The National Consumers League is out with the results of a new study conducted by Opinion Research showing that 90% of consumers believe they should be able to back up their DVDs to a hard drive or copy them to a portable device, and they'd be willing to pay about $61 for a piece of software that helped them back up their collections. Sounds like a good business opportunity for someone like a RealNetworks...oh wait.

New York - For the past year, Jim Griffin has advised Warner Music Group on digital distribution and licensing models with the goal of bringing an end to the litigation that has put a wedge between the major labels and their customers and replacing it with a regular flow of income for right holders. The project known as Choruss, which is being incubated at Warner and is planned to be rolled out as a non-profit with Griffin at the helm, proposes to build a small music-royalty fee into university tuition payments received from students, and, if successful, could be expanded to make ISPs the collector of the fees. For those of you who were not able to attend DMW's Digital Music Forum East this past week, here is a complete transcript of his interesting keynote presentation:

As Digital Media Wire readers ready themselves for the highly anticipated Digital Music Forum East, here’s an overview of the annual MIDEM music conference that just concluded in Cannes, France. The annual music industry happening, MIDEM, is a must attend event for global players in the music business.  This year’s MIDEM attendees were welcomed by moody skies over Cannes, which were symbolic of the state of the industry overall.  Along La Croisette, rain pelted delegates darting from the Palais de Festivals to the deal making hubs of the Majestic and Carlton hotel bars.  

Busy week coming up for Google's lawyers. On Tuesday, Google's senior legal office Dave Drummond will be on Capitol Hill to answer questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee on his company's proposed search ad partnership with Yahoo. Although Congressional hearings are mostly for tourists, Drummond will need to be careful in answering the committee's questions as the deal is also under investigation by the Department of Justice, which probably isn't just doing it for show and will likely regard anything Drummond says as part of the record. Drummond will be joined at the witness table by Yahoo general counsel Michael Callahan and his counterpart at Microsoft, Brad Smith.

The appeals of last year's Copyright Royalty Board decision on the royalties paid for the use of sound recordings by Internet radio stations continue on, and one recent filing raises interesting questions of whether or not the CRB was properly appointed. Last week, the Department of Justice, which represents the CRB in defending its decision in the Court of Appeals, filed its brief in opposition to the briefs of the webcasters, which we summarized here. The DOJ brief essentially argued that the webcasters' briefs were insufficient to satisfy the requirement for a successful appeal - that the CRB decision was arbitrary and capricious or otherwise contrary to law.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about the Ala Carting of Video on the Net. The premise was very simple. To paraphrase an old saying, "If you give away the milk for free, there is no need to buy the cow". If you give away your best stuff on an ala carte basis, then the value of everything that depended on that "stuff" declines. Some folks agreed, others searched for ways to disagree. Many in their responses seemed to think that because I own HDNet that I am biased and my judgement is clouded. In fact, its the exact opposite.