TorrentFreak

For close on six years the dizzying file-sharing case of the RIAA vs Jammie Thomas-Rasset has been winding its way back and forth through the U.S. legal system. The U.S. government itself got involved last month, submitting a brief to the Supreme Court asking it to uphold the $220,000 verdict. Today the Court granted that wish with an announcement that it will not hear Thomas-Rasset’s appeal.

Following mounting pressure from international rightsholders, last year Google finally caved in and said it would start making ‘pirate’ sites more difficult for its users to find. But, according to the RIAA, this was a false promise. The music group says that sites for which Google receives thousands of DMCA notices still outrank legitimate services. To correct this problem the RIAA is now urging the search engine to “immediately make the necessary changes so its pledge becomes a reality.”

The Unites States Government has submitted a brief to the Supreme Court asking it to uphold the $220,000 verdict in the RIAA vs. Thomas file-sharing case. According to the Obama administration damages of $9,250 per song is not an unconstitutional amount and is in fact needed to deter others from engaging on online piracy.

From humble beginnings in 2011, last year the RIAA amped up its efforts to have allegedly infringing URLs removed from Google’s public indexes. Fast forward to today and the RIAA is about to hit a historic milestone. During the next few hours the music industry group will issue orders to the world’s largest search engine to take down the 10,000,000th URL on its behalf.

It’s said that “Good men never die”, and it seems to hold true for bad court cases too. The court case between Thomas and the RIAA has now been dragging on for more than 5 years, but the home stretch might be in sight as the case comes to the US Supreme Court This case [...]

Very soon the six strikes anti-piracy program will kick off in the United States but the RIAA isn’t just sitting back and presuming that it will be an anti-piracy cure-all. Since early November the recording industry group has massively upped the number of DMCA notices it issues to make content harder to find. From an average of between 200,000 and 240,000 URL requests sent every week to Google, the RIAA has just posted 463,000 and 666,000 in successive weeks.

The RIAA has submitted a new list of “notorious websites” to the U.S. Government, sites that the labels would like to see disappear . The list includes all major torrent sites, cyberlockers such as RapidShare, and so-called linking sites. The music group acknowledges that most sites respond to takedown requests, but says it’s tired of playing “cat and mouse” with the site’s users who simply re-upload the infringing files.