MIR Related Newsbits

Last week the CRB approved an increase in royalty fees (proposed by the RIAA) for Internet radio (only the US is affected). I can't believe that they will succeed with this, even if the CRB has approved it. Paul wrote a nice summarizing entry in his blog.

Recently the RIAA seems to have found a very efficient way to sue people who share music via P2P networks (p2plawsuits.com). They've been testing it on college students in the last weeks. Seems as though they will be using this approach with any ISP in the future. I'm guessing that more people in the US will now start to use P2P systems which make it impossible to track those sharing music. Noteworthy are also alternatives to P2P which are emerging... e.g. Amie Street has an interesting price model and sells the music DRM free. (BTW, pressure on iTunes and other closed-DRM systems is continuously mounting in Europe.)

The IFPI has put pressure on the MP3 blog the "Late Greats". If this is not a single incident then this could have a negative impact on the Hype Machine, or even interesting work within MIR (see e.g. Oscar Celma's work).

Last month last.fm has signed deals with Warner and EMI. (Last.fm is one of the few companies actively seeking cooperations with MIR researchers.)

There is some confusion with MP3 licensing (it is not clear who owns which rights of the MP3 format). Using alternatives such as Ogg seems a good solution.