News written by Matti Robinson (May, 2008)

Napster has opened their own music store to compete with Amazon and Apple. Their music store is said to boast more than 6 million songs, more than Amazon or Apple's iTunes. All files are downloadable in MP3 format and are DRM-free, which makes them compatible with most of the music players, including Apple iPod and iPhone.

Changing directions from the previous all-you-can-eat subscription, the company hopes that it will grow interest amongst the customers who want to transfer their favorite songs to portable media players. Napster's service has an edge against iTunes with DRM-free files and larger catalog, but analysts don't see it topping iTunes mainly because of Apple's strong integration of iTunes into their PMPs.

The pay-television companies have been actively searching and investigating websites that spread the word of set-top box modding. One of the sites, modshack.co.uk, was detected to illegally instruct how to bypass the set-top boxes' security settings. The two Brits responsible for the site were taken to court in 2006 for breaking the Copyright and Designs Act. Modshack.co.uk gathered nearly 27 000 pounds worth of donations from its users.

Carl Morgan Davison and Mark Taylor helped people via their website to bypass the security settings and therefore get a free access to digital pay-TV broadcasts from Virgin Media and BSkyB. The companies complained to North Wales Police about the service in the summer of 2005. Soon after the investigation began and resulted to a raid and eventually to legal action.

The court sentenced the two men to what Malcolm Davies, Virgin Media’s head of fraud security calls a "serious warning to others" -- a total of 15 months in prison. Carl Morgan Davison alias "Hairy Monster" was sentenced to 10 months and Mark Taylor alias "Novice Angle" to 5 months imprisonment.

Following the example of western neighbor Sweden, Finland is about to get their own Pirate Party. During 24th and 25th of May Finnish Pirate Party will hold their two day constitutive meeting. Rick Falkvinge, the founder and chairman of Swedish Piratpartiet, will deliver a speech as one of the guests.

After the meeting they will start gathering the 5 000 supporter cards necessary to officially register the party. The organizers said that there has been a lot of interest towards the party and they except plenty of attendees. Everyone attending has been asked to enroll to avoid organization problems.

Finnish Pirate Alliance has interviewed Matti Hiltunen, the founder of Finnish Pirate Party. Here are some quick snippets:

Hiltunen was satisfied how the building of the party has gone so far and claimed that Pirate Party and its ideas will definitely stand out. Hiltunen continued that he is not interested to follow his colleague Falkvinge for the chairman position. He calls himself more of a philosopher than a politician and would like to continue to contribute as a party secretary. The party is looking for active supporters all around Finland from all social classes and age groups.

Nine Inch Nails has released a new album called The Slip under creative commons license and it is completely free to download. The group encourages everyone to "remix it, share it with your friends, post it on your blog, play it on your podcast, give it to strangers, etc."

The Slip, consisting ten tracks, can be downloaded in several formats through a link that is sent to your email address. In addition to "high-quality MP3, FLAC or M4A lossless at CD quality and even higher-than-CD quality 24/96 WAVE" formats the album will be released on CD and vinyl in July. The downloadable files are all 100% DRM-free and the larger FLAC lossless, M4A apple lossless and high definition WAVE 24/96 packages are distributed via BitTorrent.