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Definitely NOT Dynamic: Ticketmaster ‘Assaulted’ by Scalpers On Springsteen Sale… | Digital Music News

Reposted from http://bit.ly/A54dUe on January 28, 2012 at 08:12AM

This couldn’t have happened to a more high-profile artist, at a worse time, or in a worse place.

ifttt update: ‘Google Talk channel’ gets a bot upgrade | MediaFuturist

Please welcome bot@ifttt.com to your Google Talk contacts and edit the Google Talk channel for improved performance http://bit.ly/z6bRtk





















puts the internet to work for you.


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Mega Aftermath: Upheaval In Pirate Warez Land | TorrentFreak

Despite its “rogue site” status and various other warnings, when MegaUpload went down last week it still came as a shock.

But what came next was unprecedented, a dramatic reaction in cyberlocker land that took out vast libraries of digital content and capacity. The perception of the established ground rules had been changed, without the passing of a single new law.

FBI, arrests by huge numbers of police, enormous cash and asset seizures overseas, reward program scrutiny, knowledge of payouts to persistent uploaders of infringing content. Extradition. These are things that changed the game.

“If the US government can come for Kim Dotcom it can happen to almost anyone,” a file-hosting operator told TorrentFreak on condition of anonymity. “I’m trying to think of everything I did possibly wrong in the last 3 years and worrying about that and the next 3 years also, if we even have that long.”

For many hosting sites it was time to react – quickly.

Earlier this week we documented the drastic actions taken by services such as Filesonic and Fileserve who shut down all 3rd party sharing and, like many others, closed down their affiliate payout programs. Later we showed how file-hosting competitors such as 4shared, Rapidshare and Hotfile had grown as users hunted for spare capacity.

In the space of a week and the MegaUpload shutdown aside, huge libraries of both legitimate and pirated material were wiped out as filehost after filehost deleted an impossible-to-calculate number of files and closed down thousands of suspected infringing accounts.

And this is where it gets quite interesting.

For more than half a decade Hollywood and the recording industry have spent millions of dollars not so much on actually eliminating illegal content, but getting rid of links to content such as those found on BitTorrent.

But this week, without a single cease and desist being sent, cyberlockers across the globe not only self-deleted vast quantities of files, but in doing so made millions of links across thousands of ‘linking sites’ completely useless too.

For the operators of these linking sites and their uploaders, this week has been very hard work indeed. For some sites it was all too much and the shutters have simply come down.

The problem, it seems, is money. While there is money to be made in torrent sites, the content sharers there are largely altruistic. The cyberlocker scene is more complex and incestuous, with revenue being generated in a handful of basic ways on both legal and illegal content.

Through reward programs, uploaders get paid on the number of times people subsequently download content. Equally, ‘release’ sites can upload the content themselves and get paid like a regular uploader when people download. Reward programs are important for cyberlockers too since they attract customers away from competitors and also give them an incentive to supply content.

Release sites and warez forums send users to cyberlockers to get content and when they get there they are faced with a choice. Download a little, relatively slowly but for free, or pay for a premium account and get lots as quickly as possible. In many cases choosing the first option means that cyberlockers also make more money from advertising.

When various sites shut their rewards programs this week, those uploading purely for the money were hit hard. In fact, many who had cash mounting up in their accounts lost it all – some cyberlockers simply kept the accrued money. While the ‘victims’ were livid, those who hate financially motivated ‘sharing’ commented that justice had been served.

But while it’s clear that some uploaders, often young and in less well-off countries, are ‘sharing’ small time for a few bucks, for some the reward payouts are more important. For many release sites, those rewards pay the server bills.

“We needed the payout and when [filehost name redacted on request] shut down sharing we were all but finished,” one admin of a release site told TorrentFreak. “90% of our content was hosted there. Then they deleted all our files and closed the account. They won’t even speak with us about it. A whole year’s work gone. We shut at the end of the month.”

But like worker ants whose nest has just been smashed apart by angry humans, others are utterly unfazed and just want to know which hosts are still paying out. Despite the climate of fear, quite a few hosts say they are and it’s evident from the links being posted on release blogs that the upload-for-cash crew have noticed them quickly.

Things, however, are still in a state of flux. Some of the filehosts still paying out appear to be offering tiered reward systems with just about every country in the world getting a reasonable deal but with the United States right at the very bottom.

Another interesting rumor, which at the time of writing we have been unable to confirm, is that one of the filehosts who banned 3rd party downloads earlier this week is now re-enabling them. This is something to look out for. Without 3rd party links being operational users are extremely unlikely to sign up for a premium account and this is where the cyberlockers can make good money.

So finally, one has to ask whether the MegaUpload shutdown has damaged the Internet piracy infrastructure. Providing an answer is not easy.

The amount of material coming online has not really reduced – content feeding from ‘The Scene’ is business as usual. Torrent sites are watching on closely, but the public ones tend not to host content, their users do. Cyberlockers are in a mess, but already recovering. Release sites are continuing, albeit with a reduced number of multiple links to the same content.

Perhaps the best test is whether it’s now very hard or impossible to find and download popular content. Not even close.

Source: Mega Aftermath: Upheaval In Pirate Warez Land

Be Good, Be Safe | Musicology.fm

I dropped my dad off at the airport yesterday. We engaged in a familiar, yet awkward dance. We hugged and said goodbye as he held back the tears welling up in his eyes.

This scenario has played out before. When I moved to LA back in April, he and I drove across the country—all 1,828 miles of it—and saw the city together for the first time.

I don’t remember much about the trip, but I do remember how it ended.

We were standing inside his terminal. He asked me if I wanted to come with him to the airport gift shop and I said “no.” We would’ve needed to take a shuttle to get to the other side of the airport and I didn’t want to get lost. I had no idea where I was and didn’t want risk forgetting where I parked. So there we were, standing there—squirming through the moment—and my dad started to lose his shit. It hit me hard and twisted inside my stomach. We’ve never said goodbye like this before and I didn’t see it coming.

But he did.

Prior, we had eaten at Jack in the Box, where he quietly stuffed a handful of napkins in his pocket, in anticipation for the moment when he would leave his son alone in LA.

He tried to hold his composure, but fell apart. The emotions overtook him and swept me up too. I held things together and maintained myself. As we separated, he muttered to me, though the tears, the parting phrase that he’s told me for years, “Be good, be safe.”

I walked to my car in a turmoil and once I sat inside it, I cried too.

Driving home, I realized something that’s always been apparent to me, but hadn’t been revealed in such a public manner: somebody loves me and that person is my dad.

It’s an insight powerful enough to break your heart and put it back together again.

Business Matters: Optimistic About the Record Business? You’re Not Alone | Billboard

Macworld iWorld Pumps Up Volume for Music Fans, Artists and Companies | Billboard

Scalper ‘Assault’ Caused Website Jam for Bruce Springsteen Ticket Sales, Ticketmaster Says | Billboard

Backbeat: Light Artist Chris Levine Breaks Down Antony’s ‘Swanlights’ NYC Spectacle | Billboard

Two teens send a Lego man into near space | LA Times

Two Canadian high school students have successfully launched a Lego man almost 80,000 feet above sea level—high enough to capture video of the plastic toy hovering above the curvature of the Earth.

Now the results of their experiment have gone viral, racking up more than 600,000 views on YouTube in just two daysand inspiring the young engineers to make their small astronaut his own Facebook page—Lego Man in Space.

The Toronto Starreports that the two teens, Matthew Ho and Asad Muhammed, were inspired to do the project about a year and a half ago when Ho saw a YouTube video of MIT students who sent a balloon to near space. Ho wanted to see if he could do it too.

The friends spent four and a half months working on the project, mostly on Saturdays. In a video interview with the Star, they said the hardest part was making the parachute, which they decided to hand-sew, even though neither of them had any sewing experience.

They also constructed a lightweight Styrofoam box to carry three point-and-shoot cameras, a wide-angle video camera and a cellphone with a downloadable GPS app. They purchased a professional weather balloon for $85 online. The helium that would lift it up came from a party supply store. For launch, they put two mitten warmers in the Styrofoam box to keep the cameras working at that altitude. The whole project cost them about $400.

After the balloon was constructed, the two waited until weather conditions would ensure that the Lego man would land in Canada and not somewhere in the U.S. because they didn’t want to take their chances with U.S. Homeland Security, the Star reports.

Ho and Muhammed estimate that it took their balloon craft one hour and five minutes to climb 80,000 feet before it finally popped. The descent took a little more than 30 minutes.

Besides online notoriety, the two also received a congratulatory note from Lego.

ALSO:

Digital painting comes alive in a not so ‘Still Life’

The making of NASA’s super hi-res blue marble Earth image

8-foot-tall Lego Man washes up on Florida beach, held in custody

—Deborah Netburn

Aneesh Chopra, the first White House chief of technology, resigns | LA Times

Aneesh Chopra, the first White House chief of technology, has resigned after almost three years on the job.

Chopra’s resignation was announced in a post on the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s blog that did not explain why he’s leaving the Obama administration. The Washington Post reported that he is rumored to be considering a run for lieutenant governor in Virgina.

“When President Obama came into office in January 2009, the administration found a federal government relying too heavily on 20th century technology,” John P. Holdren, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in the blog post. “On his first day on the job, the president created the position of ‘chief technology officer.’”

Chopra was sworn in as the first U.S. chief technology officer May 22, 2009. The job called for “looking at ways technology can spur innovations that help government do a better and more efficient job.”

Holdren said Chopra had “a dizzying array of accomplishments” while in office, which included input on crafting the president’s National Wireless Initiative, which calls for “the development of a nationwide public safety broadband network”; establishing “a set of Internet policy principles, including the call for a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights”; and leading “the implementation of the president’s open government strategy focused on unlocking the innovative potential of the federal government to solve problems and seed the jobs and industries of the future.”

Obama, who is known as a more tech-friendly president than his predecessors, said in a statement that Chopra “did groundbreaking work to bring our government into the 21st century. Aneesh found countless ways to engage the American people using technology, from electronic health records for veterans, to expanding access to broadband for rural communities, to modernizing government records.”

The White House under Obama has used technology — social media in particular — much more than previous administrations. This can be attributed to the rise in popularity of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, but Chopra may have had an influence as well.

Before his White House job, Chopra was chief technology officer for the state of Virgina. On “The Daily Show,” host Jon Stewart once jokingly called Chopra the “Indian George Clooney.”

RELATED:

Obama 2012 campaign heads to Tumblr

Obama 2012 campaign joins Instagram on eve of Iowa caucuses

President Obama to answer questions in Google+ Hangout on Jan. 30

— Nathan Olivarez-Giles

Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+

Twitter.com/nateog

Photo: Aneesh Chopra smiles during a roundtable discussion at the 2010 International CTIA Wireless convention in Las Vegas. Credit: Ethan Miller / Getty Images

Apple’s Tim Cook responds to accounts of poor factory conditions | LA Times

Apple Inc.’s chief executive responded to a wave of negative attention to conditions at overseas factories that make its products, saying the insinuation that Apple doesn’t care about the welfare of its workers is “offensive.”

“Unfortunately, some people are questioning Apple’s values today,” Tim Cook wrote in an e-mail to Apple employees. “Any accident is deeply troubling, and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern.”

A series of articles in the New York Times has brought new focus on Apple’s highly profitable production strategy, which relies heavily on Chinese workers who live in dormlike factories and spend many hours assembling devices. The safety records and working conditions in those factories have been questioned, and Apple’s labor practices received intense scrutiny in 2010, when more than a dozen workers at  Chinese iPhone plants committed suicide. 

The later New York Times article quoted former Apple and Foxconn employees saying that Apple prioritized profit and production speed above worker welfare. 

The company was trying to address problems in its factories, one of the sources said, “but most people would still be really disturbed if they saw where their iPhone comes from.”

In Cook’s note, first published by 9to5Mac, he said that Apple was a world leader in improving overseas working conditions, and will continue to work hard to find and fix problems.

“We will continue to dig deeper, and we will undoubtedly find more issues,” Cook wrote.  “What we will not do — and never have done — is stand still or turn a blind eye to problems in our supply chain. On this you have my word.”

RELATED:

IPad down to 58% of tablet sales as Android catches up

Apple reports record sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs

Harvard study finds the iPad can be a pain in the neck

— David Sarno

Image: A person injured by an explosion at the Foxconn factory in May 2011 arrives at the Sichuan People’s Hospital in Chengdu in southwest China. Credit: Associated Press.

Take a tour of BMW’s new Mog online music system | News.com

Reposted from http://bit.ly/AaVz6m on January 27, 2012 at 07:59PM

CNET takes a hands-on look at the new Mog online music system in a BMW 650i. Relying on an iPhone, the Mog interface lets the driver choose from 14 million tracks.

Nada Surf - “Waiting For Something” (MP3 download) | Boing Boing

Reposted from http://bit.ly/xWg6yv on January 27, 2012 at 10:53PM

Sound it Out # 15: Nada Surf “Waiting for Something” Nada Surf has been playing intelligent and catchy guitar-based rock music for two decades. Their records are lush and beautifully written, and the constant sense of wonder and optimism throughout is a joy for this cynic to discover each time. Nada Surf always makes me […]

Universal Music Claims Copyright Over Song That It Didn’t License, Just Because One Of Its Artists Rapped To It On A Leaked Track | Techdirt

Reposted from http://bit.ly/wkaHx8 on January 27, 2012 at 04:59PM

Last year, when Universal Music issued a very questionable takedown of a Megaupload commercial — which involved some Universal Music artists — UMG suggested that it had extra special rights with YouTube in which it could take down videos that it didn’t even have a direct copyright on. Google later said that UMG was greatly exaggerating the details of their deal, and all UMG could do beyond issuing normal copyright takedowns was to take down live performances.

So a bunch of folks are scratching their heads over a highly questionable UMG takedown of a song by a Florida-based rap duo, After the Smoke (who are not signed to Universal). The details are a bit complex, and to understand what appears to have happened, you first have to go back a bit. It seems that After the Smoke recorded an instrumental “beat” which they then shopped around to various artists to potentially rap/sing over. This is pretty common, and if someone likes the beat, they’ll buy it. In this case, they offered the beat to Yelawolf, who they had opened for. Yelawolf claimed to like it, and apparently did record over it… but about the same time got signed to Universal Music and nothing happened with the track (and the beat was never paid for). However, about a month ago, the Yelawolf track over the ATS beat got leaked — leading ATS to get upset about the lack of credit (and, one assumes, payment).

Some of the folks who participated in the Yelawolf track apologized and went public with a statement about how this track was not intended to be released and how leaks suck and how ATS definitely deserves credit. That statement also noted that ATS had (after not finding a buyer) recorded their own version of a song over the beat. And, indeed, soon after, ATS released their own official version…. but then UMG took it down. As far as I can tell, UMG apparently decided that because its act — Yelawolf — had recorded over this beat (despite not licensing it), it must own it… and because of that blocked ATS’s song — which was completely their own. It seems likely that UMG simply used the Yelawolf track with YouTube’s ContentID to block any tracks with the same music — but things got screwy when it turned out that neither UMG nor Yelawolf had actually licensed the beat.

Either way, in another report, ATS filed a complaint with YouTube… and was told, too bad, and that UMG owned the track. Eventually, as the story started spreading, someone at UMG realized the mistake and backed down.

But, in the short term, this really does (yet again) highlight one of the many problems of an aggressive takedown system. UMG clearly screwed up here and shut down an independent act’s own song — which, honestly, one of its own acts had infringed on the copyright for. This is really quite an amazing form of copyright abuse when you think about it: UMG artist fails to license beat on a song that is leaked… and then UMG claims copyright over the official song over the same beat. That’s definitely adding insult to injury — or, perhaps, adding injunction to infringement. While it appears that cooler heads prevailed and got this worked out eventually, it seems pretty crazy that any artist should have to deal with some giant industry conglomerate completely shutting down their own works based on bogus copyright claims.

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Bar Fight! Sony Sues Karaoke Distributor For Infringement; Gets Sued Right Back For ‘Copyright Misuse’ | Techdirt

Reposted from http://bit.ly/zidiy4 on January 27, 2012 at 03:54PM

A great many drinkers have watched helplessly as their BAC became inversely proportionate to their common sense, throwing around cash as thought it were Monopoly money before grabbing the mic to belt out Adele’s latest track. Karaoke has been the go-to bar sport for thousands of people who feel the only thing keeping them back from superstardom is sobriety. It’s a proven money-maker, but does it make ridiculously large damages-type money? Sony/ATV sure thinks so:

[O]ne manufacturer and distributor of karaoke discs [KTS] has just taken Sony/ATV Music Publishing to California federal court to get a declaration that it doesn’t owe $1.28 billion for 6,715 acts of alleged infringement. The plaintiff not only wants to limit its liability, but also is seeking to punish the music publisher for unfair trade practices.

The use of the original music as the background score requires a license over the master recording. The use of the song composition requires a mechanical license too. When songs are performed in public, that requires payment to a PRO like ASCAP or BMI. When the music is matched to video images, it requires a synchronisation license. And if the lyrics are being republished, that might require an additional fee too.

In KTS’ lawsuit two weeks ago, the company alleges that Sony is committing copyright misuse by attempting to collect multiple damage awards on a single work from the upstream producers, the downstream users (bars and restaurants), and KTS, the packager/distributor. KTS believes this alleged bullying “scheme” is unlawful.

KTS wants a declaration that Sony is only eligible for one statutory award per work, which would trim the nearly $1.3 billion that Sony allegedly says it is due, but perhaps just as importantly, the karaoke manufacturer is bringing a bold copyright misuse claim that seeks to punish the publisher for trying to “recover multiple times for the same allegedly infringing conduct at rates greater than if the claims had been asserted against the manufacturers.”