Crimes that have crippled the music industry are now be taken serious by authories. Hundreds of illegal sites could be threatened with the ‘Global antipiracy treaty’ in works.

Global counterfeiting and piracy steal billions of dollars from workers, artists and entrepreneurs and the U.S. Government plans to  strengthen the legal framework of intellectual property rights enforcement.

Now that the government has finally acknowledged this is a serious problem, the next step is to combat this global problem. Countries taking part in the negotiations include Canada, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Switzerland and the 27 member states of the European Union.

The new treaty is intended to complement the existing Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual-Property Rights — the so-called TRIPS agreement established by the World Trade Organization.

“It will not involve any changes to the TRIPS agreement,” the USTR said. “Rather, the goal is to set a new, higher benchmark for enforcement that countries can join on a voluntary basis.”

The Bottom Line: This is good news for anyone who is in the copyright industry. They may finally see the silver lining along the edge of the cloud.

Coheed & Cambria new album, No World for Tomorrow, hit the streets today.

Meese has signed to Atlantic Records, you can find them in KOARs New Music column.

The President of CD Baby talks about the failed relationship with SnoCap. Its a must read. CD Baby made a total of $1080 in the course of 8 months.

My Getaway will be performing 10/30 in NYC at the ANNEX at 7pm. The central Florida based pop punk band is the BMI Artist of the month for October. The band recorded with producer Marc McClusky (Powerspace, Hit The Lights, Ludo).

Comcast blocks some internet traffic: Comcast actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally. If widely applied by other ISPs, the technology Comcast is using would be a crippling blow to the BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella file-sharing networks. Could this be the beginning of the end of file sharing?

British and Dutch police have shut down Oink the world’s biggest site of pirated pre-release albums. OiNK distributed albums weeks ahead of their official release date and had an estimated membership of 180,000.

This membership model was as creepy as the website name oink. People were only invited to become members if they could prove they had music to offer and had to keep posting tracks to maintain their membership.

Authorities found the site was operated by a 24-year-old man who lived near Middlesbrough in north-east England. He was arrested Tuesday. The site’s servers, based in Amsterdam which is the home of prostitution and drugs, were seized in raids last week.

Jeremy Banks, head of the IFPI’s Internet anti-piracy unit said “This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure. This was a worldwide network that got hold of music they did not own the rights to and posted it online.” (Reuters)

Ticket Prices skyrocketing: Do you remember when you called Ticketmaster  hoping to get 7 tickets to you’re favorite concert? I wanted to purchase tickets for all of my friends to share the experience, hoping they would pay me back. I remember being up in arms when ticketmaster told me it was a 4 ticket maximum. Those days are done. Brokers are now sneaking around security measures and using AUTOMATED BOTS to purchase thousands tickets and selling them for insane prices. Tickets for Hannah Montana cost $36.00 at face-value and scalpers offered top seats for as high as $4,000. What is even more ridiculous is that the authorities are doing next to nothing to prevent this illegal trade. The technological trend is on a downward spiral, meaning its causing more harm than good.

CMJ 2007: KOAR always enjoys thrusting our ADD into high gear by hopping from club to club and party to party during the fall CMJ music conference. We get to catch 20 seconds of hundreds of bands. In most cases, 20 seconds is enough. I believe this quote from Idolator sums it up: 75% of the bands we saw this week couldn’t really write a song with a million-dollar recording contract to their heads–hardly a big surprise in the world of “indie” music–but some bands pulled off the atmospheric shtick better than others…..

Houston, TX based alternative rock band Thee Armada have signed to Foundation Records which is distributed by Universal. Their new record will be produced by Brian McTernan (Circa Survive, Thrice) and mixed by David Bendeth (Paramore). Legal rep is Ben McLane.

Free Can’t Satisfy the Thief: According to calculations by Los Angeles company Big Champagne, The new Radiohead album is being downloaded at a higher rate illegally than legally. On the day of the album’s “release,” 240,000 users illegally downloaded the album, and the following days averaged 100,000 more per, ultimately resulting in over 500,000 illegal downloads of a possibly free legal download. (RollingStone)

If you want to become a worldwide pop phenomenon then check out the column “How the internet can make you a pop star for almost nothing“.

Tool frontman Maynard Talks Business: “We’re kind of in a new era of music, and this is the perfect project to embrace that. Between MySpace and YouTube and Trig.com and iTunes, whatever’s coming is going to be really interesting,” Keenan said. “It’s not the dog-and-pony show of ‘Here’s the band, here’s the four guys, here’s them going out on their first tour.’ All that stuff goes along with the old way of thinking.” “In a way, I’m trying to discover…a way to make music and survive without it being this capitalist monster trying to take over the world and sell three million units.” (full article)

The RIAA Targets Universities: The ninth wave of pre-litigation letters has been sent by the RIAA to administrators at 19 universities. The effort is for those using university networks to illegally share music to settle claims before they are named in a lawsuit. According to market research firm NPD Group, college students alone accounted for more than 1.3 billion illegal music downloads in 2006. (Billboard)