by Becky Hogge - EDRi-member Open Rights Group - UK
Commissioner Charlie McCreevy’s announcement in February 2008 that he proposes to nearly double the term of copyright protection for sound recordings from 50 to 95 years came as a shock to UK digital rights campaigners. Back in 2006, here in the UK, the case against copyright term extension was robustly made - by campaigners such as my organisation, the Open Rights Group, and more importantly, by economists from one of the UK’s leading universities. It led to a firm commitment from our Government that they would never seek to extend copyright term retrospectively. Read the rest of this entry »
February is starting with another new DJ on Sonic Walker. Oleg aka 4Tech from Russia created a passionate and energetic mix with his favorite minimal tech-house tracks.
Well, no - luckily it wasn’t bloody, but Sonic Walker has been offline for 10 1/2 hours today, just after we had released the new mix by echtZEIT. Great timing! I am very sorry for this. In case you want to know the reason, you can read about it on the site of our former host (Power Outage Update). Dreamhost has been a nightmare from the start - there hasn’t been a week without downtime. I went there because of the storage and bandwidth and not because they are cheap but that’s what they are and that’s what you get.
I used the day to migrate this site and all mp3 files to a new and hopefully more reliable hosting company and if you are reading this, it means that you are looking at the new server. We will know if they can handle the high load of a netlabel release soon and I truly hope, that I don’t have to move once again (this has been the 3rd time).
A little bit more than a year ago I launched Sonic Walker, so that I can publish my own netlabel mixes, 100% legal and free. Soon, some other DJ’s from all over the world followed and Sonic Walker was born as a small DJ-mix netlabel. The focus has mostly been on house and electronic music, but we also tried to feature many other styles.
The huge amount of downloads has sometimes caused technical problems and forced me to switch hosting provider earlier this year. Unfortunately the new provider had some serious problems in past weeks as well, but I am confident that they will be able to solve them. My apologies, if the site has sometimes been unavailable or very slow.
In the meantime I felt it was time for a small relaunch, so here it is: Sonic Walker 2.0. But don’t worry, I am not going to place the 2.0 label on everything. More important is new music and I am happy to announce today, that we will release the 10th Sonic Walker Mix later this week.
If you have any comments, suggestions or you would like to share your own netlabel mix with the internet community, please leave a comment or use the contact form.
For a while last night our file server has not been able to handle the traffic. Since 2 pm on Sunday the traffic increased and since then we have been transferring more than 300GB. It all started with the podcast on starfrosch but obviously Nappunk’s mix has also been mentioned on other sites and feeds as well. The majority of downloads did not come directly from this site but have been direct downloads from podcast clients. In 93% Apple’s iTunes has been used as podcast client with each 50% Macintosh and Windows users. Unfortunately neither iTunes nor the other podcast clients (like iPodder and iPodderX) transmit the source of the podcast, so we can not see, which RSS feeds have been used.
While we can now handle the traffic after I tweaked the server settings, we will have to find a different solution soon, so I will start looking at archive.org and similar solutions.
If you have problems downloading, please use the alternative download server.
February is starting with another new DJ on Sonic Walker. Oleg aka 4Tech from Russia created a passionate and energetic mix with his favorite minimal tech-house tracks. 
