Risk & Safety

What will it be like for the some 10 million people using P2P services at any given moment around the world? The Washington Post looked at that question, but I don't think it's fully answered yet. I hope any readers who have file-sharing experts at their house will send me their answers! The Post says that "in the simplest terms, the P2P sites will begin using a filter to keep users from trading … [Read more...] about File-sharing’s future

The US film industry released it last February (see my coverage), and now the free software's available under a different name in six more languages at a site representing the recording industry worldwide. What Parent File Scan and Digital File Check do is 1) scan your PC and tell you what media files (video, music, photos, etc.) and file-sharing software you may have on it, and 2) let you delete … [Read more...] about Anti-P2P software for parents

The end of an era is upon us - the "Wild West" of file-sharing, its decline spurred on, of course, by the US Supreme Court's decision last June (see 7/1/05). "At least five online file-sharing companies have started trying to reach an accord with the music industry to convert the free trading of copyrighted music on their networks to paid services," the New York Times reports, citing Grokster … [Read more...] about P2P services going ‘legit’

These are so interesting, they're legal (users won't get sued by the RIAA!), and they seem to be popping up at an accelerating rate. The latest is Pandora.com, where digital-music fans can start their own radio stations (up to 100!) by telling Pandora their favorite tune or artist. Pandora will then consult the 300,000-song database of the Music Genome Project that fuels the service and compile a … [Read more...] about Creative online music communities

An Australian federal court decided that the company that runs the Kazaa P2P Web site encouraged its users to infringe copyright, the BBC reports. The court ordered Kazaa's owners, Sharman Networks, to modify the software within two months to stop the sharing of copyrighted material. "A fresh round of hearings will now be held to determine the level of damages, which could run into the millions of … [Read more...] about Kazaa ordered to stop piracy