It's been interesting to watch the number of entrepreneurs building Web-based media businesses around the concept of online lockers, an idea that failed in convincing fashion back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This time, though, they're offering something a tad sexier than access to your collection from your PC at work. Ezmo is one example; another is MediaMaster, which is enables people to create Internet radio stations based on their collections. Those stations can then be posted to their Facebook pages.

Now, MediaMaster is pushing the edge a bit futher by giving users free access to their collections from certain kinds of cellphone (specifically, a smartphone running Windows Mobile software or a Treo equipped with Palm's OS). That's a wonderfully disruptive use of the technology, given its potential to undermine all sorts of fee-based mobile music businesses. I mean, how long will it be before every phone has the brains of a smartphone? This, IMHO, is the Achilles heel of mobile-phone apps that try to extract a premium from consumers for the privilege of doing things that they can do for free (or less expensively) on a Web-connected PC. Ultimately, the only sustainable premium may be the price that mobile carriers charge for data service, and even that has dropped considerably over the years.

The X factor here is what MediaMaster may eventually charge for its locker service, which is still in something of an r&d phase. My guess, though, is that some amount of storage and remote access will always be free -- it would hard to compete otherwise -- and the company will make its money off of add-on services and sponsorships.

I've never seen a surcharge of this magnitude before, but maybe some of you folks have. LA Times reader Tom Ogden sent in a copy of a Ticketmaster receipt showing that one $32 seat for a play at UCLA (The Fortune Teller) actually cost $67.40. That's a markup of more than 110%. Here's the breakdown: $12 for a "Facility Fee," $19 for a "Handling Fee," and $4.40 for an "Order Processing fee." The first two fees are clearly more important, because they were capitalized. Anyway, when he saw the total, Ogden said, he decided not to buy.

As Ticketmaster's take-no-prisoners publicist, Larry Solters, has explained to me repeatedly, much of what the company tacks on top of the ticket price goes to entities other than Ticketmaster. Still, the explanation that Solters gives for concert fees -- that the band takes all the gate, so promoters and venues insist on extra charges to make a profit -- wouldn't seem to apply here. Do marionette plays have promoters? Did Erik Sanko demand 100% of the gate? And why would UCLA pile on a $12 facility fee for the Freud Playhouse instead of including that compensation in the ticket price?

One consolation for Ogden is that the ticket could have been more expensive. Had he wanted to print his own ducat, Ticketmaster would have charged an additional $2.50 for that privilege.

U.S. District Court Judge Stephen V. Wilson offered more details this week about the p2p filtering bake-off he wants court-appointed special master to perform. At issue is the best way for StreamCast Networks to block unauthorized downloading with its Morpheus software while preserving the "core noninfringing uses." While the results will apply only to Morpheus, the work could influence other courts as they consider other suits involving large-scale copyright infringements (say, Viacom's against YouTube).

Ezmo CEO Petter Karal e-mailed last night to answer some of the questions I raised in my last post about the site's business model and licensing. As I suspected, the site -- an online music locker that lets users share their collections with a small group of friends -- is banking on a fair-use defense and is not paying royalties. In short, he argues that Ezmo is a new kind of music playing device, virtual instead of plastic. And using it to play one's music to 10 friends or less is akin to bringing one's CDs to a small party. That's a social activity, he reasons, not a commercial distribution or a public performance. His rationale is better articulated than the one I suggested yesterday; whether the labels and music publishers accept it is, of course, another matter. As for me, I still wonder how Ezmo can do on-demand streaming without licenses. But then, I'm not a copyright lawyer.

Karal's actual comments appear after the jump.

Add Ezmo to the list of sites claiming to offer a legal way to share music. The service, based in Norway, is an online music locker similar to Lala.com, minus the (questionable) business model. In fact, there's no apparent business model at all, at least not yet. And unless Ezmo followed Lala's lead on the licensing front, its creators may soon find themselves spending their start-up cash on attorney fees.

Judging by their top executives' remarks, neither NBC Universal nor Viacom is much of a fan of YouTube. Viacom is still embroiled in a billion-dollar copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube, and NBC Universal recently joined its media rival in demanding that YouTube remove clips from its television shows. But the two conglomerates appear to be taking subtly different approaches to competing with YouTube for the online video audience. Although both seem wedded to the dubious notion that people will go out of their way online for content they like, at least Viacom is making the trip shorter.

I guess this is the entertainment industry's vision of the future: ISPs that interdict file-sharing. Bravo to the AP's Peter Svensson for a troubling bit of investigation that produced two pieces today, one on Comcast's practice of sending bogus reset messages to p2p users in the act of uploading, and a sidebar suggesting how Comcast was doing it.

The twisting path of MGM vs. Grokster (the entertainment industry's lawsuit against the companies behind the Grokster, Kazaa and Morpheus file-sharing programs) took another fascinating turn today. As only fanatical followers of this case may know, two of the three sets of defendants -- the companies connected to Grokster and Kazaa -- settled with the movie studios, record companies and music publishers not long after the Supreme Court ruled that p2p software companies could be held liable for inducing infringement. But StreamCast Networks, which distributes Morpheus, couldn't strike a deal with the labels and studios, so it fell to U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson to apply the justices' opinion to that portion of the case. He did so a year ago, finding that StreamCast was, in fact, liable. But he did not immediately grant the plaintiffs' request for a permanent injunction, wondering aloud at a hearing how to craft an injunction that did not block non-infringing uses of Morpheus. Today, Wilson finally granted the injunction (Download the pdf here), but with caveats that will keep StreamCast in the game at least temporarily.

Months after promising to do so, Google has rolled out a recognition system for YouTube that can help copyright owners block unauthorized uploads of their work. Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge weighed in with an early criticism, noting that such systems have trouble distinguishing fair uses from infringements. So do some copyright holders, heh heh heh.

I have a column on latimes.com today discussing a couple of different business models that companies such as Grooveshark, Qtrax and Mashboxx (remember them?) are trying to bring to file-sharing. They're divided into two basic camps: one tries to persuade p2p users to pay for songs, and the other tries to persuade advertisers to pay for access to a law-abiding p2p audience. The latter is obviously the bigger departure from the status quo ante Napster. After all, the major record companies once fretted that low-cost online approaches would devalue music and crater sales. Now they're signing licensing deals with ventures like Qtrax that let people play songs on demand for free.

Sorry, can't help myself: Gigwise.com, a UK music webzine, is reporting that Radiohead has sold 1.2 million copies of "In Rainbows" in a little more than a week of preorders and live online sales. The number comes from the familiar "source close to the band," so try not to crack your teeth on the salt. After all, Radiohead's last two studio LPs have yet to go platinum (i.e., sell 1 million copies). Still, Gigwise's number is conceivable -- the album's really good, it's been four years since Radiohead's last disc, and you can't beat the price. As noted in yesterday's sour-grapes Radiohead post, a third of the 3,000 buyers surveyed by the Times of London paid the minimum of 1 pence (2 cents, plus an 80-cent processing charge), but the average amount was 4 pounds -- a little more than $8.

Maybe Radiohead isn't out to revolutionize the music business after all.
The band made headlines earlier this month by putting its new album, "In Rainbows," up for sale on its website in two versions: an $82 box set due in December, and a name-your-price download due Wednesday. Many observers, myself included, saw this as a bracing expression of faith by Radiohead in its fans' willingness to pay for music (albeit at no real risk to its members' ability to put food on their tables, given their ability to sell out arena-sized concert venues). But this may have been the wrong conclusion. About 12 hours before the downloadable "In Rainbows" became available, the band sent an e-mail to those who pre-ordered it, letting them know the files would be 160 Kbps MP3s. That's not CD quality, and fans quickly cried foul.

The Associated Press reports that the jury in Capitol v Thomas (formerly Virgin v Thomas) found Jammie Thomas liable today for willfully infringing 24 copyrighted songs and assessed damages of $9,250 per track -- well above the $750 minimum, but nowhere near the $150,000 maximum, either. The grand total is a stunning $222,000.

Many years have passed since my seven-year stint as a reporter in Washington, D.C., so I'm no longer fascinated by all things inside the Beltway. Still, I have a soft spot for bold lobbying, which is why I've enjoyed watching the National Assn. of Broadcasters so much this year. It's been a tough slog for the broadcasters, with fights over decency, webcasting fees, HDTV carriage on cable systems, the XM-Sirius merger and local ownership restrictions, among other issues. And yet, in spite of all the demands on its time, the NAB keeps cranking out nuggets of lobbying gold. The latest example is the belt-grazing blow it threw at the major record companies yesterday in response to their push for more royalties from radio stations.

The camera's rapid shift from film to microchips has revolutionized the way people take, store and share photographs, making these tasks far easier in digital than they were in analog. One bit of drudgery that hasn't been eliminated, though, is the time-consuming task of labeling photos. Although your computer can automatically sort photos by date and even by common faces or imagery, it can't tell where the photo was taken, who's in it or what it represents. Providing that data makes the photos more valuable and interesting, yet it can be a lot of work. That's where rmbr.com hopes its funware will make a difference.

I wrote a column for latimes.com about a milestone reached today in the RIAA's litigation campaign against file-sharers, which recently entered its fifth year: of the 30,000 people sued or threatened with a lawsuit, one of these cases will actually go to trial. The lucky(?!?) defendant is Jammie Thomas of Brainerd, Minnesota, who's being sued by six record labels and/or label groups.