Articles by Jon Newton

Major international music artists based in Canada have banded together to form a group aimed, among other things, at protesting the recording industry's practice of targeting fans with lawsuits With Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne and Sarah McLachlan as members, the Canadian Music Creators Coalition stated in a White Paper Wednesday:...

The Patti Santangelo Fight Goliath campaign was officially launched about four months ago and since then, it's raised an impressive $13,140.21 Santangelo is the New York mother of five targeted by the Big Four record labels' Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)....

Could Apple's troubles in Europe get any worse? It's on the wrong end of a lawsuit from The Beatles in the UK, who say iTunes breaks a US$26 million settlement under which Apple Computer agreed to stay away from the music business; there's a distinct possibility Apple's digital rights management technology might go down the chiottes in France; and, now two major Danish companies, Maersk and TDC, both with online music stores, would also like to see an end to Apple's digital rights restrictions...

More than half of American high school students say they have at least one symptom of hearing loss, and many of their problems are directly attributable to the use of iPods and other portable music players, says a new study Teenagers aren't the only ones at risk, however....

In 1932 Solomon Linda wrote a song he called "Mbube." He and the Evening Birds recorded it as a 78 in 1939 and by 1949, some 100,000 copies had been sold. If you were around in the '60s, you'd have known it as "Wimoweh" (from the Zulu "uyiMbube") Then it showed up as "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" in Walt Disney's "The Lion King."

Did Recording Industry Association of America spokesperson Jonathon Whitehead switch the names of two completely different P2P applications in a deliberate bid to fool a court hearing a P2P file-sharing case? The question is raised in an affidavit presented in the latest stage of Atlantic Recording v. John Does 1-25....

In the United States, the Big Four music labels now routinelyblackmail colleges and universities into peddling product via the likes of Napster and iTunes, with school staff working as unpaid public relations and marketing teams EMI, Vivendi Universal, Warner Music and Sony BMG wield the threat of lawsuits against students attending schools that fa...

It's 2006 -- a brand new year and the entertainment cartels are already crying doom and gloom. As usual, rather than acknowledging they're the authors of their own misfortunes, they're blaming the most important people in their worlds -- their customers. Worse, they're continuing with their bizarre attempts to try to sue consumers into towing corporate bottom lines...

Guess what? Your digital music library is not actually a library. It's considered "hoarding." The entertainment cartels have already pirated the word "pirate" to replace "counterfeit" and/or "duplicate" and/or "share." It's so much more PR-friendly -- more emotive and evocative....

A filmmaker in India believes he's hit on the perfect DRM (Digital Restriction Management) solution: hiding secret coding in "every single print." So suggests producer Firoz A. Nadiadwala, quoted by the Times of India Along with California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jackie Chan has taken on a role as a Motion Picture Association of America (MP...

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was to publish the world's first "storyline patent" application yesterday According to Georgetown University law professor Jay Thomas, "The case law of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has established that virtually any subject matter is potentially patentable," and Andrew Knight extols the idea in a...

The Recording Industry Association of America may be feeding judges inaccurate technical "evidence" which is being believed as though it comes from a reliable source, according to Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who's representing victims being sued by the Big Four music cartel-owned organization "There's a crisis in this country with the RIAA's r...

In a report on the upcoming P2P Litigation Summit, I mentioned "Big Music wants Britanny Chan," which describes how the Big Four are using the RIAA to terrorize a 14-year-old Michigan girl and her mother. Having already failed once to frighten Brittany through her mother, the cartel is now going after her again, this time as an individual Britanny ...

Take-Two Interactive, the U.S. company that lied about secret animated sex scenes stashed in one of its brutally sadistic "Grand Theft Auto" Rockstar video games, is counting on Bill and the Boyz, a.k.a., Microsoft, for a little extra lift Next month, Take-Two plans to set an all-in-one, M for Mature "GTA III," "GTA Vice City," and "GTA San Andreas...

If the mainstream media are feeling the pressure from infonews sites and blogs, B-b-b-baby, you ain't seen nothin' yet, to quote the words of rock group BTO I'm talking about indie 'Net journalists taking over from the scribes of yesteryear with straight-up reporting, untainted by corporate self-interests....

Universal Pictures has already started touting its US$150 million re-hash of "King Kong," due out around Christmas. But how will the mighty ape be kept safe from the Evil File Sharing Villains? High-speed Internet connections can mean huge, extremely fast downloads and, as a result, movie studios are now faced with the "same thorny challenges that ...

Music being burned onto CDs is becoming a bigger threat than P2P file-sharing to both the music industry and record stores The news comes from Recording Industry Association of America chief Mitch Bainwol, speaking for his bosses and the RIAA's owners, the members of the Big Four record label cartel....

"Speed of Sound" from Coldplay's X&Y album is currently Number 7 in the Modern Rock section of p2pnet's unique Top Ten Music Download chart. And Gorillaz's "Feel Good Inc." is at Number 8 Cool....

A recent "operation" of the Motion Picture Association of America, whose "Keystone Kops" unit is run by ex-U.S. Department of Justice deputy assistant attorney general John G. Malcolm, was a media circus Helped by the Southern California High Tech Task Force, Malcolm and his crew raided New Century Media, a legitimate Los Angeles duplicating busine...

Pay us 4,000 pounds (US$7,290) by July 1. Or go to jail That's the message from the BPI, the Big Four record labels' UK enforcer, to the mother of 14-year-old Emily Price who downloaded songs from the Net without her 53-year-old mother knowing, says Britain's Gloucestershire Echo....