This week, “Pirates of the Web: At World’s End”: No doubt about it, file sharing is a dirty rotten shame. Some band had a million downloads but never actually sold a single unit. And the big boys – the RIAA, Hollywood movie studios, etc. – are sobbing all the way to the bank about lost profits, anarchy, and that poor kid with a great song, sitting in his garage with his guitar and amp, unpaid, while ungrateful leeches vamp on his creativity for free. So, you filthy pirates out there, you’d better hurry up and take advantage of open sourcing, file sharing, peer-to-peer networks, and the rest of that “all-you-can-eat, unlimited access to content” – because an Emeryville company, Gracenote, has figured out a way to help copyright holders and other owners of intellectual property e-fingerprint everything you’ll ever want to listen to or watch or read, for the rest of your life, and make you pay. In other words, no more freebies forever. Express Music Editor David Downs crawls deep into the guts of the beast and lays the story out straight.
.You Write Too Long — This Week’s Cover Story Bite-Sized
