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Even though the European Commission okayed the merger of Sony and the Bertlesmann Music Group (BMG) in 2004, Europe's second-highest court—the Court of First Instance—annulled the merger on July 13. The decision came about because of a challenge from independent record labels that claimed the EU regulators shouldn't have approved the merger in the first place. This is the first time a European Commission decision has been overturned and it requires the commission to examine the complex merger again.

We have just learned that Paul Nelson, an influential music writer and talent scout for Mercury Records, was found dead in his New York City apartment last week. The cause of death was not reported.

In a gesture that mirrors a petitionhttp://www.eff.org/share/petition/">petition; the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) is presenting to Congress, Flowerburger Records is circulating a petitionhttp://www.flowerburger.com/">petition; requesting that the British Parliament and the BPI, Britain's recording industry trade group, stop the lawsuits against music fans and develop constructive alternatives aimed at compensating artists.

We have lost a great artist. Mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, 52, who had previously triumphed over breast cancer, died at her home in Santa Fe on July 3. While The New York Times obituary did not specify the cause of death, other reports suggest she died from cancer, leading to speculation that the claims of back trouble and gall bladder inflammation that led to a string of cancellations in the past few years were related to a recurrence of the disease.

In an article published on June 28 on the website Slyck.com, a popular site dedicated to news and activism surrounding P2P networks, writer Thomas Mennecke contends that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1237 ">retooled its "strategy of launching a continuous barrage of monthly lawsuits aimed at approximately 750 individuals," a policy that has resulted in more than 18,000 suits since it was instituted three years ago.

After I decided to join">http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/352">join Stereophile as its editor in the spring of 1986, I took a road trip through Europe. The ostensible reason for the trip was to attend a hi-fi show in Lucerne, Switzerland, but the reality was that, faced with the transatlantic dislocation, I wanted to touch base with places that had meant much to me over the preceding years. I took the train to Paris, where I spent a day taking what might have been my last look at the Impressionist paintings (then at the Jeu de Paume gallery, now at the Musée d'Orsay), then drove the rest of the way to Lucerne with KEF's then marketing manager David Inman.

"I don't get why some audiophiles still think that saving data using a lossless compression scheme like FLAC or Apple Lossless sounds any different than an uncompressed CD file," says Sonoshttp://www.sonos.com">Sonos; founder and VP of Sales and Marketing Thomas S. Cullen between bites of white fish shish kebab. "It's just mathematics, and the results are sonically identical, but you save half the space on your hard drive."