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Back in June, we reported on the http://stereophile.com/news/060605BBC/"> BBC's "The Beethoven Experience", described as "a bold experiment in whether or not free music stimulates legitimate music sales or suppresses them." Last week, The Independent published a terse 200-word article, reporting that the Beeb had downloaded one million files during the Experience, and stating "The initiative has infuriated the bosses of leading classical record companies, who argue the offer undermines the value of music and that any further offers would be unfair competition."

On July 4, a Brazilian website apparently posted some tools that allowed users of InterVideo's">http://www.intervideo.com/jsp/Home.jsp">InterVideo's WinDVD to pull copy-protected data off DVD-Audio discs and store it on the user's hard drive rather than simply routing it to a sound card. According to Afterdawnhttp://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/6597.cfm">Afterdawn;, the tools didn't "do the decryption themselves, [but] instead patched WinDVD to output the decrypted stream to disk instead of the sound card."

The music industry has been telling us for years that peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing is a bad thing. But a New York company has decided the record labels had it wrong and that it merely needed to harness P2P's power.