The two million dollar fine handed out to Jammie Thomas by a Minnesota jury this week hasn’t done the music industry’s image much good. While lawyers and high level managers at the major labels cracked open the Champagne, artists such as Moby and Radiohead shook their heads in shame at what the music world has become.
Jammie Thomas-Rasset has lost her retrial against the RIAA and was ordered to pay $1.92 million for 24 songs she shared via Kazaa. The defense had argued that it might have been her children who shared the files instead of Thomas-Rasset, but the jury didn’t buy this and found her guilty.
In February TechCrunch rumored that Last.fm had ratted out its users to the RIAA. Now they have another source claiming data was shared with the music industry group, including IP addresses. Without going into the validity of these allegations, we’d like to point out that this data is completely useless to the RIAA, from a legal point of view.
In one of RIAA’s high profile cases the Free Software Foundation backed defendant Joel Tenenbaum, much to the dislike of the music industry lobby. John Sullivan, Operations Manager at the FSF explains in a guest post why they think these cases impact not just music, but also free software and its technology.
Just a couple of days ago we reported that the MPAA’s website was vulnerable to an XSS attack, which left it displaying torrents from The Pirate Bay. This time a flaw has been discovered in the RIAA’s site, which now allows it to display TorrentFreak’s latest articles.
Until recently, the recording industry were committing publicity suicide by routinely issuing legal threats to file sharers. Now, they seem to have changed the routine, going for fewer, but bigger targets. The goal is clear: if you own the Internet, you don’t have to worry about pirates — or anyone else.
Radiohead, the band that made millions of dollars by giving away their music for free, has very little to complain about when it comes to piracy. On the contrary, in a landmark file-sharing case, Radiohead has responded positively to a request to testify against the RIAA.
This week’s hot topic is the reported collaboration between the RIAA, MPAA and your ISP. The aim of the music and movie industries is to reduce and deter illicit file-sharing by sending out warnings to alleged infringers. The big questions is this: How would you react if you received one of these warnings?
This week several scary stories surfaced about how the MPAA and RIAA are negotiating with ISPs on how to deal with copyright infringers. Even though it was often presented as news, those who look deeper will realize that this is nothing new at all, just the same old threats dressed up in a new jacket.
It’s been a rough week for the RIAA as massive layoffs are about to cost many employees their job. On top of that, the anti-piracy outfit is being sued for abusing the legal system for its war on piracy, civil conspiracy, deceptive trade practices, trespassing and computer fraud.
Comcast doesn’t really have a good reputation in the BitTorrent community and it’s getting worse by the day. They now have plans to cooperate with the RIAA and disconnect alleged copyright infringers. A worrisome development, especially since they have a tendency to accuse innocent customers.
