Zomba Recording has settled it's copyright infringement lawsuits with MP3.com. The exact details of the settlement were not disclosed, but as a part of it Zomba has licenced it's catalog for use with the My.MP3.com -service.
Zomba, whose lineup includes artists like Britney Spears, NSync, and the Backstreet Boys, sued MP3.com last year. With the settlement MP3.com avoided going to court for damage assesment.
Source:
Webnoize
According to a study by G2, a subsidiary of the Gartner Group, on-line users are quite unlikely to purchase digital music on the Web. The survey of the purchasing plans and habits of 4000 online adults showed that only half of them use their computer to listen to AudioCDs, and only a quarter listens to downloaded digital music.
``Digital distribution needs to be brain-dead simple for consumers, and any digital rights management solution deployed should work with all music software and hardware,´´ said analyst P J McNealy from G2. ``The percentage of Internet music buyers is not likely to increase with new Internet services being developed by the big five music companies unless they make their copyright protection systems more flexible to entice consumers.´´
It is rather unlikely that the on-line music sales will be a success unless the customers can listen to the music they've purchased not only on their computer, but also on their home stereo etc.
It's the same old story re-visited. Fifty-two independent artists represented by Copyright.net have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against MP3.com. As before, the lawsuit accuses MP3.com of distributing copyrighted music through their My.MP3.com service which was shut down ages ago. The lawsuit identifies about 1,000 songs, and the plaintiffs are seeking damages of $25,000 per infringed song.
According to the lawsuit streaming songs from the My.MP3.com service were easy to record on hard-disk and then share the songs on P2P services like Napster. But in order to stream the songs from the services the user had to own the actual CD. The last time I checked, it is actually much easier to use a CDDA extractor to convert a CD to MP3 format instead of going through the laborious process of recording "live" streams off the Net.
The motive behind the lawsuit is most likely the fact that having been acquired by Vivendi Universal, MP3.com is more capable, and perhaps also more likely to pay damages to whoever seeks them.
This morning at around 11AM the one millionth software item was downloaded from AfterDawn.com. Quite fittingly the number 1,000,000 was the DeCSS DVD ripper.
The AfterDawn.com would like to thank all our users for their continuing support. Please do keep visiting our site in the future as well for more interesting software reviews and downloads!
Although Napster is beginning to seem like yesterday's news, the recording industry, or the online music businesses for that matter, have little time to rest. A new generation of media sharing applications is rising, and it'll definitely get real big real soon.
According to a recent study by the digital music research firm Webnoize, a popular new file-sharing service FastTrack counted an average 425,000 simultaneous users in July. That accounted for an 89% increase from the 225,000 user average in June. At this rate FastTrack would have an average number of one million simultaneous users in the network by September.
FastTrack's network-client -structure is utilized by eg. KaZaA and MusicCity Morpheus, and the files shared using each of these clients is visible to every user on the FastTrack network. Currently there are over 550,000 users on the network sharing 309,320GB in music, videos, pictures, and software applications.
You can find out more about the advanced features of the FastTrack network at the FastTrack homepage.
MP3.com announced that it has achieved positive pro forma earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) for the first time -- the company posted EBITDA of $662,000. The second quarter revenues decreased by 13% from last year and were $17.5 million. The company was able to cut its pro forma net loss 27% to $1.6 million ($.02 per share). The company net loss was $11.6 million, down 93% from net loss of $177.1 in the second quarter of 2000.
