Free for a Fee

TorrentFreak: How To Kill The Music Industry:

According to Per Sundin, CEO of Universal Music, the decline in music revenues in the past 8 years can be fully attributed to (read: blamed on) illegal file sharing. If this were actually true, many of us might even respect his decision to go after pirates as fiercely as the music industry is doing right now. However, the past 8 years have seen a lot more changes in the landscape of home entertainment than Per Sundin would like to admit, and some of those changes have had a massive impact on music profitability — much more so than any amount of piracy.

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TechCrunc: ToysRUs Buys TOYS.COM

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Canada’s telecoms regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is in the midst of a network neutrality proceeding, and the responses that rolled in this week were vociferous. Several ISPs and music groups objected to any such rules, arguing that they might stop ISPs from implementing all sorts of wonderful policies such as P2P upload throttling, website blocking, and graduated response rules.

One of the more interesting responses came from an ISP called Videotron, which told the CRTC that controlling access to content “peut être bénéfique non seulement pour les utilisateurs de services Internet mais pour la société en général”—that is, “could be beneficial not only to users of Internet services but to society in general.”

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Creative Commons has officially launched a Web tool to aid content creators who want to publish material under the highly permissive CC0 license. The tool, which has been under development for over a year, has now reached 1.0 status and is accessible from the Creative Commons website.

Creative Commons was founded in 2001 by legal scholar and intellectual property reform advocate Lawrence Lessig to provide a legal framework for the free culture movement. Creative Commons offers a spectrum of copyright licenses that enable content creators to concede intellectual property rights to varying degrees in order to encourage third-party use of creative works. The organization has also developed technical tools that can be used to apply licensing metadata to digital content and to find material that is available under Creative Commons licenses.

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The Federal Communications Commission has launched a comment cycle on a petition asking for reform of the DTV receiver patent license sharing system. The Coalition United to Terminate Financial Abuses of the Television Transition (that’s right: CUT FATT), charges that American digital television makers are getting gouged by unmonitored patent licensing. That means higher DTV prices at the retail level.

“Licensors in the United States operate freely in an un-regulated ‘Wild West’ without supervision or accountability,” the January 2 petition charges. “As a result, American consumers pay to per television for intellectual property rights that cost about elsewhere in the world.”

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