That didn’t take long: The new Danger Mouse album Dark Night of the Soul found its way onto various torrent sites this weekend after reports surfaced that the Hip Hop producer won’t be able to legally publish the record due to a dispute with the major label EMI.

NPR’s website reported last Friday that Danger Mouse recently collaborated with Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous as well as Iggy Pop, Vic Chesnutt, Nina Persson and various other musicians for an album that was supposed to be accompanied with a 100 page photo book by David Lynch. However, it wasn’t meant to be. The artists got into trouble with EMI, according to the project’s website, which reads:

“Due to an ongoing disput with EMI, Danger Mouse is unable to release the recorded music for Dark Night of the Soul without fear of being sued by EMI. Danger Mouse remains hugely proud of Dark Night of the Soul and hopes that people lucky enough to hear the music, by whatever means, are as excited as he is.” Read more »

Luxemburg’s Root eSolutions pulled the plug on dozens of torrent and file sharing community sites after receiving legal threats, according to a gulli report. Some of the more popular sites affected by the measure are www.torrent.to, www.relfreaks.com, www.flashload.org, www.datensau.org, www.sceneload.com and www.ddl-scene.com.

A representative of the hosting company told gulli that it received a court order to take down the sites, complete with the threat that the police would confiscate 30 servers if Root wouldn’t act. Root was able to inform the owners of the sites affected before the take-down, but apparently no on acted upon the warning. Since them, some admins seem to have taken some initiative, as some of the domains redirect to new hosts, albeit without the original sites in place.

The hosting company spokesperson told gulli that some of the admins would probably just move their sites to German or British hosting providers, but expressed doubt that such a step would offer any more protection because those companies would have to follow the same European Union copyright directives.

My colleague Liz Gannes published a great piece titled “Copyright Meets a New Worthy Foe: The Real-Time Web” over at Newteevee today. The main premise: Traditional DMCA take-down notices can’t keep up with Ustream and Justin.tv anymore. Users can just jump onto streams in no time, and live events may be over before anyone could even send out an appropriate notice.

One of the aspects of the article that found really intriguing was the combination of the live web and the social graph:

“Ustream CEO John Ham says he’s seen live video feeds go from zero to a million viewers faster than ever before after being shared on Facebook and Twitter.”

Liz doesn’t present a definite solution to this problem, probably because there isn’t just one, but she does hint at a few possibilities, one of them being this:

“(I)t’s not easy for people who start aligned as enemies to become friends. If sports leagues were to embrace Justin.tv as their viral marketing engine…well, that would be something.” Read more »

Twitter’s 140 character limit hasn’t really stopped people to share all kinds of stuff through the micro-blogging platform. First there were dedicated photo services like Twitpic, then video sites like Twiddeo, and now there are all kinds of Twitter file sharing services popping up everywhere.

One that has gotten a lot of attention in recent days is Filetwt. The company behind it did a bit of PR for its service, and it quickly paid off: Mashable, Readwriteweb and Zeropaid all did positive reviews of FileTwt, with reviewers calling the service “handy”, “quick and painless” and “true P2P.” However, FileTwt isn’t any of these things.

The service currently uploads files to Rapidshare, where most users have to wait half a minute or longer before being able to download it. Files uploaded this way can also only be downloaded 10 times max, so you better don’t have too many followers. Then there is the fact that FileTwt seems to spam your entire twitter address book with obnoxious ad messages if you happen to click on the wrong button.

The worst thing however is that Filetwt makes users enter their Twittter username and password – a completely unnecessary and highly insecure way of authentication, given the fact that Twitter supports OAuth. I really can’t recommend using this service to anyone in its current form. Read more »

German HipHop musician Thomas D. has a somewhat unusual request: He wants people to steal his music. Thomas D., who’s been a member of the German HipHip pioneers Fantastische Vier, would apparently much rather have people donate money to worthwhile non-profit organizations than spend it on his records.

At least that’s the message of a new online campaign that Thomas D. is spearheading for an organization called Roter Lotus (red lotus). Roter Lotus wants to build a hospital in northern India, and Thomas D. is trying to help the organization raise 500.000 Euro towards this goal.

(via gulli)

Google has added video recording capabilities to the HTC G1 through an update of its Android operating system that was sent out wirelessly to T-Mobile customers this week. Android version 1.5, code-named Cupcake, also features video sharing via YouTube, email and MMS.

Bruce Lidl did a great first write-up of the new features earlier this week, but we couldn’t resist giving Android’s video recording a shot as well.

First the facts. The G1 records 3gp videos encoded with the h.263 video codec. There are two recording modes: High-quality offers you a resolution of 352×288 and a 360 Kbps bit rate while the low-quality setting comes with a resolution of 176×144 and a bit rate of 192 Kbps. How does all of that look? Well, see for yourself. Continue reading on Newteevee.com.

Germany’s Undersecretary of Culture Bernd Neumann wants to adopt a three strikes policy against file sharing similar to the one recently enacted in France. “We can’t say that this is out of the question,” Neumann told the audience of a media policy event of the German Christian-Democratic Union (CDU), according to heise.de.

The CDU is currently the majority partner in a coalition government with the Social Democrats (SPD). Germany’s Secretary of Justice Brigitte Zypries, who is an SPD member herself, had previously voiced strong objections against three strikes, calling the idea to boot suspected file sharers off the Internet after three cases of infringement “a completely unreasonable punishment.” Neumann did however get strong support for his position from Germany’s music industry, and he vowed to get Zypries to talk to the major labels about their position.

Three strikes isn’t the only Internet-related issue that’s currently keeping Germany’s politicians busy. The country is also in the midst of a heated debate of how to fight child pornography online. Germany’s conservative Secretary of Family has proposed a country-wide Internet censorship that would have to implemented by ISPs on the DNS level.

Internet activists and civil liberties advocates are outraged about this idea. They have started a very successful online petition drive against it, which has currently more than 100,000 co-signers. One of the concerns that activists have is that child porn will only be the first of many unwanted forms of content to be blocked. They have certainly reason to be concerned: The music industry has already proposed to put file sharing sites like the Pirate Bay and Mininova on these block lists as well. Read more »