Free for a Fee

This has been quite the week for the web. First we had the whole Facebook fiasco (which seems to have motivated Facebook to do the right thing and revert back the terms of service, but still leaves unanswered questions about how binding terms of service are in these sorts of circumstances), then our attentions turned to the Pirate Bay trial – where the old “making available” issue has come up again, this time in an international law context – and yesterday TechCrunch dropped this bombshell:

That leaked U2 album is causing all sorts of trouble. The unreleased album, which is due out on March 3, found its way onto BitTorrent and was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. That, apparently, sent music industry lawyers over at the Recording Industry Association of America into a fit. As a result, word is going around that the RIAA asked social music service Last.fm for data about its user’s listening habits to find people with unreleased tracks on their computers. And Last.fm, which is owned by CBS, actually handed the data over to the RIAA. According to a tip we received:

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