Yahoo! music will close the doors on its music-download store on September 30, taking its DRM keys with it. This means that any music downloads bought from Yahoo! won’t be able to be played on any other computer than the one they were downloaded to.

Yahoo! has come up with the odd solution of burning the files to CD and then ripping them back onto your computer.

This is certainly a roundabout way of getting your value for money on music downloads bought from Yahoo! It’s similar to when Microsoft rolled out its Zune and shut down its own store for music downloads.

This is a clear indication of how sucky DRM music is. Hopefully DRM will soon be a thing of the past as it is nothing but a headache for the end user. For all the time and money spent creating DRM files, it appears to have largely been a waste of resources.

One filesharing user being sued by the RIAA has turned the system on its head by admitting to the charges presented, only to then challenge those very same laws that have led to her being charged.

Denise Barker stands accused of sharing the unholy sum of eight songs on filesharing network Kazaa. If found guilty, she could be fined up to $1.2 million. We hope they are good songs to warrant such a high price tag.

Denise took the huge risk of not settling out of court, admitting to the charges and then standing up against those charges and the excessive fine she may be slapped with.

Her lawyer is arguing that each track is worth about $3.50 and therefore Denise should only face a fine of $252 going by the 9-to-1 rule. If this all stands up in court, it could go some way to outlining the cost of fines in the future. People typically settle out of court for a few thousand dollars. If they can go to court and only be fined a few hundred, it makes it a whole different ball game.

Phuket has to be one of the party capitals of the world. This little island is simply a massive 24-hour party that goes on 7 days of every week. I was fortunate enough to be invited to a stag party there last week and I can’t think of anywhere better to go.

Probably what made the trip was the Phuket bars. There are hundreds of Phuket bars around the island, but most are concentrated on one street (and quite a few side streets coming off this one street) in the centre of town. There was a maximum of 30 seconds’ walk between the bars and restaurants here and it was simply a great place to be.

The Phuket bars are cool in so many ways, but mainly because they are so much cheaper than back home: what we spent in airfares was saved quite quickly in cheaper beer prices in the Phuket bars. The hotels were pretty reasonable, too.

And then there are the girls. Phuket bars are quite simply teeming with gorgeous women who are all more than happy to spend time chatting with you. Sure they want the odd drink bought for them, but which woman doesn’t!? A great time had by all.

More filesharing news related to the Dark Knight today. Warner Bros somehow managed to keep the Dark Knight off filesharing networks for 38 hours after the movie’s release. Though that may not seem like a huge amount of time, Warner Bros says it was enough to protect ticket sales on the first week of the movie’s launch.

With the movie doing so well over its opening weekend, you have to think there’s some truth to this. By delaying the movie being leaked onto filesharing networks, Warner Bros stopped bootleggers from logging on to make dodgy copies of the movie to sell around the world.

Those 38 hours were the result of a six-month anti-piracy plan with the sole aim of keeping the movie off of filesharing networks. This plan included keeping the reel from movie theaters until the last minute. The Dark Knight looks set to break the $300 million mark soon.

Following on from Virgin teaming up with the BPI to bother its subscribers with letters warning them for using filesharing services to get illegal music downloads, six more ISPs have joined up with the UK government and will send 1,000 letter a week to filesharing subscribers.

The ISPs will also help to develop and promote legal music downloads. There’s no word on exactly what these letters will say and what implications receiving one might have.

It may be that this is the first step towards the three-strikes-and-your-out approach, which would see repeated filesharing violators cut off from the Internet after a third offense.

Virgin and BT have already begun threatening to cut users off from the Net, but ISPs aren’t known for being fond of this resource- and fund-consuming approach. Regardless, the UK’s ISPs are all set to begin tackling the issue of filesharing in accordance with the government’s vision.

If nothing else, this is clearly a step at educating the general public, but is it too little to late?

Anyone heard of BuckCherry? We certainly haven’t. Despite having a really rubbish name for a band, BuckCherry are apparently quite popular, so much so a track from their latest album recently leaked onto BitTorrent.

That’s one track, not even the whole album. BuckCherry are so distraught that one of their tracks has been released to millions of people that they’ve issued a press release through their record company. The track “Too Drunk…” from their forthcoming album Black Butterfly was leaked before its September release.

This would normally be a great thing for an unknown band such as BlackBerry, or whatever they’re called. The press release said, “Honestly, we hate it when this s*** happens, because we want our FANS to have any new songs first.”

Nice use of caps there. So, ChuckCheesy think that their fans don’t use BitTorrent and that they actually have fans in the first place. Way to go, guys. We’ll be sure not to buy your album now. Could this all be a ploy to get people to download the song? Maybe. It hasn’t worked though. It’s put us off even listening to the band.

Yesterday I discovered, to my amazement, that I could fit a LOT of music on my iPhone. My introduction to iPhone music may seem a little belated to some of you techno-whizzes out there, but believe me: this is an incredible achievement for me. I managed to send an SMS on the iPhone only just last week.

My decision to make the most of iPhone music was interrupted, briefly, by a worry that I didn’t know where to start downloading the stuff. A brief bit of research into iPhone music later and I was convinced that even I could manage to download it.

I signed up for a rather excellent iPhone music download service that allowed me, for the cost only of a monthly subscription, to download as much as I liked. The download speed is a little slow (I’m waiting a while longer than I would like for my favorite ABBA track: that’s why I’m here writing this) but I suppose I can live with it. I priced up the music that I would be buying on iTunes and I do believe I’ve made my money back within the first day.

My experience of iPhone music downloads has been rather short, but it has certainly been sweet.

You’d think that finding a free Ares download would be a simple task.

On the face of it, it is. You just type in ‘free Ares download’ into your favorite search engine and hey Presto! several million pages of results to wade through. Even when you do get into the subject you may well find that the sheer number of free Ares download versions available is more than enough to overwhelm.

It is in this situation where you need some kind of advice on the free Ares download that you’re going to finally go for. It is in this situation that a site like OfficialAres.com can be a real life saver.

OfficialAres.com has at its core a wonderful review of most of the big names in the world of the free Ares download. It reviews these pieces of software with passion, élan and verve. Once you’ve been to the site you will be in no doubt as to which free Ares download is the best and which is the worse. The other information on the site includes news on the world of music sharing and filesharing in general. A great read whether you need help or just intellectual simulation.

So the Dark Knight has been in movie theaters for a few days now. In the midst of movie companies, as well as record labels, complaining about filesharing destroying the industry, the new Batman movie earned a reported $155.3 million in its first weekend.

Tight security of the movie meant that only one cam version surfaced on filesharing networks – and it wasn’t a very good version at that. What this proves is that filesharing is not killing the movie industry. People will still pay for stuff if it’s good.

The problem comes with the bar being raised so high. People have access to every movie and every album ever released and so they are becoming increasingly picky about what they pay for. It takes a blockbuster smash such as Batman to motivate people to go to the cinema.

With the advent of the Internet, people just don’t bother to watch bad movies or listen to bad music and they certainly won’t pay to do so.

BskyB in the UK recently signed a major deal with Universal Music to launch a new music service. Sky, one of the fastest-growing ISPs in the UK, is one of the first ISPs to really try and make a go of making money from music downloads.

The new deal gives Sky full access to Universal’s back catalog, which is no small archive. Sky has got quite a deal out of the music giant, with the two companies joining together to bring something new in the form of a subscription-based music service that comes with a set number of DRM-free downloads.

It sounds very cool, right? It will be interesting to see how this pans out. The other three of the Big 4 have yet to jump on board, but this is a bold move by an ISP.

There is still no word on whether Universal will send letter to Sky subscribers to “educate” them about why filesharing is a bad way to get free music downloads, as Virgin recently started doing.

The price and launch date for the new service have yet to be revealed.