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A key part of this was that the major labels, key members of ASCAP, suddenly started "dropping out" of ASCAP in order to do licensing directly. At first we thought this was a sign of how the labels might be realizing that ASCAP was obsolete and out of touch, but it has since become clear that these "removals" were all something of a scam to force Pandora into higher rates.

What happened was that ASCAP and Pandora had first negotiated a higher rate than Pandora had agreed to in the past -- reaching a handshake agreement. However, before that agreement could be finalized, these labels started "withdrawing" from ASCAP in order to negotiate directly. As part of that, both ASCAP and the labels refused to tell Pandora which songs had been withdrawn, meaning that if Pandora accidentally played one of the withdrawn songs (again, without knowing which songs were withdrawn),

Last year, we reported that Amazon was talking to the labels about an on-demand music service, and Recode has essentially confirmed that a dialog is ongoing.

At this point, the novelty of music streaming services has largely worn off, but Amazon's business approach could prove interesting. Just as it does with movies and TV shows, the company would likely include music streaming as part your Amazon Prime subscription. And while all of that content may seem like a lot when you factor in Prime's $79 fee, Amazon has recently said it's considering upping the annual cost by as much as $40. Having both music and video at your fingertips could help make a price hike easier to swallow.

Earlier Edward Snowden leaks had revealed that the NSA created a flawed random number generation system (Dual_EC_DRBG), Dual Elliptic Curve, which RSA used in its Bsafe security tool and now Snowden has revealed that RSA received $10 million from NSA for keeping Encryption Weak. So, anyone who knows the right numbers used in Random number generator program, can decipher the resulting cryptotext easily.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset

the first US file-sharer to take her RIAA-initiated lawsuit all the way to a trial and a verdict back in 2007. Five years, three trials, and one appeal later, she owes $222,000 to the recording industry for sharing songs on the Kazaa file-sharing network, but she doesn't plan to quit fighting.

Thomas-Rasset will follow Joel Tenenbaum, the second US resident to take his file-sharing case that far. Tenenbaum—who reached the Supreme Court first because he had only one jury trial instead of three—tried to convince the justices that they should take his case to stop the music label plan to create, in his lawyer's words, "an urban legend so frightening to children using the Internet, and so frightening for parents and teachers of students using the Internet, that they will somehow reverse the tide of the digital future." The Supremes showed no interest, denying Tenenbaum's petition back in May.

Kim Dotcom is determined to put the major music labels out of business with Megabox. At the same time he promises to give artists full control over their own work and a healthy revenue stream. Today Dotcom released a video on the making of Megabox which unveils some of the service’s features. The video also shows “The Black Keys,” “Rusko,” “Two Fingers” and “Will.i.am” as exclusive artists.

So why would artists join Megabox in the first place? The goal of Megabox is to give the public access to free music and compensate artists through advertising revenue. Megaupload’s founder believes that this “free music” business model has the potential to decrease music piracy while giving artists proper compensation for their work. This revenue comes from the Megakey application that users have to install. Megakey works like an ad blocker, but instead of blocking ads it replaces a small percentage with Mega’s own ads. Those who prefer not to install the app have the option to buy the music instead.

“These new solutions will allow content creators to keep 90% of all earnings and generate significant income from the untapped market of free downloads,” Dotcom said.

The past was, and the future is going to be, much more about performance. In this new world, recordings often function as more as ads for concerts than as money-makers themselves. (And sometimes are bundled with concert tickets, as Madonna's latest album was.) As a result, copying looks a lot less fearsome. A copied ad is just as effective--and maybe much more so--than the original.

Just ask pop singer Colbie Caillat. Caillet's music career began in 2005 when a friend posted several of her home-recorded songs to MySpace. One song, Bubbly, began to get word of mouth among MySpace users, and within a couple of months went viral. Soon Colbie Caillat was the No. 1 unsigned artist on MySpace. Two years after posting Bubbly, Caillet had more than 200,000 MySpace friends, and her songs had been played more than 22 million times. Caillet had built a global fan base while never leaving her Malibu home. In 2007, Universal Records released her debut album, Coco, which peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard charts and reached platinum status.

The problem of piracy in music is, of course, very different from the problem in comedy. Stand-up comics worry most about a rival, not a fan, copying their jokes. Still, the reduction of consumer copying of music via norms may be possible, and will become more imaginable if the music industry experiences ever-greater fragmentation and communication. There is already an interesting example of norms playing a substantial role in controlling copying in music. In the culture of jambands, we see the fans themselves taking action to deter pirates. What are jambands? In a fascinating 2006 paper, legal scholar Mark Schultz studied the unique culture of a group of bands that belong to a musical genre, pioneered by the Grateful Dead, characterized by long-form improvisation, extensive touring, recreational drug use, and dedicated fans. Although acts like Phish, Blues Traveler, and the Dave Mathews Band vary in their styles, they are all recognizably inspired by the progenitors of jam music, the Dead. But the Dead's influence is not only musical. Most jambands adhere to a particular relationship with their fans that also was forged by the Dead.

The Exploitation process relied upon a Java vulnerability (CVE-2013-2460) and after getting dropped into the target computer system, the malware detects the Java version installed on the operating system and based upon it requests the suitable exploit.

Researchers on Thursday discovered a critical remotely exploitable vulnerability in the widely used command-line shell GNU Bourne Again Shell (Bash), dubbed "Shellshock" which affects most of the Linux distributions and servers worldwide, and may already have been exploited in the wild to take over Web servers as part of a botnet that is currently trying to infect other servers as well.