UPDATE: Bush Administration Voices Strong Opposition to Senate-Approved Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act Bill (And Totally Ruins My Fake Contest)

By Heidi Vanderslice on Sep 30 2008

Yes, my protest sign is a coffee table, and it also didn't make it into the special Under the Radar Magazine's Summer Protest Issue, but who's counting? (Next year, I will spend more time on my tree disguise.) Artists like The Flaming Lips, Spoon, Built to Spill, Sharon Jones, Shout Out Louds, Les Savy Fav, R.E.M., Chuck D, Talib Kweli, and oh so many more donated their art skills and pretty faces to make up a photographic representation of their various protestations. From the plight of polar bears to paper ballots to health care to the right to live in Woody Guthrie's America, these artists ran the gamut of righteous grievances, and you can check out photos and clips from the issue here.

As if that wasn't dece enough, many of these artists donated their signs to be auctioned off for charity, specifically War Child, an organization working to help children in war-torn areas around the world, which recently announced a compilation benefit CD (TMT News). You can check out the signs up for grabs here, and remember, the auctions begin today!

By Nobodaddy on Sep 30 2008

The music market took an extra large hit this week on Wal-Street, when the value of DRM songs from Wal-Mart began to plummet at a rate not matched since the great Wax Recording Crash when vinyl came along. After it was recently uncovered by economic experts that Wal-mart, who began offering DRM MP3s in August 2007, had been irresponsibly offering customers cheap DRM music that it could not support after the company switched to DRM-free music this past February, music consumers fell into a panic and many analysts began to paint a doomsday picture of the future of digital music.

With little time to spare before the impending crash, frazzled Wal-Mart publicists addressed the panic-stricken nation on the internet, highlighting, in a nutshell, the details of a highly controversial DRM music bailout plan:

As the final stage of our transition to a full DRM-free MP3 download store, Walmart will be shutting down our digital rights management system that supports protected songs and albums purchased from our site. If you have purchased protected WMA music files from our site prior to Feb 2008, we strongly recommend that you back up your songs by burning them to a recordable audio CD. By backing up your songs, you will be able to access them from any personal computer. This change does not impact songs or albums purchased after Feb 2008, as those are DRM-free.

While naysayers of the DRM bailout argue fiercely about "what bullshit" it is to have to burn physical copies of all of their DRM digital music after it has already been bought and paid-for, proponents of Wal-mart's daring and unconventional bailout procedure counter with an insistence that sacrifices must be made if our global music economy hopes to recover from the crippling international stigma of DRM.

"DRM-free digital music is the future of digital downloads," said one particularly attractive proponent who later accompanied this reporter to dinner. "I know that burning CDs to back up all of your old music from Wal-mart is a sacrifice for many, but think about the alternative: without compliance, this music will be lost forever, and the face of digital stores will be permanently and irrevocably damaged on the world stage." My, what pretty words! Isn’t she great!?