Fergal Sharkey (yes the Fergal Sharkey of the Undertones and singer of Teenage Kicks) has blogged on the Guardian website about recent research to try and identify how the illegal music download issue maybe resolved,  The article can be seen ay Illegal downloads – guardian.co.uk.

According to Digital Music News, MediaDefender an anti-piracy company has used an illegal means to try an shutdown what is a legitimate online media selling service Revision3.  Revision3 legally uses bit torrent technologies and as a result of a security hole had servers tricked into acting as a tracker for some illegal content, setup up by MediaDefender by exploiting a security hole according to Revision3.  When Revision3 spotted the abuse and shutout MediaDefender it appears to have triggered a denial of service attack (achieved by saturating a web server with too many requests for content).  So Revision3’s actions which were correctly taken to prevent their servers from being exploited and used for illegal copying (also the the job of MediaDefender) resulted in the service attack. Reviosn3 has a good description of what the DOS attack is like.

Given MediaDefender’s failure to atleast talk with Revision3 let alone use correct legal channels, has been referred the matter to the FBI as it breaks 12 different statutes including Computer Fraud and Misuse act.  Revision3’s news article on the whole event is fascinating insight into how blasé MediaDefender about its actions.  Since the attack, MediaDefender have said they’ve updated their policies to first check to see if the server they’re looking at is associated to a legitimate business. Hey, shouldn’t you have been doing that anyway?  As Revision3 had said, what if someone had exploited an loophole in security for an emergency service to host a bit torrent tracker which had then been attacked by MediaDefender?

Interestingly most of the information describing what has gone on has come from Revision3, and MediaDefender’s website is particularly quiet on these events.

Peter Gabriel is a busy man, quietly helping music in the world of technology, with his work with OD2 (On Demand 2), We7 and now Bowers & Wilkins music club.  Bowers & Wilkins are a audiophile speaker manufacturer and wither Peter have indicated that sharing music using MP3s results in a loss of quality.  So they have set up a music club through which you can buy high quality music recordings (in the Apple’s loss less audio file format as used in the recording studio) recorded at Peter’s state of the art Real World recording studios.  Although not explicitly stated, the indications are from the website’s information is that the music is DRM free. The club costs £33.95 per year for which you get a free album to download  every month.  You don’t get to choose the artist or album, but initial indications that the artists involved so far are both interesting and diverse in styles so within a year you should get to hear a couple of albums that will appeal to your musical palate, unless you’re exclusively a Spice Girls and Sugababes fan. So far albums have been recorded with blues artist Little Axe (aka Skip MacDonald), Grindhouse and Gwyneth Herbert.

  I cam across a new free service called Chilirec.  It allows your to select and record Internet radio stations for later playback.  Currently there are 300 or so stations although none of the major names appear for example BBC, KCRW and so on.  As a solution it has some exciting potential, and could if it takes off have some interesting affects on podcasting (i.e. you record your favourite programmes for time shifted listening without first having to download or accept any download quality restrictions.

It does however raise all sorts of interesting copyright issues, which probably explains why the major stations are absent from the available list as it would attract the big money lawyers.

Following my recent post (here) about MSN Music discontinuing the ability to move DRM’d music, it would appear that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have the same view that I have and have written to Microsoft outlining what they believe Microsoft must to make good the service discontinuation – see EFF’s statement here.

del.icio.us tags: DRM free, EFF, MSN Music

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del.icio.us tags: mp3, ipod, grill, BBQ, Idolator, gadget