Audible Magic, a content-filtering company, announced on Friday a wide-ranging agreement with Sony Music, aimed in part at improving tools to combat peer-to-peer piracy. The record label will provide digital “fingerprints” to Audible Magic, which creates technology that identifies and blocks songs as they are transferred online through file-swapping applications or other tools. Sony will …

Several proposals to collect money from Internet service subscribers to pay for online music swapping are bubbling to public attention in the United States and Canada. A trade group representing Canadian songwriters and music publishers argued in front of that country’s Supreme Court on Wednesday that ISPs should pay into a nationwide pool–similar to a tax now imposed on blank …

The recording industry this week claimed progress in a controversial legal campaign targeting individuals who use peer-to-peer networks, but its optimism appeared to clash with at least some of the evidence, which remains murky. By some measures, usage of peer-to-peer software such as Kazaa has been cut in half since the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced in late …

The Recording Industry Association of America said Wednesday it had sued another 41 people in its ongoing legal campaign against file swappers who are trading copyrighted music online. This is the RIAA’s third batch of suits against computer users since early September, bringing the total number of people sued to 382. The group also said it had sent out an …

Australian Web site Ninemsn has announced that it will launch an online music store that will sell music from the big five record labels. Due for launch early next year, the site will offer songs from BMG Entertainment, EMI Recorded Music, Sony Music Group, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, as well as from independent labels. The new store …

As the success of digital music services like Apple Computer’s iTunes and Napster puts new pressure on corporate and other private computer networks, a generation of tools is springing up to control the software. On Tuesday, network traffic management company Packeteer released an upgrade to its software that would allow network administrators to identify and control the use of these …

A San Francisco federal judge last week moved the venue for SBC Communications’ lawsuit against the recording industry’s file-swapping legal strategy, a potentially significant victory for record labels. The decision, which was released late last Wednesday, transfers a closely watched legal battle over the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) dragnet for online music traders to courts in the nation’s …

Shortly after buying the MP3.com domain name and announcing that its sprawling music archive would close, CNET Networks said Wednesday it will start its own free service for independent musicians online. MP3.com’s existing database, which contains more than 1 million songs, largely from unsigned and independent musicians, will be shut down Dec. 2. But CNET said it will create a …

Two filmmakers are getting attention around the Net for an “antiadvertising” project aimed at protesting what they call the “dirty secret” of the iPod music player–its battery life. Brothers Casey and Van Neistat, who collaborate on video projects using Mac editing software, said they were told by a technical support representative at Apple Computer that the cost to replace the …

The Norwegian programmer who distributed the first widely used tool for cracking the copy protection technology found on DVDs has turned his attention to Apple Computer’s iTunes. Late last week, programmer Jon Johansen posted a small program called QTFairUse to his Web site, with little in the way of instruction and even less explanation. But during the next few days, …