Hank calls the technique equivalent to a virtual cover-band playing The Beatles’ songs. He bought all of their albums, had a computer analyse the waveforms to determine their pitch, timbre and other defining qualities, then destroyed the original copies of the music.

He then had a computer reconstruct the songs based on the data it collected from analysing the waveforms. It wasn’t a recording, but a complete mathematical rebuild of the song.

That’s really cool and incredibly impressive that he managed to recreate the tracks from scratch like that, but there’s no way the defence stands a chance against EMI’s lawyers. I think I remember this argument being tried before with MP3s. A defendant claimed that because a majority of the waveform data was thrown away during encoding, it was not identical to the original recording.

Nice try, said the judge. As long as it’s audibly identifiable as a certain recording, it constitutes as copyright infringement. At least that’s what I remember. If anyone knows the specific case or I’m completely wrong, please chime in. Have fun in court on November 20, Mr Risan. [FastCompany]

Music royalty groups ASCAP and BMI are harassing online music stores such as iTunes to pay performance fees not only for the songs that they sell, but for the short clips that they use as previews. You know, the things that entice people to pay for music. They want to be paid for advertisements of their product.

Just how backwards is this industry? How many years can they continue to just not get it in such an extreme way? You would have thought that maybe it would have taken a few years for them to figure out the internet, but we’re way beyond that. This entire industry seems to be run by people who don’t just not understand the internet, but are aggressive about not understanding the internet. They have their old way of doing business and the old way the world works, and they’ll be damned if any new fangled thing like a complete upheaval in the way people acquire and listen to music is going to change that.

It’d almost be funny if the people who were really being harmed by these jackasses weren’t the artists. Bands aren’t the ones pushing for something that will only end with their best form of advertising being pulled from the iTunes Music Store (because make no mistake, that’s what will happen before Apple pays for f–king song clips). It’s these royalties idiots, the same people who almost killed off Pandora.

So here’s the bottom line, guys: You’re doing it wrong. And you’ve been doing it wrong for a while. You need to figure out a new way of doing business, and that doesn’t mean just shifting fees around and charging where you clearly shouldn’t be charging. Earn your paychecks, because unlike the bands you purport to be representing, you’re still getting them. [CNET via Electronista]

• Child abduction: Fine of $US25,000 and up to three years in prison, which can be accounted as $US50,233 per year (that was the median household income in 2007, probably down because of the economic crisis). Total: $US175,699.

• Steal the CDs: A total of $US275,000, counting up to five years in prison and the $US52,500 fine per CD.

• Steal a lawnmower from your neighbour: A total of $US375,000.

• Burn someone’s house while playing The Doors: Another $US375,000.

• Stalk a Gizmodo editor (yes, you know who you are): Class 4 felony that will result in just $US175,000.

• Start a dogfighting ring: $US50,000.

• Murder someone on the second degree, a Class 1 felony: $US778,495, which accounts for a $US25,000 fine and four to 15 years in prison.

Heck, you can do all these crimes, and the total amount will be only $US2.2 million. Of course, you can’t really quantify years spent in prison, but the case of Jammie—and many like hers—is absolutely outrageous.

Now, Ms Thomas got fined $US1.92 million for downloading 1700 songs. For some reason, a popular jury thought that was fair. That’s OK—there are mentally disturbed people everywhere. But I don’t care if it’s 1700 or 6000 songs, nobody can be punished like this. It may follow a draconian law to the last comma and period, but that doesn’t make the verdict just. The law is what is at fault here, with a punishment that is not proportional to the magnitude of the “crime”, and goes against the most basic sense of justice.

I know that el Señor Presidente has more serious issues to worry about than this case, but something needs to be done about it. Something drastic.

But then again, I’m not surprised, given the “class” of people now at the Department of Justice:

What a crying shame. [Gapers Block]

In his interview on the fantastic podcast The Sound of Young America, Kot states that the music industry was actually one of the primary causes of piracy. The explosion of boy bands and bubblegum pop in the late 1990s was due to the labels’ insistence on pouring a huge amount of money into just a few dumbed-down, impersonal, lowest-common-denominator acts, which meant in turn that commercial radio was almost completely garbage. There was little room for genuine weirdo geniuses like, say, Prince or David Bowie, and devoid of good music, the market was bound to react—hence Napster.

Kot goes through the standard points all dedicated pirates know—artists have never made money on record sales, the mp3 revolution encouraged the indie movement and a huge variety of new and exciting acts, the RIAA’s insistence on trying to sue piracy out of existence led to the public having absolutely zero guilt about pirating music. But what’s nice is Kot’s recognition that iTunes, the much-applauded champion of legal music downloads, is still far inferior to pirate options.

I’ll toss this out there: I think the dear departed OiNK, an invite-only torrent site that was forcefully shut down in late 2007, was the greatest music distribution service ever created. It was leagues ahead of iTunes: Faster downloads, better mandated sound quality, an incredibly vast library, vibrant forums full of knowledgeable music dorks, and, of course, totally without DRM. Even now that iTunes has abandoned DRM, it can’t hold a candle to a service that hasn’t even been operational in nearly two years. Record labels seem to have pinned their hopes to iTunes, but Kot stresses that iTunes is far from perfect, and the labels should be busting arse trying to come up with a viable business model that attracts, not polices, customers, and can at least hold pace with the illegal options.

Cue the “screw the RIAA” comments. [The Sound of Young America]

This is the second big victory for the RIAA this month, after the even-more-ridiculous decision that filesharer Jammie Thomas should pay $US80,000 per song. But unlike Thomas, Tenenbaum hasn’t come out and said he will outright refuse to pay the fine, and it looks like this is a more concrete win for the RIAA dirtbags.

The RIAA specified to TorrentFreak that the money won will go to more lawsuits, not to the artists the RIAA supposedly represents. It looks like yet another episode in this long public relations attack in which the organisation mercilessly kills any sympathy for their cause that might have existed. [TorrentFreak]

Roy, a New Hampshire resident, actually thought the letters she received from UMG’s lawyers were either a joke or a scam and didn’t respond for several months. Her reaction is pretty understandable; the RIAA simply directed her to a site where she could pay her “debt” with a credit card (which certainly seems like a scam) and, again, Roy did not own a damn computer.

UMG had mistakenly sued her due to the vast deficiencies in MediaSentry, the anti-piracy software the RIAA uses to track down pirates. MediaSentry incorrectly pinpoints IP addresses with not uncommon frequency, and this is obviously one such case. Roy mounted a case and UMG was forced to settle out of court, for fear that any decision at all would result in a precedent that could mean future suits could be thrown out as well. Unfortunately, the settlement does not include UMG paying Roy to apologise for being such a-holes about the whole thing, and neither side will receive any money. [Recording Industry vs. The People via Electronista]

The decision has taken a ton of twists and turns—even after the jury had decided what Thomas had done was in fact illegal filesharing, the punishment wasn’t at all clear. Originally she was to be fined for over 1,700 songs, which was then whittled down to 24 “representative” songs, and the per song fine has shot up from the initial $US750 (the legal minimum) to the current $US80,000.

Apparently Thomas “gasped” when the number was read out loud. We don’t blame her, although our reaction was more fist-shaking and muttering about old white men in suits than sheer surprise.

The ordeal isn’t over, of course—Thomas will appeal the decision and it’ll probably be heard by a few more judicial levels before any final say is had. Jammie, we’re pulling for you. Stand tall. Or sit down, it’s easier to steal music that way. [Ars Technica]

The irony of a man in charge of a company who artists and consumers both hate making this statement apparently was lost on him.

Hypebot, the site that reported the layoffs, says that the “RIAA as you know it is probably history by Tuesday.” And yes, that means tomorrow. Offices are closing and over 100 people are being shown the door, so this is clearly a serious move.

So what will happen to the RIAA? It’ll probably merge with the IFPI, the European organisation currently ineptly suing The Pirate Bay. But really, it’s only a matter of time before that organisation bites the dust as well. This is something we’ve known was inevitable for a while now, but I’m somehow having trouble feeling all that happy about it. You never like to see people lose their jobs, even if said jobs were inherently despicable. [Hypebot via Threat Level]