recording industry

Grooveshark has been involved in a series of lawsuits from the recording industry and, as with the Limewire lawsuits, it looks like the music publishers are piggybacking on the labels by suing later.

I keep having the same conversation over and over again with people in the recording industry. A few days ago, I met with the head of a record label that is doing all sorts of cool and innovative experiments (both on the business model and with technology) and he still kept saying "but we gotta stop people from stealing." The problem, as always, is that they seem so focused on infringement that they miss the bigger picture: What does it actually mean for revenue?

These are two separate questions, and the labels seem to prioritize the wrong one.

Yes, the first file-sharing case in the US to go all the way to trial is still going. Filed on April 19, 2006 and progressing through a remarkable three trials, the recording industry case against Minnesota resident Jammie Thomas-Rasset continues to burn through cash and judicial attention.

Michael Geist has the news that last year, at some point, the recording industry filed a lawsuit against IsoHunt in Canada.

There's already been an ongoing lawsuit against IsoHunt in the US, but not too many people realized there was a similar lawsuit in Canada.

And that's for a specific reason: the recording industry did their best to keep it quiet.

It's not like people didn't warn everyone what would happen with various three strikes laws. The costs for ISPs were widely discussed, even if the recording industry lobbyists insisted they were overblown.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the UK’s main recording industry trade body, came out with guns blazing against Google today.

BPI says that search engines like Google are as popular as P2P applications as a source for illegal downloads.

The music industry is pressing Google and others to censor their search results in favor of ‘legal’ music services.

Last week, in talking about how one of the guys behind Mulve was arrested by UK police, we noted the similarities to the arrest a few years ago of OiNK administrator Alan Ellis on "conspiracy to defraud" charges that were eventually thrown out as Ellis didn't actually break the law.

While courts in nearby Norway rejected attempts to force ISP Telenor to block The Pirate Bay, the story appears to be quite different in Denmark.

There, Telenor (which had been Tele2) was ordered to block The Pirate Bay, followed by a higher court upholding the block.

The recording industry saw revenue growth in Sweden, Australia, the UK, Mexico, and South Korea in 2009, which it says was caused by tougher anti-piracy laws.

The data doesn't really support that thesis, however. What it does show is that innovation works wonders and that the labels are overreaching on Internet disconnections.

LA Times: "Joel Tenenbaum set out to become the standard-bearer for people who fight back against Recording Industry Assn. of America lawsuits, but he has come to symbolize fighting back the wrong way."