Ares Connect

Yahoo! music will close the doors on its music-download store on September 30, taking its DRM keys with it. This means that any music downloads bought from Yahoo! won’t be able to be played on any other computer than the one they were downloaded to.

Yahoo! has come up with the odd solution of burning the files to CD and then ripping them back onto your computer.

This is certainly a roundabout way of getting your value for money on music downloads bought from Yahoo! It’s similar to when Microsoft rolled out its Zune and shut down its own store for music downloads.

This is a clear indication of how sucky DRM music is. Hopefully DRM will soon be a thing of the past as it is nothing but a headache for the end user. For all the time and money spent creating DRM files, it appears to have largely been a waste of resources.

One filesharing user being sued by the RIAA has turned the system on its head by admitting to the charges presented, only to then challenge those very same laws that have led to her being charged.

Denise Barker stands accused of sharing the unholy sum of eight songs on filesharing network Kazaa. If found guilty, she could be fined up to $1.2 million. We hope they are good songs to warrant such a high price tag.

Denise took the huge risk of not settling out of court, admitting to the charges and then standing up against those charges and the excessive fine she may be slapped with.

Her lawyer is arguing that each track is worth about $3.50 and therefore Denise should only face a fine of $252 going by the 9-to-1 rule. If this all stands up in court, it could go some way to outlining the cost of fines in the future. People typically settle out of court for a few thousand dollars. If they can go to court and only be fined a few hundred, it makes it a whole different ball game.

More filesharing news related to the Dark Knight today. Warner Bros somehow managed to keep the Dark Knight off filesharing networks for 38 hours after the movie’s release. Though that may not seem like a huge amount of time, Warner Bros says it was enough to protect ticket sales on the first week of the movie’s launch.

With the movie doing so well over its opening weekend, you have to think there’s some truth to this. By delaying the movie being leaked onto filesharing networks, Warner Bros stopped bootleggers from logging on to make dodgy copies of the movie to sell around the world.

Those 38 hours were the result of a six-month anti-piracy plan with the sole aim of keeping the movie off of filesharing networks. This plan included keeping the reel from movie theaters until the last minute. The Dark Knight looks set to break the $300 million mark soon.

Following on from Virgin teaming up with the BPI to bother its subscribers with letters warning them for using filesharing services to get illegal music downloads, six more ISPs have joined up with the UK government and will send 1,000 letter a week to filesharing subscribers.

The ISPs will also help to develop and promote legal music downloads. There’s no word on exactly what these letters will say and what implications receiving one might have.

It may be that this is the first step towards the three-strikes-and-your-out approach, which would see repeated filesharing violators cut off from the Internet after a third offense.

Virgin and BT have already begun threatening to cut users off from the Net, but ISPs aren’t known for being fond of this resource- and fund-consuming approach. Regardless, the UK’s ISPs are all set to begin tackling the issue of filesharing in accordance with the government’s vision.

If nothing else, this is clearly a step at educating the general public, but is it too little to late?

Anyone heard of BuckCherry? We certainly haven’t. Despite having a really rubbish name for a band, BuckCherry are apparently quite popular, so much so a track from their latest album recently leaked onto BitTorrent.

That’s one track, not even the whole album. BuckCherry are so distraught that one of their tracks has been released to millions of people that they’ve issued a press release through their record company. The track “Too Drunk…” from their forthcoming album Black Butterfly was leaked before its September release.

This would normally be a great thing for an unknown band such as BlackBerry, or whatever they’re called. The press release said, “Honestly, we hate it when this s*** happens, because we want our FANS to have any new songs first.”

Nice use of caps there. So, ChuckCheesy think that their fans don’t use BitTorrent and that they actually have fans in the first place. Way to go, guys. We’ll be sure not to buy your album now. Could this all be a ploy to get people to download the song? Maybe. It hasn’t worked though. It’s put us off even listening to the band.

You’d think that finding a free Ares download would be a simple task.

On the face of it, it is. You just type in ‘free Ares download’ into your favorite search engine and hey Presto! several million pages of results to wade through. Even when you do get into the subject you may well find that the sheer number of free Ares download versions available is more than enough to overwhelm.

It is in this situation where you need some kind of advice on the free Ares download that you’re going to finally go for. It is in this situation that a site like aresvista.com can be a real life saver.

aresvista.com has at its core a wonderful review of most of the big names in the world of the free Ares download. It reviews these pieces of software with passion, élan and verve. Once you’ve been to the site you will be in no doubt as to which free Ares download is the best and which is the worse. The other information on the site includes news on the world of music sharing and filesharing in general. A great read whether you need help or just intellectual simulation.

While most of us think that using Limewire can’t get people into trouble, be warned, after Kanawha County Metro 911 was arrested thanks to some nifty police work using Limewire. The sicko, James Curtis Sorgman, has been accused of possessing indecent images of children, including his own daughter.

The offending material was located on his computer using Limewire. A police team was able to find an image and download it using the filesharing service. They were then able to trace the IP of the user and move in to arrest Sorgman.

While most of us are not criminals on the same level as Sorgman, it’s clear that there are a lot of bad people using filesharing services and giving other filesharing users a bad name. The Limewire community should not have to put up with users like this. You have to wonder how many other sickos there are sharing files over Limewire.

Making the right choice when it comes to choosing a free Ares download is sometimes a little confusing. Many review sites are biased towards one version or another, and with so man different free Ares download versions it is easy to see why people would make the wrong decision.

Fortunately for me I have second hand experience with some of the less reputable types of free Ares download. Ares Destiny was somehow loaded on my home computer (the Kids, I guess) and I was the proud owner of not only a sub-standard piece of filesharing software, but also of Dealio, the world-renowned adware server that infects your computer then is a complete ass to get off. I had to format my computer in the end. If you’re looking for a free Ares download then try at all costs to avoid Ares Destiny. Ugh.

Anyway, back to the topic: me choosing a free Ares download.

I got a lot of help in choosing for a certain website called aresvista.com. The site sets out most of the most popular free Ares downloads available today and tells us just what they think of them, good or bad. It’s this kind of unbiased review that can really help in a difficult decision like this.

So the Dark Knight has been in movie theaters for a few days now. In the midst of movie companies, as well as record labels, complaining about filesharing destroying the industry, the new Batman movie earned a reported $155.3 million in its first weekend.

Tight security of the movie meant that only one cam version surfaced on filesharing networks – and it wasn’t a very good version at that. What this proves is that filesharing is not killing the movie industry. People will still pay for stuff if it’s good.

The problem comes with the bar being raised so high. People have access to every movie and every album ever released and so they are becoming increasingly picky about what they pay for. It takes a blockbuster smash such as Batman to motivate people to go to the cinema.

With the advent of the Internet, people just don’t bother to watch bad movies or listen to bad music and they certainly won’t pay to do so.

BskyB in the UK recently signed a major deal with Universal Music to launch a new music service. Sky, one of the fastest-growing ISPs in the UK, is one of the first ISPs to really try and make a go of making money from music downloads.

The new deal gives Sky full access to Universal’s back catalog, which is no small archive. Sky has got quite a deal out of the music giant, with the two companies joining together to bring something new in the form of a subscription-based music service that comes with a set number of DRM-free downloads.

It sounds very cool, right? It will be interesting to see how this pans out. The other three of the Big 4 have yet to jump on board, but this is a bold move by an ISP.

There is still no word on whether Universal will send letter to Sky subscribers to “educate” them about why filesharing is a bad way to get free music downloads, as Virgin recently started doing.

The price and launch date for the new service have yet to be revealed.