Founded in 1998, the same year as MP3.com, MP3

MP3

MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

 Newswire is the oldest active news site devoted to digital media technology. Notable for its series of essays that chronicled the rise of digital music and the Internet’s acrimonious relationship with the record industry, MP3 Newswire initially was started to review and report on the latest products and technological advances. But opinion pieces were few and far between in the pre and early Napster days and MP3 Newswire filled the gap.

The site drew some of the earliest discourse from the digerati as columnists wrote about the birth and death of Napster

Napster

Napster is an online music store and a Best Buy company. It was originally founded as a pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing Internet service that emphasized sharing audio files that were typically digitally encoded music as MP3 format files...

, the post-Napster rise of file trading, the evolution of the digital music portable, the dominance of the iPod, the struggles of Internet radio, digital rights management, the record industry legal battles, and the ongoing attempts to interpret copyright law on the Net. Writers include the site’s editor Richard Menta

Richard Menta

Richard Menta is an American journalist, and the publisher of MP3 Newswire. Known for over a decade of commentary that followed the evolution of digital media and intellectual property protection, Menta is also an information security professional. David L...

, Jon Newton of P2pnet

P2pnet

p2pnet.net is an online news website which mainly covers stories which are relevant to peer-to-peer file sharing .p2pnet is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License, and as such actively encourages other sites to use its content, provided they keep within the...

, George Ziemann, Michael Geist

Michael Geist

Michael Allen Geist is a Canadian academic, and the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. Geist was educated at the University of Western Ontario where he received his Bachelors of Laws before going on to get his Masters of Laws at both Osgoode Hall Law...

, Thomas Mennecke of Slyck.com

Slyck.com

Slyck.com is a website dedicated to file sharing. It offers news, reviews, and opinion, and has a user forum.-History of Slyck:Slyck began operations as Slyway.com in 2000, owned by Ray Hoffman. During this time, Slyck was an aggregate news site with some original content. It also had guides to the...

, Russell McOrmond of Digital Copyright Canada

Digital Copyright Canada

The Digital Copyright Canada forum was started in Aug 2001 by Russell McOrmond to allow for a public response to that phase of the Canadian copyright revision process. While the forum focuses on digital copyright, related issues of patents, copyright, trademarks and other sui generis protections...

, Colin Stoner and Helen McGovern.

Yahoo Internet Life named MP3 Newswire one if its “50 Most Incredibly Useful Sites” in its July 2002 issue. MP3 Newswire was also among the sites named Best of the Internet by PC Magazine in 2004 .

External links

• MP3NewsWire.net
• MP3 Newswire Turns 10. How it Started Part I and Part II - Details the formation and earliest days of MP3 Newswire