ReDigi, that startup that aimed to allow people to buy and re-sell “used” digital music, has come under fire from the RIAA. Ars Technica reports that the RIAA has sent company a letter demanding that it cease and desist all “infringing activities” and make its records available to the RIAA as evidence. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised; I expected it would come to this when the company announced its plans back in February, let alone when it started buying tracks in October. The company does bend over backward to try to make sure that the resold copies weren’t...

TechCrunch reports that digital music resale firm ReDigi, who I mentioned back in February, is actually launching its eMarketplace to allow people to buy and sell “pre-owned” digital music. ReDigi claims that it has consulted with lawyers and determined what it’s doing is legal, but I’m not so sure. ReDigi hopes to succeed where others have failed by designing a marketplace that is not about file sharing, but is instead a method of “facilitating the legal transfer of music between two parties”. Really, the key here is that the startup’s technology is able to actually verify...

From the JISC website.  Blockquotes omitted: Fragile treasures of 16 century music are now freely available online, thanks to a partnership between Royal Holloway, University of London, the British Library and JISC. The Early Music Online project has digitised more than 300 books of the world’s earliest printed music from holdings at the British Library. Some of the books date back as far as the 1500s and, due to their fragile nature, would not be freely available to researchers, but thanks to this digitization project, musicians from around the world can now source the original...

Last year, we reported on Brazil’s copyright law forbidding the use of DRM to block fair use. It appeared at the time that Brazil was developing a very progressive and open stance on copyright reform, even licensing the contents of its state website under Creative Commons. There was even a movement to legalize file sharing. However, after a new administration was elected, Brazil’s stance on copyright seems to have gone through a screeching U-turn. Mike Masnick at Techdirt reports that the country’s new Culture Minister ordered the removal of the CC license from the website shortly after taking office,...

Edward Nawotka of Publishing Perspectives has a summary of events at Brazil’s second digital book conference. There is some interesting stuff there, including the contention of SocialBook founder Bob Stein that Brazil has the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of far-too-conservative American publishers who “blew it” when it came to meeting the e-book challenge. But something I find more interesting in this case is Nawotka’s “discussion seed” post, that brings up a point raised at the conference that wasn’t even reflected in the main article. One panelist noted that piracy proves, at the very...

With the release of the multimedia eBook version of Stephen Smokeís Cathedral of the Senses, the possibility of including a soundtrack inside a novel is now a reality. Book and music publishers can now creatively repurpose existing assets at a fraction of the cost of creating new ones, while providing opportunities for tapping into fresh revenue streams. For years authors and songwriters have dreamed of a day when music could be added as soundtracks for books. That day has now arrived and there are already further applications on the horizon that make use of the concept. Nobody believes that the prolific...

If you think spam on the Kindle or Nook store is annoying, how would you feel if authors started producing "ebooks" that were loaded with affiliate marketing links and direct sales pitches? Oh right, that's called the Web. But Cathedral Rock Publishing wants to bring that wearying concept into the world of digital publishing in a big way. Although the company is promoting its new "Ebook is the Store" concept in terms of musicians selling their songs from within an ebook, in reality the idea is that you can sell anything, or better still everything. Here are two cringe-inducing bits...

Most ebook promotions today involve either steep discounting or bundling multiple formats, but Seth Godin's The Domino Project is trying something different with its new title "Anything You Want" by Derek Sivers. The ebook will cost you about $8 on the Amazon Kindle Store, which is less than many new releases but not by much. However, it comes with a code good for 200 free songs from indie musicians, hand selected by Sivers, who founded CD Baby and has a deeply personal connection with the indie music scene. Could this sort of cross-promotional bundling be a viable marketing strategy for other...

Opinions on DRM vs. piracy are like noses: everyone has one, and they all smell. Lately, I ran across a fairly interesting piece containing the opinions of Roland Denning, a London-based writer and filmmaker, on Self Publishing Review. I can’t entirely agree with it, but it does offer a good basis for discussion. Denning sees problems with both the anti-DRM and anti-piracy arguments, finding that both sides harbor “some surprisingly naïve notions”, such as the idea that “we can stop people downloading, just like we can ‘win’ the ‘war on drugs’,” or that “people will pay for something they...

When I first mentioned the possibility of a cloud media service from Amazon, I noted that (according to the article) Amazon was still in the process of acquiring licenses, but might announce it before I had all of them in order. But according to Ars Technica, it seems Amazon decided (much as competing services MP3Tunes and mSpot did) not to bother with licenses at all. Amazon holds that its service is, in principle, just like people putting their music on an iPod or external hard drive and listening from there, and for that they don’t need licenses. But the...

I hadn’t been paying much attention to the court ruling issued in the case of white rapper Eminem suing his record labels for more money. But then I saw this piece in Techdirt about it, and had to reconsider. It may not have direct implications for e-books specifically, but it definitely has larger implications for digital media as a whole. Eminem’s producers sued the Universal subsidiary that was handling his music for a greater share of royalties. The rationale was that music sales generate a much lower rate of royalties than music licenses (for use in TV shows, commercials,...

Here's what they say about themselves: Welcome to the portal page of the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)! We at the IMSLP believe that music should be something that is easily accessible for everyone. For this purpose we have created a music library to provide music scores free of charge to anyone with internet access, with several other projects in planning. IMSLP is also entirely collaborative, and all contributions are greatly welcome. You can browse by composer (aphabetical), composer (time period), instrumentation, genre, recordings by composer.  As of March 15, they have 88,000 scores and 5,000...