Music giant EMI says it’s looking at how to build a business model around file swapping, or peer to peer networks – the ones which, until now, the music industry as a whole around the world has decided are the personification of the devil. You’ll recall their general tactic is to threaten teenagers with fines and jail.

“We want to learn how to embrace P2P,” said Ted Cohen, EMI’s senior vice president for digital development and distribution. He believes it will take a year for the tide to change.”

EMI is set to make its music available via Wippit, a UK based peer to peer music sharing network, which until now has only had access to small independent labels’ music.

“For about $50 a year, subscribers can download any of Wippit’s tunes using P2P and save them in as many places they like — an idea that makes many big recording companies nervous. Other services limit copying. “

Google is busy firing lawyer letters off at the owner of a new web site www.booble.com. Have a look and you’ll quickly realise why the Googlemeisters are unhappy. Booble is an adult search engine – designed as a parody of Google. Except Google doesn’t agree it’s a parody and is claiming all manner of trade mark breaches.

Suffice it to say, all the resulting press coverage has led to a massive surge of traffic to Booble – no doubt all part of the plan.

Bill Gates famously predicted a few weeks ago Microsoft would eliminate spam within 2 years. One strategy was for the sender of an email to have to pay a small ‘bond’ to the recipient each time an email was sent. If the emails was legitimate, the recipient would refund the bond.

Now the OECD has decided they don’t share Bill’s vision. A new OECD report says “spam is dangerous, expensive and growing on an epidemic scale that threatens confidence in the internet and e-commerce”.

What might be suprising is the assertion:

“One anti-spam company, Spamhaus, says that only about 180 known individuals, working in “spam gangs”, are behind all spam received in Europe and the United States. “

With all the billions of babies and computers on the planet it’s a wonder no-one has done this before. A couple in the US has named their baby son ‘Jon Blake Cusack 2.0’. Dad is a computer programmer engineer.

Kazaa’s owner Sharman Networks has won the right to sue the music industry for copyright infringement.

“Sharman, targeted by studios and record companies because its software is used to trade music and video files, has sought to turn the tables on the industry, accusing it of misusing Kazaa software to invade users’ privacy and send corrupt files and threatening messages.”

You gotta try this one. It’s Music Plasma – a visual musical map. Type in the name of an artist, then explore music genres visually on the screen while listening to snatches of tracks.

Something I hadn’t quite twigged about Telstra BigPond’s new music download service was that it can’t be accessed by Macs. An earlier entry in my Blog noted Telstra’s claim their service was unique, I think I posited the uniqueness was probably that it couldn’t be used with iPods, the besy selling, most popular portable music player in the world. iPods of course are produced by Apple.

BigPond decided to go with a proprietary format from Windows.

BigPond’s exclusive use of a proprietary format also means that an estimated 15 per cent of potential buyers cannot even browse the site because they use Apple Macs.

That estimate is open to debate, but most PCs in Australia and worldwide, are in offices where bosses generally prefer the help not to download music all day, and Mac users are keener users of cyberspace than PC owners.

eBooks – electronic copies of what otherwise would be paper-based publications – have been pretty quiet of late, after an initial burst of enthusiasm a couple of years ago. At least one retailer, Barnes and Noble in the US, stopped selling eBooks last year.

But eBooks were worth $US10 million last year, a drop in the ocean of course compared to the offline busines, but it’s gradually growing. Pundits are saying that it just needs a good eBook reader to come on the market, and sales will take off. Pretty much the same as iPod did for music downloads.

“Unlike music, the book business’s core demographic is older and female and not drawn to piracy. But the fear of “Napsterisation” has led to rather stringent DRM measures in e- publishing. Rogaty suggests things are beginning to settle down, with companies recognising that the right to use ebooks in certain ways is important to consumers.

“Another thing we need is a really good retail experience,” he adds. “What Apple has done with the iPod, the iTunes software and the iTunes store is amazingly good. We need an equivalent in the ebook industry.”

Apparently it’s official, the new MyDoom virus is the worst ever, accounting for 1 in 12 emails on the Net at the moment. Which would explain why some mail servers seem to have ground to a halt around the place, at least when I’m trying to send an email to someone there.

What many people might not realise is the virus is also something of a political statement. As well as distributing itself willy nilly, it is programmed to take over an infected computer to launch denial of service attacks on US company SCO Group. The suggesting is this is all linked to something of a storm SCO kicked up last year regarding the open source Linux Software. SCO has been ascerting it owns copyright on some parts of the software. This could be something of an inconvenience for a piece of software that is supposed to be free and unemcumbered by copyright. And which is used, by some estimates, on 70% of the world’s web servers.

There are many people who dispute SCO’s claim, but with the stakes this high, one can see why SCO might give the tyres a kick and try its luck. Reminds me of the company which claimed it had a patent on the hyperlink, and filed a courtcase wanting a royalty from ISPs everytime someone clicked a link on a web site.

As you bash out the latest opus, or drop a line to your favourite newsgroup, spare a thought for some internet users in China. Amnesty is currently calling for the release of 54 people jailed in China for expressing opinions on the Internet.

“Prisoners included people who signed online petitions for government reform, published non-official news about SARS, communicated with dissident groups overseas, or called for a review of Beijing’s bloody 1989 crackdown on demonstrators in Tiananmen Square”

The Net provides the ultimate in democratic voices. Essentially anyone can say anything anytime and the whole world can hear. Unfortunately some government’s take a dim view of such freedom, and lock you up.

China has, I think, pretty much the most stringent controls on the Internet of any country, including hiring the major US network hardware providers like Cisco to install equipment which can monitor Chinese net traffic. Of course, if Cisco, a dominant provider of the network routers and equipment which drives the internet world wide, were to undertake such a contract in the West there would be an outcry. But capitalism is clearly happy to assist communists monitor, and thus supress, a population.

There’s good summary from a year or two ago about big US technology companies working for the Chinese government here.