Concerned that information about your file-sharing username may have been subpoenaed by the RIAA?

How Not To Get Sued By The RIAA For File-Sharing
(And Other Ideas to Avoid Being Treated Like a Criminal)

I fully support the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They are a group of, as they put it, "non-profit group of passionate people — lawyers, volunteers, and visionaries — working to protect your digital rights." First of all these guys are non-profit which I really respect pro-bono work. Helps me to maintain the belief that not all lawyers are bloodsucking maggots as popularly believed. They're supporting a legal means of file-sharing which I think is a wonderful idea. There are two ways mp3/movie/media trading can go from here.

1) We continue to share files. Artists continue to lose a slight bit of money (since most of their income comes from concerts/venues anyways), but the music industry takes a big hit. The music industry will continue to lash out at anyone they can in a desperate attempt that is likeable to punching a 20ft wave. Sales of IPods skyrocket...

2) The RIAA and music industry get a much needed clue and work with artists and the common consumer to come up with a veritable solution that benefits everybody. Such things have already been put in motion, but they are not at full potential yet. Buy.com's BuyMusic just launched last week, and they actually are pretty reasonable. $7-$9.99 per album and individual songs ranging from $.79-$.99. That I could deal with. You even save by buying the album as a whole. I haven't seen any prices higher on standard CDs yet. Music needs to encompass an integration onto online media.

This is one area where the Britain comes through with shining colors. I recently borrowed and ripped (the RIAA does not scare me :) the Ministry of Sound's "The Annual" 2003. 2 CD-set mixed by DJ Sammy. Pretty decent. Not as good as 2002, but still some good hits. One song was really awesome and I totally got into it and went and found the video shortly after. Divine Inspiration's "The Way" is the name of the song. Upon going to the Ministry of Sound webpage I immediately saw the concise nature they'd arranged things into. When I found Divine Inspiration's page there was the music video streamed online for all to watch, and on the left menu bar options to download the song, and in many versions! I don't know about you, but when I find a good techno song (or even a rock hit that's been remixed), I go and try to find as many remixes as possible. Each one is usually better than the last. Well I found about 2 or 3 yesterday for this particular song, but there were some hard to get ones, or versions which only came in WMA (Windows Media format) which is horrible and gets delays playing in even winamp. Sounds like it needs to buffer like you were streaming it live online...hum. Well on the site you can buy all the versions, order the cd, buy it in vinyl, or burn it straight to cd. They only iff I have with this site is that they limit the times you can burn it per month. Some sites limit the times you can download it, or number of times you can burn it at all. Some of them don't even let you do that, but allow you to export it to a MP3 device. This doesn't make too much sense to me, (well it does for OBVIOUS reasons) but my logic here is that when I buy a CD, I now own the right to make personal copies to my heart's content. As long as I'm not passing them out to anyone, I could have Madonna's Hollywood cd copied 500x. Roughly 30% of my mp3 collection (out of 11,000 songs that's something like 3300) are legitimate owns, meaning I own the actual CD it came off of. The rest is a blatant smack to the music industry :) The accessibility of the site and the "shopping cart" buying experience makes it very Amazonlike in feel. I think it's well integrated, and if we could mimic the same thing on artists own websites, I think we'd see a resurgence in album sales once again. If I remember correctly there was a movie industry monopoly way back at the beginning of this century. FIL 485 taught me well, because I remember that monopoly was abolished by Thomas Edison. I serioulsy doubt the music industry will collapse, lol. They are going to have to adapt a little quicker though or suffer horrible sales not much unlike Jacko's latest album >:L

Pearl Jam is a once again bona fide unsigned band again! lol