Economy Profits From File-Sharing says Dutch Government Report

TorrentFreak reports that a report, which was commissioned by the government, estimates the positive effect of file sharing on the Dutch economy would be around 100 million euros a year.

Isn't that amazing?

Can you believe this? Most surprising is that a government report says it.

Hmm. In France all government reports say the contrary, but of course they are always written by analysts paid by the music and movie industry, far from any neutral point of view. Service and software providers are even required by law to tell the contrary to their users, the words being that "illegal file sharing is dangerous for artistic creation". Us being honest citizens and all with VIPeers and Pump we write that sentence all over the place. Tough to imagine it could be not true.

Oh well. Let's hope. Maybe the times are a-chaging. Yes we can!

Free Music by Bands Sharing Officially on BitTorrent

Nine Inch Nails and the CXCR6 are the latest news in the trend, ever more impressive, of freely distributed music on the Web.

About NIN, the album "Ghosts I-IV" got first spot on CD sales on Amazon in 2008, in spite of it being downloadable freely, legally and officially, on P2P networks with a Creative Commons license. Now I discover they are also distributing 400GB (no typo here!) of raw HD footage from 3 of their concerts, for their fans to play with - that is amazing. The news is here on the NIN web-site and the torrents are here.

The news about CXCR6 is here on TorrentFreak: a Netlabel specialized in distributing it's bands albums for free on BitTorrent to get them exposure.

Rock on!

Apple Dropping DRM on iTunes - will music piracy increase or decrease?

I bet on decreasing numbers for P2P music sharing in 2009, if not absolutely, at least relatively to the global file sharing growth.

Personally, each time I want to buy music I have a hard time choosing between ordering the CD or the nauseating disgusting effect of purchasing DRMed tracks.

Sometimes you just can't wait for a CD delivery. Actually in the Internet days, you feel less and less inclined to ever wait more than 24h for any delivery.