BullJustin points us to a short NPR piece about four massive failures by the recording industry. If we skip over number 3 (Kevin Federline), the other three are pretty relevant to what we talk about here on a regular basis: the Sony BMG rootkit fiasco that opened up security holes on computers without letting anyone know, the RIAA's lawsuit strategy of suing fans and the record labels' ongoing efforts at payola to get songs played on the radio. However, BullJustin makes an amusing point in the submission concerning that last one: It cost the industry untold millions in actual payola, independent promoter fees, and then more than $25 million in settlements, not to mention lawyer fees. Full story...
We've seen this before, with individual authors like Paulo Coelho and David Pogue, who both found that as more people were able to get unauthorized copies of their ebooks, their sales actually increased.
A bunch of folks sent over Jeff Jarvis' recent blog post entitled stop selling scarcity, which I actually think is slightly misleading.
In my experience, there is a group of photographers who are even more extreme in their copyright views than groups like the RIAA and MPAA.
With a new report coming out suggesting that Facebook sends more traffic to news sites than Google News, folks like Mathew Ingram are asking if Rupert Murdoch, the AP and others will be complaining about Facebook "stealing" their traffic and demanding to get paid.
TorrentFreak alerts us to an interesting case happening in Norway right now. Apparently, the most expensive movie ever produced in Norway was (shocking, I know) found on the internet soon after it was released.
We noted in the past how odd it was that AT&T blocked something like the place-shifting Sling Player from the iPhone, but allowed place-shifting streaming TV apps from partners like MLB.
This post is part of the IT Innovation series, sponsored by Sun & Intel. Read more at ITInnovation.
Obviously, we've been covering various stories of content creators who are making use of new methods and new ideas to build a successful business model in a very changed world.
Last week, in discussing its attempt to settle its lawsuit with Google over the Google book scanning project, the Authors Guild posted a rather interesting public letter, entitled To RIAA or Not to RIAA, That was the Question.
Last summer, due to a DDOS attack emanating from IP addresses connected to 4chan, AT&T temporarily blocked access to 4chan.