We are living in an era when “free” is decimating the music industry, but while those who make our music are having the lifeblood sucked from them, others are profiting handsomely, the U2 manager argues.

“Yet for the world’s internet service providers, bloated by years of broadband growth, ‘free music’ has become a multi-billion dollar bonanza,” says McGuinness.

Internet service provider Entanet took exception to his comments and last night responded. After earlier telling Bono to “Stick To Singing“, they are now suggesting that McGuinness should stick to what he knows best – the music.

“Considering Mr. McGuinness proudly informs us he has been debating on this issue for two years, he seems to totally misunderstand the reasons behind broadband customers’ demand for better broadband speeds and equally doesn’t understand the current facilities available on the Internet,” writes Entanet’s head of marketing, Darren Farnden.

Farnden argues that most broadband customers want faster speeds in order to enjoy better performance on legal services such as online gaming, YouTube, iPlayer, iTunes and VoIP, and slams McGuinness for suggesting people just want to pirate more efficiently.

“It is simply naive to suggest that customers’ desire for faster broadband and more bandwidth is driven solely by a desire to cheat music rights holders out of their royalties through illegal file sharing,” said Farnden.

“Furthermore, without legal services such as iTunes music sales would undeniably decrease. Does Mr. McGuinness want to close down this distribution model that has proven to contribute positively to music sales? Talk about cutting your nose off to spite your face!”

McGuinness further provokes ISPs by stating, as if they are somehow responsible for the actions of others, that “their free-music bonanza has got to stop”. This can be achieved, he says, by ISPs entering into commercial partnerships to offer unlimited music via streaming services and “taking proportionate responsible steps” to stop customers sharing unauthorized music.

But ISPs are not the Internet police, they are mere conduits of information, writes Farnden, while questioning why yet again the emphasis is being put on ISPs to solve someone else’s problem.

“It’s about time the music industry took responsibility for its own revenues and embraced the new distribution models available instead of trying to shut them down!” he concludes.

But of course, McGuinness recognizes that ISPs aren’t going to fight someone else’s battle voluntarily and his solution is, predictably for the music industry, the use of lawyers.

“Some things have got to come with the force of legislation.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Unsurprisingly, it began to appear on BitTorrent sites just a few hours ago, well over a week in advance.

In just 10 hours the album has already been downloaded 100,000 times, which is notable for a music album. A few month ago, some of the fans already got a preview of four of the tracks, after a fan recorded them outside Bono’s villa in the south of France.

Unlike those early leaks, the quality full album that leaked today is reportedly of a quality worth listening to. The source of the leak is unknown, but it has to come from someone close to the band as there were no preview copies sent out to the press.

U2 has always taken an anti-piracy stance and wont be pleased to hear that the album is out before schedule. U2 manager Paul McGuiness has been particularly aggressive in his stance against file-sharers and has suggested that people who share copyrighted files should have their connection to the Internet severed. Skip to 2009 and the RIAA and IFPI are indeed pushing for such legislation.

It doesn’t stop there either. In order to prevent their latest album from being pirated, they refused to send out review copies to the press. Instead they organized listening parties where journalists could listen to the album in advance.

These ‘parties’ were of course surrounded by all kinds of security measures – recording devices and even mobile phones were not allowed anywhere near the hearings. Some good that did.

Despite all the effort the album leaked early, and many U2 fans are having a party of their own now. Over 100,000 of them – and counting.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Proving that if media can be seen, heard or touched it can be copied, songs from U2′s forthcoming album have been leaked online. Four tracks from the album, provisionally entitled ‘No Line On The Horizon’, have appeared on the Internet. The mechanism of the release is pretty comical – Bono blasted the tracks from a stereo in his villa in the South of France so loudly, that a passer-by recognized his voice and recorded them.

Four songs have been put online including the title track, the first single from the album ‘Sexy Boots’, ‘Moment of Surrender’ and ‘For Your Love’.

There’s no doubt that these cam-quality recordings will be particularly poor, but a large section of the file-sharing U2 fans won’t care about that. They have something that they’re not supposed to have and Mr McGuiness has had a bit of egg rubbed in his face – which probably holds more value to file-sharers than a pre-release FLAC rip of the entire album….

…which will appear online too of course, probably before the scheduled November release date.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.