Wax representation of Li Ka-Shing in Madame Tussauds Shanghai courtesy of Klaith Zhang.Spotify’s P2P music-streaming service has yet to reach North American shores, but details continue to emerge about investors in the promising Swedish start-up, already valued at around $250 million. Chinese plastics, real estate, electricity, shipping and communications baron Li Ka-shing now owns a minority stake in Spotify, as his foundation confirmed to Forbes on Thursday. Among other things, Li could be planning to integrate Spotify service into his telecommunication empire including “3,” his cellphone company. Li’s investment adds an undisclosed sum to Spotify’s war chest, which it will need to satisfy licensing requirements for its U.S. launch and the iPhone app that would complement it. The powerful nature of Spotify’s service (it differs from Pandora by playing on-demand music, differs from iTunes by not selling songs, and differs from Rhapsody by not requiring up-front subscription payments) means it could pay a premium to the labels. As it stands now, Spotify is free on its basic level. If music fans in the countries where it’s available can put up with a few ads each hour, it lets them treat more than 6 million songs as if they were stored on their own computers. Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek ...

Here, YouTube's Content ID system matches the original video (on the left) with a user-uploaded video (on the right), even though they're encoded differently. You know how digital music works: People get sued, content gets deleted, startups go bankrupt. But with its ContentID program YouTube has created a mechanism that makes it just as easy for copyright owners to make money from unauthorized uploads as to order them deleted, the system’s design purpose. And they are starting to get with the program. In an area known for bitter lawsuits and hastily issued take-down notices, this is that rarest of birds: a feel-good digital music story. YouTube accomplished this by writing what Lawrence Lessig calls “East Coast code” (in this case, copyright law) into “West Coast code” (computer code). ContentID still performs its primary function, making it faster and easier to delete unapproved content from YouTube. But the system’s capacity to monetize infringing videos while allowing them to remain on the site is becoming more significant. YouTube’s database of audio and video fingerprints is learning how to deal with the fact that the guy who added a saxophone part to a particular song deserves a certain minute percentage of revenue when the song appears in your YouTube ...

Btarena.net contains the whole database of bit torrent tracker files from The Pirate Bay, plus the familiar pirate ship logo. Embattled file-sharing site The Pirate Bay became famous for helping bit torrent users trade music, movies and other files. The site’s founders face a major lawsuit, as its prospective new owner, Global Gaming Factory X, struggles to keep the site online. Meanwhile, another organization has taken one of the copies of (nearly) the entire The Pirate Bay database that’s been in circulation and deployed a cloned version at btarena.org. It’s another classic case of copyright wac-a-mole. Content owners and legal authorities are spending thousands or even millions of dollars pursuing those they accuse of aiding copyright infringement — but just as they appear to be making progress, someone crawls out of the woodwork to show them how quixotic their mission ultimately is. The Pirate Bay co-founders are still awaiting the results of their appeal, but from the point of view of file sharers, it doesn’t matter that Peter Sunde and company could spend up to a year in prison. The Pirate Bay site has been compressed, seeded and shared via bit torrent — just like one of the millions of music and movie ...

What did you do this summer? Flat World Knowledge stayed busy on campus and now has 40 times as many students and more than 10 times the colleges using their freemium, open-source digital textbooks as they did spring semester. And they did it the old-fashioned way — one professor at a time. After a sort of beta earlier this year, Flat World is set to announce Thursday that more than 40,000 college students at 400 colleges will use their digital, DRM-free textbooks fall semester, up from 1,000 in 30 colleges in the spring. Digital textbooks remain a nascent business and a tough market to enter. At an average cost of $100, textbooks command the highest cover prices in publishing, outside of only some art and coffee-table books. Demand is artificially inelastic as students are indentured to cost servitude at the whim of college professors who blithely assign titles a student must own if she hopes to do well in a given course. Now, multiply that by four, five or even six courses a semester and you are talking big bucks. By comparison, Flat World has a pricing scheme that starts at zero for online access using a browser, and $20 for a PDF, which they ...

In the latest example of finding media innovation where you’d least expect it, CBS is embedding a video player in a print ad in Entertainment Weekly that will serve up a buffet of its fall TV lineup. The CBS foray into a print-digital alliance plays full-motion video at a crisp resolution. The ad, dubbed by CBS and partner Pepsi Max “the first-ever VIP (video-in-print) promotion,” works like one of those audio greeting cards. Opening the page activates the player, which is a quarter-inch–thick screen seen through a cutaway between two pages concealing the larger circuit board underneath. The audio quality is equally good (extremely poor video shot by this reporter notwithstanding), but beware: There are no volume controls, and in a quiet environment, it’s quite loud. This is surely a intentional design feature, aimed at getting the attention of people nearby. Unlike the wholly unsatisfying debut of the e-ink cover in Esquire magazine last year, this works. The video-enhancement will appear in the September issue of Entertainment Weekly, but only in what sounds like a relatively small subset of the circulation: The promo itself will be in every copy, but the video portion only in some subscriptions delivered to New York and Los Angeles. It was released Tuesday ...