Thursday, October 18, 2007

Our Favorite Music Services, Part 1

PC Magazine reports: "We all remember the wild and wooly early days of online music trading, when Napster and its imitators turned millions of otherwise upright, law-abiding folk into instant criminals on a scale that previously would have been hard to imagine. Suddenly, a music collection that represented hundreds if not thousands of CDs was within the grasp of everyone with a reasonably reliable connection to the Internet and the moral flexibility to ignore the fact that it was all stolen. Yes, it was a carefree time of all the free (stolen) crappy 32 or 64 Kbps rips of songs you could stand to download. Alas, those heady days of carefree larceny are mostly gone, unless you're willing to dare the (mostly impotent) wrath of RIAA and the risk of unbridled spyware infections that often goes hand in hand with P2P file-sharing."

Here is an excerpt from part 2 of the article: "Things haven't been looking good lately for Internet radio sites. The Copyright Royalty Board decided to modify current webcast radio royalties, imposing heavier fees that could put sites like Pandora and Last.fm out of businesses. The Internet radio community has fought back hard, getting Congress to introduce the Internet Radio Equality Act that would lighten their financial burden."

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