SPFF wakes up

French collecting society SPFF has said it will not tolerate sites using it’s members music without licensing. To this end, about two years after if first became popular, it has filed a suit against RadioBlogClub. Maybe Deezer next? Surely this new crusade has been precipitated by the recent agreement by ISPs to suspend/terminate user accounts of copyright infringers.

The lack of urgency of some of these industry bodies to stick up for the rights of their members beggars belief. It is not impossible that the members were also backwards in coming forward so as not to invite unpopularity with their “consumers”.

Speedy licensing of most services is clearly the best outcome for most parties, with the availability of copyright infringement suits as a strong incentive to talk terms. Better late than never for the content owners that SPFF can be taken seriously as representing the infringement suits threat.

Torrentspy loses case before trial starts!

Digital Music News reports that the MPAA has won a case against Torrentspy since the judge threw out the case on the basis that Torrentspy had been lying under oath and tampering with evidence during the discovery process. Weird one.

Music in China

That long tail chap Chris Anderson has been galavanting around for new ideas and got to China. His blog post about music in China covers the headline points about ringtones and Baidu but links to an article on The Register by a Beijing-based Western A&R guy. A fascinating read it paints a vivid and informed picture of the state of the music industry in China today – the prevalance of recorded music piracy and why, despite millions of music consumers, it is hard to earn money from recorded music and even from 360-degree(esque) deals.

Among other factors:

Today’s China sees single-track, naked MP3s being Bluetoothed, file-shared, emailed, flash-disked, hard-drive-dumped and herded around the digital sphere in complete anonymity. Targeting potential listeners for your band in this scramble of a market is incredibly difficult because, in a great deal of cases, even your potential listener doesn’t know what he or she is listening to.

I wonder how much that happens elsewhere. Ed remains optimistic but it is hard to see how this particular potential market can be converted.

Leaseweb update

Not much reporting on this but most of the public BT indexes did leave Leaseweb by the Dec 1 deadline and most did leave Holland. Holland still hosts a large number of private trackers, with many of them residing at Leaseweb. Still, it appears to show that pressure on an ISP can result in services moving. The content industry faces the challenge of making forced migration a painful  cost of doing business and as such a hurdle to staying in operation. The fallout from this will probably show just how easy it is to move to another country and continue operations.