Free Republic

You have prayed for Donald Trump’s success; given money to his campaign; spoken to friends and family about the need to defeat Hillary Clinton and maybe even gone to a Trump rally; but you still want to do more. Well now there is a new and exciting option to join this fight for our survival as a nation in a simple yet very effective way. This is through the use of MP3s that send a brief but powerful message to specifically targeted audiences by reaching them over the radio. MP3s are Email features that allow you send sound. We at...

“Apple Inc said it discovered that the lead consumer in a $1 billion group antitrust lawsuit over the iPod didn’t buy a device in the time period covered by the case, which could derail a trial now under way,” Karen Gullo reports for Bloomberg. “Bill Isaacson, Apple’s attorney, told U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers that plaintiff Marianna Rosen’s iPod was purchased in July 2009, three months after a deadline for iPod owners to be included in the case. The case, filed in 2005, is over claims that Apple sought to thwart rival music stores to maintain a monopoly over...

The history of the MP3 is one of technological innovation, consumer demand and all-too-persistent litigation, often against those very consumers who embraced the format in the heady post-Napster days. The story of this resilient digital audio file has been recounted many times — from the recording industry’s early wars of attrition to the MP3s role in the filesharing explosion to the bloggers who help curate an oversaturated music marketplace. What doesn’t garner as much discussion is how the MP3 format — celebrated, reviled or somewhere in-between — has come to define the digital music experience, both for millions of listeners,...

...computational neuroscientist Anders Sandberg recently noted that although we have strong instinctive feelings about ownership, intellectual property doesn’t always fit into that framework.... ..Optimists argue that the music industry has coped before with disruptive new technology. Until recordings came along, songs, not singers, were Big Business. So while copyright law allocated royalties for performances, it said nothing about what happened when you recorded those performances and sold thousands of copies of the recording. Only after protracted legal maneuvering did we work out an arrangement that allowed both businesses to thrive. ...collectors switching from cassette and vinyl to CD swelled the...

Music piracy is a more serious crime, at least in economic terms, than bank robbery, according to the Songwriters Guild of America [PDF]. The Guild has written to Victoria Espinel, Barack Obama’s Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, who has asked for public comment on tackling piracy. The Guild writes: “There are numerous economic crimes of much lesser magnitude (such as bank robbery) that are routinely and fully investigated, for which law enforcement agencies such as the FBI have significant resources. By contrast, online copyright piracy dwarfs bank robbery in causing economic losses, yet the FBI has limited criminal investigative interest and...

Leaked documents reveal draft text of secret global copyright deal ) OTTAWA — As negotiators from 37 countries prepare to meet in New Zealand on Monday to discuss a top-secret trade agreement, a draft text of the document has found its way onto the Internet. While bits and pieces of the agreement, called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), have been leaked in the past, this is the first time a full draft is available to the public. The agreement, negotiated privately for the better part of two years, aims to create a global organization to oversee worldwide copyright and intellectual...

All the big music sellers may have moved to non-DRM MP3 files long ago, but the watermarking of files with your personal information continues. Most users who buy music don’t know about the marking of files, or don’t care. Unless those files are uploaded to BitTorrent or other P2P networks, there isn’t much to worry about.A list of which music services are selling clean MP3 files without embedded personal information, and which aren’t, is here. Apple, LaLa (owned by Apple) and Walmart embed personal information. Amazon, Napster and the rest have resisted label pressure to do so.A music industry...

Here’s a simple suggestion. Go to these specially recorded and tailored MP3 audio links and download one or all of them. Contact your local radio station or a station in the district of a moderate or conservative Democrat and ask the manager about purchasing your own one minute ad to explain and fight OBAMACARE. DOWNLOAD THESE AUDIO CLIPS And get the up on your local station! ObamaCare – Illegals – 60s Obama Care – SENIORS – 60s Obamacare – 30 sec Right click on the links and select “Save As…” to download, or just click on the link to listen...

The biggest idea I came out of SxSW with this year was that free is dead. Over. Overdone. We killed it. Because so much is free online, we expect it; where’s the value in that? It seems to me that the folks in Austin weren’t quite on this one yet… even SxSWi keynote speakers Guy Kawasaki and Chris Anderson seemed slow to the punch (Guy’s big bright idea for Chris’s new book “Free,” out this July, was to give it away for free. HELLO? Been there. Done that. Have they NOT notice that the music industry has already beaten this...

Is Internet access a fundamental human right? Or is it a privilege, carrying with it a responsibility for good behavior? ...The United States Congress held hearings last week on the growing problem of piracy, which the American entertainment industry says accounts for the loss of $20 billion a year in sales. Several lawmakers vowed to increase scrutiny of international markets where piracy is widespread. But if events in Paris last week are any indication, legislative solutions will not be easy. French lawmakers rejected an antipiracy plan championed by President Nicolas Sarkozy, where the Internet connections of people who ignored repeated...

...However, there's another type of site engaging in copyright infringement, in a far more defensible way. These are the whole-album bloggers, the modern-day cratediggers who post records long out of print, and so obscure as to have barely existed. These blogs democratise record collecting, making the arcane – Turkish prog, Italian soundtracks, Puerto Rican 45s – accessible to all. The cratedigging bloggers think their posts are on solid moral ground. "If an LP is out of print, there are no sales to be affected, so no one suffers any losses," says Smooth, of My Jazz World. "If the industry cannot...

The $0.99 that the iTunes Store charges for individual songs has taken on an almost iconic role in the field of music downloads, becoming what many consider the standard for fair pricing. While the record labels have long lobbied for variable pricing, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has fought them to keep the rate flat across the board. But the price of some customers' music has already been threatened thanks to an entirely different source: state governments. This week, a controversial proposal in the California State Assembly that would have extended the state's sales tax to include digital downloads of media...

The RIAA has quickly become one of the most disliked organizations in the world. Working ostensibly with the interests of the artists in mind, the organization has single-handedly instituted a policy of lawsuits and education in an attempt to curb the piracy of music. Although this has been going on for quite some time now, I recently read a press release from the organization outlining its successes and what 2008 will look like for its College Deterrence program. The press release tells us that the RIAA (on behalf of the music industry) has sent out "a new wave of 407...

David Bendeth, a producer who works with rock bands like Hawthorne Heights and Paramore, knows that the albums he makes are often played through tiny computer speakers by fans who are busy surfing the Internet. So he's not surprised when record labels ask the mastering engineers who work on his CDs to crank up the sound levels so high that even the soft parts sound loud. Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered — almost always for the worse. "They make it loud to get...

Last year was terrible for the recorded-music majors. The next few years are likely to be even worse. IN 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,”...

Owners of digital music players will be acting lawfully when they transfer music from their computer to a digital player or copy a CD for their own use, under proposed amendments to bring copyright law into the digital age. Consumers who have been technically breaking the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 by copying tracks from CDs to their PC or digital player, or making an extra copy to play in the car, will now be able to do so for private use. Record labels accept that consumers should not be punished for shifting music from one format to another,...

Things are looking up for the World's Dumbest File Sharer, Jammie Thomas, who became the first American to go to court in a P2P case in October A jury of her peers found Thomas guilty of copyright infringement and set a fine of $222,000 - but now she's been dumped by the person most responsible for leaving her in this predicament (apart from Jammie herself) - her attorney Brian Toder. It was Toder who foolishly advised her to make a principled fight of the matter in court - thereby turning what would have been a $2,000 tax into a candidate...

David Bendeth, a producer who works with rock bands like Hawthorne Heights and Paramore, knows that the albums he makes are often played through tiny computer speakers by fans who are busy surfing the Internet. So he's not surprised when record labels ask the mastering engineers who work on his CDs to crank up the sound levels so high that even the soft parts sound loud. Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered — almost always for the worse. "They make it loud to get...

DENVER (Billboard) - This past March, Greenpeace made headlines by criticizing Apple's environmental policies -- or lack thereof. The move generated a rare response from Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who outlined previously undisclosed plans for "a greener Apple" in a Web-published memo. It also sparked protests from pro-Apple bloggers, who claimed Apple's leadership in the digital music space had a positive impact on the environment. After all, replacing physical CDs with digital files must help the environment right? Wrong. Environmental groups claim the music industry's transition from physical to digital has no discernible benefit to the environment and, in the...

Best Buy Co. turned in disappointing third-quarter results on Tuesday as the battle to sell flat-panel TVs, MP3s and other hot electronic gadgets has slashed prices and cut into profit. the nation's largest home-electronics retailer said the "very competitive climate" -- plasma and LCD TV prices dropped 25% to 30% -- held its profit to $150 million, or 31 cents a share, up nearly 8% from last year's income of $138 million, or 28 cents a share, but short of Wall Street's expectations. That sent shares lower by 5% to $51.30. The total results were mixed compared with Wall Street's...