Individuals who pirate music and movies on the internet have a new concern thanks to a partnership between major internet service providers, movie studios and record labels. The organizations have created the Copyright Alert System which is designed to give suspected pirates fair warning before action is taken against them. This method currently has the support of AT&T, Time Warmer, Comcast, Verizon and Cablevision.

The RIAA filed documents in a New York court Friday, demanding that it issue a permanent injunction against LimeWire, the largest P2P file sharing network in the country. The group, which represents the 4 top record labels, has been widely despised for years thanks to it’s insistence on doing everything it can to fight the more »

Rumors of the coming Wi-Fi Direct are out and I’m sure it’s got the Bluetooth makers shaking in their boots. With Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth may no longer be top dog. Just announced at a consortium, some of the biggest players in the tech field are coming together to form an alliance to bring Wi-Fi connectivity more »

Illegal file sharing is down, and streaming is up, at least when it comes to teenagers. According to new research, teens are changing their ways when it comes to piracy. There has been a dramatic drop in the number of youth aged 14 to 18 who are illegally sharing music. At the same time there has been a hike in the number who now regularly stream their music online with sites like Spotify or YouTube.

In December of 2007, 42% of 14 to 18 years olds admitted they shared files at least once a month. That number has dropped to 26% as of January 2009. 65% of those teens regularly stream music and 31% are listening on their computer daily.

Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Ye makers of The Pirate Bay are apparently not planning to go sailing into waters unknown even amidst all the current legal fiascos they are facing. They are launching a new site called The Video Bay to be in competition with YouTube. No one ever said pirates were the more »

I’ve been saying it was going to happen. ISPs and music labels would come together to create a subscription service to provide music for users to download legally and it seems it has in the UK.

Virgin Media, a UK ISP, just came together with Universal Music Group to form an unlimited music service. Although it was just announced today, the actual launch won’t be until later this year.

Users of the service will be able to both stream and download as much music as they want from UMG’s catalogue. Of course, they first have to join and pay a monthly subscription fee. No word yet on exactly what that fee will be.

They’ve also stated that the music you download is yours to keep, although at this point they don’t specify whether that means everything you have downloaded, or just a set number of tracks per month can be kept. You never know, that might be one way they get you.

ReverbNation just announced their plan to have 1000 of their artists to start participating in a new Sponsored Songs program. This program will actually pay the bands $0.50 each time one of their songs is downloaded for free by a user. Yup, you get it free and the band gets paid.

Now, of course the question is where does the money to pay the band come from? You guessed it. Ads. A small branded ad will be placed within the album cover art of each download. The value to the advertiser is that it is passed along in the embedded work as the song is passed along by fans via P2P. They want you to share the song with as many people as you like.

There’s a fairly new file syncing program in town, and it is getting lots of positive feedback from its users. Dropbox is an online sync and storage service that is able to be used over Windows, Linux or Mac. It relies on Amazon S3 storage, and has both a free and a paid storage service; more »

When, oh when, are they gonna learn it is pretty much senseless to even attempt to hunt down the pirates? Right or wrong, P2P file sharing happens. And suing the creators of the popular Pirate Bay isn’t gonna stop it. And now, in a rather obvious attempt to support that fact, someone went out and created a The Pirate Google Bay. And you have to appreciate how bright and colorful they made their ship!

The Pirate Google Bay is a custom Google search made to find torrent files. They say right on their home page that:

“Please Note: This site is not affiliated with Google, it simply makes use of Google Custom Search to restrict your searches to Torrent files. You can do this with any regular Google search by appending your query with filetype:torrent.”

But slapping the “Google” name right on there sure makes it sound all official like, eh? Ahhhh….I can see a lawsuit against Google brewing anyway. That one should be entertaining. I mean, even a recent article in Forbes magazine said that Google itself is an incredibly efficient torrent tracker. That’s not any big secret.

It seems like a never ending story doesn’t it? People are downloading music and not paying for it. Naughty, naughty. The industry has their panties in a bunch over the fact people are downloading music illegally. Threats ensue. “We’re gonna get you all.” “Oh no you won’t, pirating will live forever!” Yawn. Be real guys, you’re never gonna “get them all.” And times are changing when it comes to music. Even many of the artists recognize this fact, the labels are starting to, now we just need the Music Cops to see it as well.