Yahoo! to stop supporting Yahoo! Music after September 30
Starting Oct. 1, customers won’t be able to revive frozen tracks or move working ones onto new hard drives or computers, because Yahoo! won’t be providing any more keys to the songs’ DRM wrappers. Without the keys, the music is stuck. If a user’s computer goes on the fritz, say good-bye to Yahoo’s music. This situation epitomizes the problem we laid out in our last post about the Library of Congress.
Chris Gaither, LA Times

Mobile Net Radio Opens New Ad Opportunities
With the iPhone’s Internet radio applications comes added opportunities for advertisers, says Steve Rubel in an AdAge column. He envisions advertisers targeting users based on music tastes or through GPS-based location, in that way delivering "locally relevant" ads to consumers. "This maybe one of the most promising mobile ad formats and is a space to watch," he states. Additionally, iPhone Internet radio may "disrupt" traditional radio because it transforms the one-way delivery of radio into a two-way interaction—not only matching the in-car listening and music discovery aspects of radio, but adding a degree of personalization.
Paul Maloney, Advertising Age

Universal Says It Can Ignore Fair Use In DMCA Takedowns
The question is whether or not filing a takedown notice on content that is used in a way consistent with "fair use" is a misuse or not. Universal Music’s claim is that it is not reasonable for the copyright holder to take fair use into consideration before sending a takedown notice. At a first pass, it sounds like the judge agrees… the judge and Universal Music may be correct under the existing law. There isn’t anything in the law that says the copyright holder needs to take into account the user’s defenses. It just says they need to be the legitimate copyright holder (which Universal Music is).
Mike Masnick, Techdirt

MySpace Music to launch in September
MySpace Music will launch in September, according to Chris DeWolfe, the social network’s CEO. MySpace announced in April that it planned to launch a music service that would offer songs from three out of the top four recording companies (EMI has yet to join). MySpace said then that the music site, which will offer free streaming music, unprotected MP3 downloads, ringtones, and merchandise, would roll out over a span of three to four months.
Greg Sandoval, Cnet News

Favtape Creates Mixtapes from Your Pandora and Last.fm Accounts
Favtape is another new mixtape creation site, but its standout feature is its automation process, which creates a mixtape based off songs you’ve listened to on Pandora, or those you’ve favorited on Last.fm. Provide Favtape with your Pandora URL or your Last.fm username, and a mixtape will automatically be created for you with a unique URL that can be accessed anytime.
Kristen Nicole, Mashable
www.futureofmusic.org
Library of Congress: DRM is a problem
Wednesday, July 23, 2008 5:18 PM

Inside the Library of Congress

Last week, the Library of Congress issued a report concerning the problems it is facing as it attempts to digitally preserve creative works. Despite the Library’s noble goals, some archaic provisions of copyright law, digital rights management and the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) are standing in the way of its mission to collect and preserve America’s cultural history.

For instance, the Library of Congress has the authority to copy a work three times, but only in the event that the original work is damaged or the original platform on which the work was created has become obsolete. As Nate Anderson of ArsTechnica points out, obsolescence can be difficult to define, as previous-generation devices like record players are still available for commercial purchase. This rule prevents the Library from taking the steps to preserve music now on vinyl discs onto multiple digital formats.

Even more chilling, there are some cases where the current legal structure would lead to a scenario where proper preservation would be impossible.

Say, for example, the Library of Congress was charged with preserving a musical work, but that work was delivered as a digitally "locked" file. The LOC would only be able to copy it to another format – MP3 for example – when the current technology to play back the DRM-ed file became obsolete (which will happen sooner or later). However, it would still be illegal for the LOC to save the file as an MP3 or other format because the DMCA prevents the circumvention of encryption and other protection schemes. In this example, since a) no means to play the song would exist and b) it would be illegal to transcode it into a different format, the music would be lost forever.

The report offered many recommendations to Congress as to how best change the law to "encourage[s] digital preservation of copyrighted works." Removing the muzzle placed upon digital archiving is essential to the mission of the Library of Congress.

An interesting aside: the LOC report was published under a Creative Commons license, so you shouldn’t have any legal trouble reproducing that.