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There are parts of the world where it's understandably difficult for the topic of Internet piracy, or the theft of U.S. intellectual property, to be elevated to critical significance. There is still rioting in Syria, a cruise ship has run aground killing some passengers, and Japan is still struggling to emerge from the devastation of the tsunami.

But Saturday's statement from the Obama Administration awakened many broadcast organizations to a strange and, for some, unexplored new question: Is the U.S. truly planning to implement legislation that could shut parts of the Internet off? That's how the Saturday statement truly appeared for some who had not been following the goings-on (such as they are) in the U.S. Congress.

Clear Channel, the largest radio station owner in the United States, has teamed up with music intelligence platform The Echo Nest to build an Internet radio service similar to Pandora and Last.fm.

Clear Channel's iHeartRadio service uses The Echo Nest's massive dataset of 30 million songs and 5 billion related data points to let users create radio stations based on their musical tastes. It has been dubbed a potential "Pandora killer" by Billboard and indeed its functionality could hardly be more similar to Pandora's. Users can create stations based on a particular artist or song, vote tracks up or down and skip a limited number of songs per station.

The manufacturers of the Grace Digital Radio have teamed with audio industry disruptor Michael Robertson and his newest startup, DAR.FM (Digital Audio Recorder). The integration of the two technologies means that owners of the Grace hardware can now use the DAR website to queue up talk radio shows from all over the country, the dial and the 24-hour broadcast schedule to be played on-demand, including with fast-forward and rewind functionality.

"Radios have historically been speakers where broadcasters control what blares out," Robertson writes on his blog today about his first partnership with a digital radio manufacturer. "A new day is upon us where listeners are wrestling control away from broadcasters and can now control what comes out of their radios. "

The only reason streaming web music hasn't completely killed all other forms of music distribution is the fact that it's not available when you're traveling across wireless networks - say, in a car. Well hold on to your hats and start canceling your satellite radio subscriptions, Pandora is taking to the road.

In the mid-1980s, Pierre Bellanger launched Skyrock pirate radio station as a continuation of his efforts with the French free radio movement. A community inclusive of a diverse voices and agendas, Skyrock inspired a generation of 18-25-year-olds who had never lent their unscripted opinions to a mass distribution medium. As Skyrock developed an IRC channel and later its own blogging software, the community evolved into what it is today - the third largest social networking site in Europe.

It appears that the time for freemium music services in the US has passed. Earlier this week streaming music site Imeem sold to MySpace for under $10 million dollars while laying off a large number of staff. For a company with all four major record labels signed, more than 15 million uniques a month and well over 5 million tracks in its catalogue, it came as a sobering blow to the industry. While many companies move to a subscription model, 8tracks continues to forge along in what some describe as a convenient loophole. As of this weekend the company is publicly launching its API for Boston's Music Hack Day.

In a few weeks, moviegoers will flock to Philip Seymour Hoffman's latest rock ensemble flick Pirate Radio. A fictional period comedy about an illegal station in the North Sea, the film embodies the same anti-authoritarian sentiments that Gen X and Y audiences have grown to love. Jelli.net, a crowdsourced radio station with a Web-based interface, has found a way to democratize sound waves and captivate that same 18-35-year-old audience. The Bay Area company launched in June, allowing users to access a Digg-like interface and vote up or down real time on FM radio during CBS' Live 105 KITS' Sunday programming. As of this evening, the company has penned a national deal with 450 Triton Digital Media radio stations and a distribution deal with Australian broadcaster Austereo.

Some newspapers scrambling to survive the internet condemn websites like Google News and the Huffington Post. Aggregators, they say, need to pay for the right to point to a newspaper's site. Public radio stations, on the other hand, face competition from the internet as well and are just as competitive between themselves as they are collaborative. Somehow, they've responded differently to new media. There may be no better example of that than an iPhone application built by several large public radio organizations and called Public Radio Player. The team behind the app launched a major new release this morning.

After all that waiting, today should have been a day of rejoicing for SIRIUS XM subscribers. That's because today, the satellite radio company finally launched their much-anticipated iPhone application (iTunes link). However, instead of being pleased, subscribers are sorely disappointed. It seems the app is more notable for what it is lacking than what it offers. What's missing? Only some of Sirius XM's best content: Howard Stern, NFL Play-by-Play, MLB Play-by-Play, and SIRIUS NASCAR Radio.

A new radio system developed in Australia is transforming the vehicles on the street into nodes on a network. The technology, designed by scientists at the University of Southern Australia's Institute for Telecommunications Research, is an application called "Dedicated Short Range Communications" (DSRC). Using a combination of GPS and Wi-Fi, cars can communicate their location data to a central office, but it also enables them to communicate with each other.