News for the Week of April 24, 2005

Online music - all aspects of it, from file-sharing to pay-per-tune - was the top story in family-PC news this week....

Family sues P2P service

In the first case of its kind, parents are suing a file-sharing (or peer-to-peer/P2P) service for being sued for their children's file-sharing activities. Sounds complicated, so let me explain. Sally and Jim Wilson of Cold Spring, Ohio, were sued in February by the Recording Industry Association because the RIAA said their two teenage daughters had downloaded 653 songs illegally, the Cincinnati Enquirer reports. The RIAA added that they "could be liable to pay $750 for each song," or a total of $490,000, if they lost the case in court (they settled with the RIAA for $3,000). They are now suing Kazaa, the P2P service their daughters used, basically for profiting from the ignorance of parents of file-sharers, according to the Enquirer. They're using the class-action method so other parents who have settled with the RIAA can join them in the lawsuit (more than 10,000 people, not necessarily parents, have been sued by the media industry so far for file-sharing music). [This lawsuit could take some time because Kazaa's owner, Sharman Networks, is based in Australia and registered in Vanuatu (see Wired News).] Kazaa is embroiled in other litigation and reportedly on the decline among P2P services, but it's still widely used. "In October 2004 alone, approximately 2.4 million users of the FastTrack network, which includes Kazaa and Grokster, traded 1.4 billion files," according to RIAA data cited by the Enquirer.

P2P worm

Besides the legal issue, there are other downsides to file-sharing, including viruses and family PC privacy breaches. File-sharers need to be on the alert for the Nopir.B worm that's spreading on the P2P networks. It's "designed to look like a DVD-cracking program," tricking file-sharers who are looking for software that circumvents copy-restriction technology on DVDs, ZDNET UK reports. What it really does is delete people's music libraries (all MP3 files on hard drives), as well as some P2P programs (e.g., LimeWire, Grokster, or Kazaa, but ZDNET doesn't say which ones). It's too early to tell how infectious this one will be, but apparently the family PC's safe if your anti-virus software is up to date. On the privacy front, see "P2P's privacy problem".

Free music from a paid service.

RealNetworks, meanwhile, just increased people's options on the legal side of online music. Real unveiled the new Rhapsody, TIME.com reports, including Rhapsody 25 (listen to 25 songs/month for free on a PC); Rhapsody Unlimited (pay $10/month to "rent" unlimited songs - listen to them on your PC for as long as you're a subscriber or pay 89 cents/tune or $8.99/album to own the tunes and listen to them on the PC off-line); and Rhapsody to Go (pay $15/month to move the music onto an MP3 player or burn a CD). The "free" category represents something of an alternative to illegal file-sharing: 25 free "plays" a month (whether 25 songs or 25 plays of the same song). Of course, restrictions are still built in. The number of MP3 players Rhapsody's tunes can be played on is limited, though Real says it has made its service compatible with the iPod.

Why share if you can buy?

Apple's iTunes is two years old this week, and Rob Pegoraro, the Washington Post's tech writer, has spent "a fair amount of change" at iTunes since he first went there, he reports. "And yet millions of people still get their music online from a file-sharing service or site - and in the process, put up with an often dubious selection, spyware-ridden software, and the unpleasant reality that the artists who made that music won't make a cent off each such download," Rob adds. So he looks at why people put up with the downsides of P2P and what's still missing at "the legit online stores." Examples, no Beatles or Led Zeppelin in any of them, hardware (MP3 player) restrictions, and sharing/transferring tunes with/to friends. By spelling out these points that any of our kids could probably tick off in two seconds, Rob's providing us parents some helpful insights into the online music world.