We all watched with awe as the Olympic Games in Beijing began with one of the most incredible opening ceremonies for any event — ever. While about two billion people tuned in to watch the opening ceremony, there were a few people who missed it or perhaps wanted to watch it again.

It didn’t take long for the opening ceremony to find its way onto filesharing networks such as the Pirate Bay. This has severely pissed of the The International Olympic Committee, who have ordered the filesharing service to remove the offending content. About one million copies of the ceremony have been made available through filesharing, which apparently harms “the interest of IOC and its licensees”.

The IOC has yet to hear a response from the Pirate Bay and so it has now asked the Swedish government to help with the matter. Who knows where this filesharing saga may end up.

Limewire remains one of the most popular services for people to get their hands on free music downloads. For a long time, the filesharing service has been part of the staple diet of most people’s Internet surfing habits. Want a song? Use Limewire. After a movie? Use Limewire.

Despite the problems and controversies surrounding filesharing, Limewire just won’t go away, no matter how hard the RIAA tries. The ever-developing list of functions on Limewire bears testimony to just how great the software is.

For a long, Limewire was only for PCs, but all that changed as Limewire rolled out Limewire for Macs. Mac users now have even more to brag about as they have access to a decent filesharing service that they can use to get music downloads.

Reviews of the filesharing service for Macs have been largely positive. The current version of Limewire for Macs is 4.18.3. The latest Limewire version adds a few tweaks to the program to make it even better.

eMusic is one of the most reliable websites out there for getting your hands on independent music. The website of eMusic is currently being given a major facelift to make it even better. eMusic will throw in a bunch of Web 2.0 features to offer even more music content that before.

This looks like a bold move for a music website, but it also looks like a smart one, especially considering the popularity of social media websites. eMusic will now import content from FlickR, Wikipedia and Youtube when users browse information about certain artists.

There will also be links for users to share content with friends over social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. With filesharing and BitTorrent so popular along with all these new social websites, eMusic looks to be onto a winner.

While music websites such as iTunes and Amazon stick to tried and tested formulas, eMusic looks to breaking the mould somewhat. This is surely the future for all music websites.

Ellen Saylor could be your grandma. She’s a regular lady. Nothing out of the ordinary. All that changed when she was sent a letter by the folks at the Recording Industry Association of America claiming that she has downloaded 400 songs from the Internet.

Even though she barely knows how to use a computer, Ellen somehow managed to illegally download a bunch of songs. Ellen is now due in court and, if found guilty, she faces a fine of up to $750 per song.

Since 2003, the RIAA has filed about 30,000 against people accused of getting music downloads illegally. Among these 30,000 are students, single parents and very old people such as Ellen.

Jammie Thomas was last year ordered to pay $222,000 for illegal music downloads shared over the filesharing network Kazaa. Ellen faces a fine of $300,000. Who knows, maybe she is guilty and she has been downloading the Frank Sinatra back catalog, but this whole business of suing people for illegal music downloads is becoming farcical.

We’ve been saying for a long time how the solution to the standoff between filesharing advocates and the music industry would be a legal filesharing website. Well, it looks like just such a service could be launched in the UK soon.

There have been some serious talks going on between records labels and ISPs in the UK in an attempt to come up with a legal filesharing service by the end of 2009. South Korea was the first country to offer legal filesharing and it would be great if Britain were to follow suit.

The legal filesharing service would likely work on some kind of subscription-based setup. There’s no information about how much this would cost or how the system would work, but this is exciting news for people around the world because it could trigger similar initiatives in more countries.

Just imagine if students in the US had access to legal filesharing. The possibilities are endless.

It’s official: Australians are not as behind the times as we first thought. In fact, Aussies will apparently spend $100 million (that’s Aussie dollars) on legal music downloads in the next year, with the trend expected to continue over the next five years.

Researchers have predicted that Australia will see exponential growth in the market of legal music downloads. And there was us thinking that Australians were nothing but barbecues and kangaroos. Hurray for progress.

Legal music downloads account for about 20% of all music sales in Australia and this figure is predicted to rise to 50% in the next five years.

It hasn’t always been such plain sailing, however, as in 2004, Australian spent just $100,000 on legal music downloads.

Coincidentally, Apple, which loves to brag about sales of music downloads, has launched its first Aussie retail store, on George Street in Sydney.

A survey on youth music habits conducted by British Music Rights found that most youngsters surveyed use illegal means to get free music downloads. Interestingly, the respondents were adamant that they love music and that many of them would be interested in paying for a legal filesharing service. See: it’s not all doom and gloom with today’s youth.

The survey of 14-to-24-year-olds gives an interesting insight into the minds of a generation of music lovers that record labels are seemingly at odds with at the moment. Will anyone listen and create a legal filesharing service that will attract this demographic of people? If we had the time and connections to the music industry we’d set up just such a service for teens.

Subscription-based filesharing models seem to be the way to go in order to appease all parties. Illegal filesharing will, of course, still go on, but perhaps it won’t be such an issue if there are more legal services for people to choose from.

Kids aren’t totally immoral, as the music industry often forgets.

It was recently reported that six users of the now defunct filesharing service OiNK were arrested in the UK. A lot of media attention has been given to OiNK recently. OiNK was a filesharing service that was officially busted on October 23 last year. OiNK was revered for its comprehensive filesharing networks.

OiNK was one of the top places to find free music downloads for millions of Internet users. The site was incredibly useful, with a lot of high-quality music available. The problem with OiNK was that, as with other similar filesharing networks, the material being shared was copyrighted.

The owners of OiNK argued that they did not host any of the copyrighted material and so they were not in violation of any laws. However, the police had other ideas, and the site was shut down and all logs were seized, which gave police access to all OiNK users.

Six of those users were recently arrested, and there may be more to follow.

OiNK was a sad loss for the filesharing community.

Radiohead’s back catalogue will soon be available through iTunes. This is big news, apparently, but we’re not really bothered because we own all the albums from their original releases. Gloating over. This is great news for Radiohead fans around the world.

EMI has now permitted iTunes to offer the songs from the six Radiohead albums released on the label. The legal music downloads should satisfy people who only discovered Radiohead after they offered their last album for free music download.

The Radiohead songs will be available as individual music downloads or as full albums. Take your pick.

Next up for iTunes is the seemingly insurmountable challenge of getting the rights to sell the Beatles back cat as legal music downloads. It is expected that Apple will finally have access to the music of the Beatles, but it’s anyone’s guess when this will happen. For now, music fans will have to put up with legal music downloads from Radiohead.

iPhone fans now have something else to brag about along with their touchscreens and gadgets and gizmos. While it has been a long time coming, a filesharing app has finally been released for the iPhone, although it isn’t exactly official.

iSlsk gives owners of cracked iPhones access to the Soulseek filesharing network, with free music downloads now available at decent speeds, straight to their iPhones.
With a decent connection, it’s possible to download an entire movie in under an hour. Free music downloads are super fast, taking only about three minutes to download a whole song. If that isn’t enough to tempt you to buy an iPhone then we don’t know what is.

Of course, people seem to forget that filesharing is much easier and faster on a computer, which pretty much all iPhone users have, but as a gimmick, iPhone filesharing is pretty cool.

Downloaded songs can then be imported into your iPhone library.

This is, apparently, just the beginning of iPhone filesharing. We can’t wait to see what Apple has to say about all of this.