a bit, and they were (briefly) willing to pay a slight premium to get access to music from well-known bands and musicians. Rather than build on that, the industry did two things: it focused all of its attention on those kinds of games, absolutely flooding the market and making people get sick of the game genre, and demanded much higher royalties.

The viewpoint seemed to be that there could be almost no benefits for the innovators. Nearly all of the benefits had to accrue to the labels, or it would be seen as a problem. In fact, the one exception that got through was iTunes, and that was quickly seen as a “problem” by the labels, even as it was dragging them, kicking and screaming, into the marketplace for digital music. The view is one of an extreme zero-sum world, where if someone else is benefiting, it must mean that the labels were losing out. They didn’t even hide this view of the world. Doug Morris, then head of Universal Music (now head of Sony Music) explained to a Wired reporter that investing in new innovations that weren’t paying money upfront meant that “someone, somewhere is taking advantage of you.” As laid out in the article, Morris was uninterested in technology, and didn’t even know how to hire a competent technology person, so his focus was on making sure everyone paid up immediately. Anyone making money in the music world without first paying a massive cut were dubbed “thieves.”

RIAA attempt to embrace Spotify

The decision by the RIAA to include streaming in gold and platinum certification is interesting, but not for the reasons the RIAA think.

Music Week explains how it'll work:

After a year-long project by the RIAA, the organisation will now recognise the non-sales format (in audio and/or video) for the first time ever in its 55-year history that will go towards amounts calculated for G&P’s Digital Single Award certification.

Within the new approach includes the formula of 100 streams being equivalent to one download.

Fifty-six certifications were given following the new rules for the Digital Single Award with 11 Gold, 18 Platinum and 27 multi-Platinum new 'combined' Digital Single Awards counting both downloads and streams.

This isn't really about legitimacy being given to streaming; it's more about the RIAA trying to carve itself out a role.

Did anyone have any problems with streaming not getting a randomly-assigned status from a self-appointed body before? The coverage of, say, Psy's massive YouTube numbers manages to survive quite well without the need to have Cary Sherman shout "that's equivalent to a platinum-studded-with-emerald disc, that is" over the top of the numbers. The metrics are all out in the open; why do we need a third party to use a periodic-table-based code to try and teach us that a million is a lot?

There's an added complication; historically, the silver, gold and platinum statuses have been conferred on shipments, rather than sales; wholesale orders rather than retail purchases. These digital prizes, though, are triggered by consumer behaviour.

While that's understandable - something on YouTube effectively has 'shipped' forty quintrillion plays - it's not comparing like with like, is it?

RIAA feeling the pinch

As the major labels slide towards the exit, times are getting tougher for their cartel organisation. TorrentFreak has looked at the RIAA's finances:

In its most recent filing the RIAA lists 72 people on the payroll compared to 117 two years earlier. In total these employees earned $12.7 million of which nearly 25% went into the pockets of the top two executives.

The top earner in the year ending March 2011 was Mitch Bainwol (CEO) with $1.75 million a year with a working week of 50 hours. Current CEO Cary Sherman (then President) came in second with $1.37 million.

Other high income employees were Neil Turkewitz (EVP International), Steve Marks (General Counsel) and Mitch Glazier (Public Policy & Industry Relations) with $696,036, $675,528 and $599,661 respectively.

They're still doing nicely; and the cash paid to lobbyists is still high - USD2.3million spunked away on trying to distort the legislative process.

But the good times are coming to an end as the money dries up:

The total revenue in the latest filing is $29.1 million, down from $51.35 million two years earlier.

Given the main business of the RIAA has been to stop piracy, and its success has been markedly poor, is it any wonder that the cash is draining away?

Where is music shared? Not so much online, it turns out

Here's an interesting little chart that was leaked to TorrentFreak. It's from the NPD survey into Digital Music from the end of last year, and forms part of the RIAA's campaign for a "six strikes" rule in the US:

What you'll spot about this is that the unpaid acquisition of digital music, far from being an internet-centred phenomenon, actually takes place in the physical realm. All these years on from Hope Taping Is Killing Music, and most of the time tracks change hands without cash flowing in the opposite direction, it's still done face to face.

The sheer amount of musician's money the RIAA is pouring into lobbying for control of the net, and the enormous dents to our information rights they're calling for, and they're not even worrying about their bigger challenge.

Of course, a cynic might think that because physical swapping is even harder to do anything about, and attracts less glittery opportunities for RIAA people to meet-and-greet in Washington (always a good chance for them to put out feelers for their next jobs), that might be why we hear a lot less about hard drive swapping. But it couldn't be that, could it?

The return of dotmusic, sort of

Remember dotmusic? The one-time online home of Music Week from the days back when the internet was in black and white and closed down at 10.30? Sold on to BT, and then to Yahoo, where all the effort and marketing cash ended up in the service being folded into the now-defunct-on-its-own-right Yahoo Launch? You remember, right?

Lets hope Yahoo kept the paperwork, though, as there's no fewer than four (five, depending on how you count it) companies called dotmusic something or other bidding for the rights to be registraron the soon-to-be-launched .music top-level domain.

.music is part of a massive push to try and create new domain names, partly to stop the crush of demand for the dwindling supply of .com names. (It's doomed to failure, of course - large numbers of .music and other new web addresses will be registered, at great expenses, but research will discover that people trying to guess names will still always plump for .com, and so that's where the real demand will be. You know how you smile indulgently at companies that still use .tv as their main website? It's like that.)

Hypebot has a helpful list of contenders:

DotMusic Inc.
Dot Music / CCGR E-Commerce LTD - founded by Constantine Roussos, who began lobbying to establish the .music top level domain in 2005 and has the edge with the support of TuneCore, LyricFind, CD Baby, ReverbNation, The Orchard, INgrooves Fontana and others in the industry.
dotMusic Limited
Amazon
Victor Cross
Charleston Rd Registry / Google
.music LLC / FarFurther - supported by the RIAA, The National Music Publishers Association, A2IM, Impala and The Recording Academy.
Entertainment Names Inc

I know, it's like suddenly in the middle of 2012 there's something a bit like an ITV franchise round.

The real point of interest here is that the Roussos bid and the FarFurther biddraws support roughly split between internet-native businesses (Roussos) and old-school music endeavours (FarFurther). I think a useful rule of thumb is any initiative being supported by the RIAA is liable to work against the general interests of musicians and audience, and in favour of the multinational companies which used to be the music industry. On that basis alone, lets hope one of the others wins. The RIAA already believes it controls music; let's not let it control .music, too.

Takedown demands suggests RIAA isn't particularly concerned with detail

TorrentFreak has been wading through some of the requests that copyright holders have made for Google to delist content under the DCMA.

It suggests that perhaps most of the copyright firms have employed a Hulk like "Smash! Smash!" approach to their work:

[T]he RIAA asked Google to delist a review of the album Own The Night published on The Guardian. The artist behind the album is Lady Antebellum, signed to RIAA-member Capitol Records.

Even more worrying, the RIAA asked Google to delist Last.fm’s entire Electro Pop section because they thought it carried a pirate copy of All About Tonight by Pixie Lott.

Warner also reappeared later on, asking Google to delist a page on news site NME which lists information on the latest movies, which at the time included information on the movie Hall Pass. The same page on NME was targeted on several other occasions, including by anti-piracy company DtecNet on behalf of Lionsgate, who had info on The Hunger Games delisted.

Maybe it's unfair to charcterise the RIAA as simply throwing their weight around like a confused bear suddenly trapped in a camper van. Perhaps they really did fear that the Guardian review might have contained enough information to effectively allow people to know what the record sounded like by imagining it.

Or perhaps they're a business who won't and can't adapt to the 21st century.

Piracy actually not that bad, but let's say it is

There's some interesting figures in the IFPI report into digital music, reported by Music Week. You remember piracy, don't you?

According to Nielsen/IFPI figures from November 2011, the percentage of internet users accessing at least one unlicensed site monthly stood at 27% in Europe and 28% worldwide – with around half using peer-to-peer networks.

That doesn't really sound very much, does it? Over 70% of internet users not even visiting an "unlicensed site" (whatever that is) at all.

But that's averages. What's happening in piracy hotspots?

In some countries, the rate of usage of illegal sites is far higher than the global average - for example 42 per cent and 44 per cent respectively in the major markets of Spain and Brazil (Nielsen/IFPI).

So, even where it's bad, fewer than half the people online visit a site which holds unlicensed music.

And America? How are things in America - a country where piracy is apparently so rife, we came within an ace of having SOPA destroy the free internet?

NPD data included in the IFPI report shows that 16% of the US internet population were using infringing P2P sites in Q4 2007, down to just 9% in Q4 2010.

Meanwhile, the average number of tracks downloaded from P2P services dropped from 35 to 18 in the same period.

All this, surely, is brilliant news for the entertainment industry, right?

Music Week isn't so sure:

However, levels of global music piracy won’t bring comfort to labels.

Really? They're relatively small, and appear to be declining. Why would they not take comfort from that?

Let's nip over to the IFPI site, where Frances Moore, CEO, is looking at the figures. Is he happy?

As we enter 2012, there are good reasons for optimism in the world of digital music. Legal services with expanding audiences have reached across the globe and consumer choice has been revolutionised.

Well, that's great news. Treble clefs all ro... oh, hang on. He's looking cross. Why is he looking cross?

"Any complacency now, however, would be a great mistake. Our digital business is progressing in spite of the environment in which it operates, not because of it. In 2012 the momentum needs to build further. We need legislation from governments with coordinated measures that deal with piracy effectively and in all its forms. We also need more cooperation from online intermediaries such as search engines and advertisers to support the legal digital music business."

Moore is, you'll spot, telling a whopper here. His organisation's own figures show that even with their gross over-estimation of piracy, it's in decline - mainly despite, not because of, the work of the labels and their chums in the movie industry.

(Actually, should the labels be worried? Even without any comeback, even when it's available for free, people are scooping up less music.)

To the untrained eye, it might look like the RIAA and their client organisations have bought themselves a fire engine; now there's no fire, rather than getting rid of the uniforms and hoses, they're running round going 'I think I still smell burning'.

They passed from being entertainment companies into copyright farmers long ago; now, it looks like they're going to be permanent copyright lobbyists, too.

Just like the old days

I suspect the RIAA will be secretly delighted at having been included on Anonymous' attacks on various copyright industry sites; they've been so long eclipsed by the MPAA in the 'trying to shore up a business model that no longer exists' lobbying that they'll just be delighted anyone bothered to take them down.

I'm picturing the RIAA trying to look cross while thinking "oh, this is like the good old days when our site was booted offline every three or four days. We've still got it..."

On a more serious note, the loss of Megaupload is a shame; it was one of the most usable of the filesharing sites. What the US government has done, at the behest of the people who pay for the comfy seats in their offices, will take no unlicensed content off the internet. It simply removes a useful tool for the rest of us.

Second hand digital music files

ReDigi offers an internet-era version of that stand-by for lean weeks, flogging off your records. It has a service which checks that you've deleted your copy of song, allowing it to sell it to a new owner.
Naturally, the RIAA feels this must be stopped, as ars technica reports:

ReDigi must "quarantine any copies on its servers of our Member's sound recordings so that those recordings are not exploited in any manner," the RIAA's Jennifer L. Pariser insists. On top of that, ReDigi must erase from its website "all references to the names and likenessess of artists signed to RIAA members" and break any ongoing connections between the operation's current downloaders and its servers.

Next, RIAA wants ReDigi to fork over "an accounting of all sales achieved and revenue generated" from RIAA member sound recordings through the ReDigi service, "so that we can discuss a resolution of our Members' claims."

"In this record, I note that the statutory damages for willful copyright infringement can be as high as $150,000 per work infringed," Pariser adds.

The main worry for the RIAA is that this again reinforces the idea of digital music being something you own, rather than rent; ReDigi maintain that it's perfectly legal to sell something you own, providing you do actually sell it.

That there's a demand for the saving offered by second-hand files - about 50% off the price - should be of more interest to the labels, as it suggests there's a huge market being missed out because the pricepoint is wrong. Maybe if they could stop being fixated on copyright, the RIAA could start to understand what happened to its business.

RIAA get to double-dip on Limewire files

Obviously, copyright law has little in common with natural justice, but the ruling this week that the RIAA can get paid twice for the same infringement seems to take the idea to a whole new level.

Paidcontent explains:

As part of a massive litigation campaign began in 2003, the RIAA sued tens of thousands of individual downloaders who used Limewire and other services. Those include relatively small settlements of several thousand dollars each for 104 songs that were downloaded by individuals from Limewire, and are also in the RIAA’s big list of tracks it wants the service to pay damages for. Defense lawyers for Limewire argued that such “double dipping” shouldn’t be allowed. Even though copyright law allows statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work, those can only be collected for each work once, the file-sharing service said. But the judge rejected that argument and RIAA lawyers will be able to get statutory damages for all infringed tracks, even ones it has already collected for from individuals.

The RIAA really do see Limewire as the gift that keeps on giving. Isn't getting repeated payments off the back of a transgression closer to what a blackmailer does, rather than a justice system?

RIAA forgets it doesn't own internet, words like 'music'

There's proposals moving to create a whole bunch more top level domains - the gTLD, which will create the opportunity to have website addresses that end in things like .soccer, .music and .etc.

While most people are convinced this will prove to be every bit as much a success as the .me and .name endeavours, it's caused panic in the offices of the RIAA, whose 'something new' alarm sounded:

Now the RIAA’s Deputy General Counsel, Victoria Sheckler, on behalf of it and a coalition of 15 national and international trade associations representing songwriters, recording artists, music publishers, record labels, and royalty collection societies, has sent a letter to ICANN expressing concern over the creation of any music themed TLDs.

“Our overriding concern is to ensure that any music themed gTLD is used productively and responsibly, and is not a means to facilitate copyright or trademark infringement,” she writes.

The flap has been caused by ICANN changing the requirements of harm that have to be demonstrated before it will intervene in misuse of a gTLD - now, you have to demonstrate harm would be caused to your special interest group and the internet in general. Hitherto, ICANN have only required evidence of harm in a community named by the complainant.

It's another piece of missing the point completely - if there's stuff on the internet that the music industry wishes wasn't there, does it matter if it's at backentrance.com or backentrance.music? And where does the RIAA get the impression that its remit - looking after the interests of a few American corporations - includes being in charge of how words relating to music are used internationally?

It'd serve the RIAA right if they end up creating a world where there's a .pirate domain.

Limewire closed in famous victory for record labels

So, Wednesday's decision from a US court that Limewire must be closed down. How's that working out, then?

No word yet on how much money the record labels have poured in to getting the closure of a service from which the world has moved on - it's a bit like environmentalists concentrating their fire on two-stroke petrol engines.

How insignificant was this expensive victory? Billboard, house journal of the US music industry, bunged the closure news in a collection of News Briefs, tucked between the possibility that Justin Timberlake might be cheating on Jessica Biel and forty year-old news about John Lennon ranting at a dry cleaners.

Marginally less important than someone kissing Olivia Munn. The RIAA must be thrilled. They've climbed a mountain and come down a molehill. Oh, but still facing bills for the action - 4chan are launching a denial of service attack on the RIAA today.

Although, really, closing down the RIAA is a bit like closing down Limewire - just hastening the end for a declining property.

RIAA surprised to discover Google wants paying in return for work

The RIAA and the IFPI - two entirely separate organisations, albeit run by the same cartel - has got in a bit of a huff as Google has asked them to pay for finding possibly unlicensed files on the internet:

The burden of finding the offending links has however always rested in the hands of the people who wish them taken down. Given what a time consuming process that has proven to be, the RIAA and the IFPI asked Google to “provide a means to help them track down pirated material more efficiently,” in the words of Cnet.

Google did not respond in the way they had hoped. Instead of offering to devote their own resources to help fight online piracy, Google directed them to their Web Search API option called Site Search, a product that charges $5 per 1000 executed searches. This in short told both the RIAA and the IFPI to do their own work, and to pay Google for using their products in their hunt to protect their content.

There's been some squawking that this is somehow "unfair", with an attempt to build some sort of logic that Google should do it for free because, erm, people might search for unlicensed files on Google and Google sells advertising and... you know, it's not fair.

Which is a bit like saying that Microsoft should chip for the costs of searching for files, because people use Windows to run a browser which they do the search on, so it's only fair, right?

RIAA attempt to recast net neutrality debate as being about... oh, guess

As Google and Verizon flirt with each other and try to explain why making some content more equal than others is good news (for people other than Google and Verizon), the RIAA has an opinion.

Of course it does.

They've picked up this bit of Gooizon's statement:

[B]oth companies have long been proponents of the FCC’s current wireline broadband openness principles, which ensure that consumers have access to all legal content on the Internet, and can use what applications, services, and devices they choose. The enforceability of those principles was called into serious question by the recent Comcast court decision. Our proposal would now make those principles fully enforceable at the FCC.

The mere hint of the word 'legal' in that paragraph has, once fed into the RIAA hive-mind, come out as somehow proving that listening to an Osmond song without paying is on a par with raping a child and putting the photos online:

Industry giants Google and Verizon recently announced what they term a “joint policy proposal for an open Internet.” Our view? We appreciate that Google and Verizon, like the FCC and Congress, recognize that lawful and unlawful content should be treated differently. We look forward to seeing the specifics of the proposal once it is fleshed out, and to actively participating in the legislative and regulatory process to ensure that any ultimate solution permits and encourages ISPs to take measures to deter unlawful activity over their networks, whether copyright infringement, child pornography or other illegal conduct.

Actually, Google and Verizon don't say anything at all about unlawful content - and certainly nothing about how "unlawful" content should be treated. Saying that everything which is properly available on the internet should be given the same treatment is not the same thing as proposing there should be different treatment for anything else.

But - in the spirit of reading things into statements that aren't quite there - let us just record our surprise at the RIAA for its support for the principle of governments blocking access to content online. We look forward to the RIAA explaining exactly how far it wants Maoist regimes to go in throttling off what the citizenry can think. To dissent, remember, is like being a child pornographer.

Some surprises: IFPI & RIAA issue takedowns on Radiohead's "behalf"

You'll recall last month Warners blithely issued a DCMA notice against us because we, erm, used a link to a file on a band's own website that the band's own label's PR team had invited us to link to. That seemed a little bit like people over-reaching their powers, but today the IFRI is at it again.

Takedown notices have been sent out ordering bloggers to take down In Rainbows tracks:

"These recordings are owned by one of our member companies and have not been authorised for this kind of use"

That's what the letter claims. Only... they're not, are they? In Rainbows was self-released. Sure, it might have been licensed to ATO in the states, but they don't own the tracks.

After all, the record labels have been telling us for years that just because we have a license allowing us to use tracks it doesn't mean they belong to us.

The tracks do appear to have been being used without permission, but it's clear that the RIAA had no authority whatsoever to demand they be removed.

These takedown orders are proper, legal statements. They're made under the pain of perjury. If the music industry continues to press them, they should at least get them right.

[Thanks to @jamesthegill]

Milo Yiannopoulos: Give mp3s away for nothing

You wouldn't normally expect the Telegraph to be talking up ideas involving loosening of property rights, but we do live in strange times. Milo Yiannopoulos, Telegraph tech blogger, has considered the staggering figures that the US music industry has burned through $16million to reclaim $391,000 pursuing unlicensed music through the courts. And comes to a conclusion:

So if we accept that file-sharing is unstoppable, and that attempts to curb it might leave us with something even worse, wouldn’t the logical consequence would be to make MP3s free, and freely shareable? Yeah, I know. But take a deep breath and think about it for a second. And yes, I do realise I'm not remotely the first person to come up with this. But I'm perhaps the latest person to be won over to it.

Giving MP3s away would require that record labels basically give up on studio recordings as a revenue channel. On the face of it, it sounds heretical and preposterous. I mean, they’re record companies because they make records, right?

Physical product, streaming services, live sales - these are the areas where Yiannopoulos sees those who want to make money from music actually doing so. To be fair, I think Apple and Amazon have shown that there is money to be made selling mp3s, too - although what they sell is ease of discovery (and, I guess, if they added virtual storage too, so you'd no longer lose your collection if you computer got taken off you by the police, they'd have an even more compelling product).

But the general point - you can't stop people copying and pasting, accept that it's part of the landscape - is a tune that long-term readers of No Rock won't be surprised to hear has me nodding along.

Today, even The Telegraph gets it. How many more years will be lost before the RIAA catches up?

[Thanks to Michael M]