As of today, the case is still ongoing.

In 2009, a jury found Tenenbaum guilty of “willful infringement” and awarded damages mounting to $675,000. A year later this amount was reduced by 90% when Judge Nancy Gertner ruled that the penalty was excessive and unconstitutional. In 2011 this decision that was reversed after a new hearing at the Court of Appeals.

In yet another appeal, Tenenbaum’s legal team, headed by Harvard law professor Charles Nesson, is asking the court to reduce the $22,500 fine per song to the minimum statutory damages of $750 per song. This request is made on due process grounds.

As expected, the RIAA doesn’t agree with the request and presented its arguments to the court last Friday. But they were not alone – on the same day the Department of Justice also filed a brief with the court, backing the RIAA’s vision on the case.

In a 26-page filing the Department of Justice makes the argument that previous cases, as cited by Tenenbaum’s legal team, do not apply in this instance. It concludes that the due process grounds are not relevant yet and that the damages therefore shouldn’t be reduced before the case continues.

The due process question should only be answered when the court decides that the jury’s award of $22,500 per song is not excessive, according to the Departement of Justice.

“The only circumstance in which the Court can reach Defendant’s due process challenge at this time is if the Court first determines the jury’s statutory damages award is not excessive under the common law remittitur standard. The United States, therefore, does not believe it is necessary at this juncture to address the merits of Defendant’s constitutional claim,” the DoJ writes.

Although this is not the first time the Justice Department has become involved in an RIAA civil case, it remains unclear why they chose to intervene this time. What we do know is that the authorities are very up-to-date with the legal proceedings, as five former RIAA lawyers are now employed by the Department of Justice.

Whether these connections between the Justice Department and the RIAA have increased the likelihood of the authorities getting involved is hard to say. However, it is clear that Tenenbaum and his legal team are up against some serious resistance, and that the US authorities don’t want the student to get off that easily..

To be continued, indefinitely.

Source: Justice Department Backs RIAA Against Pirating Student

Despite this lack of action, the RIAA sees BitTorrent sites as the main source of music piracy. In their most recent submission to the US Trade Representative (USTR) last November, they claimed BitTorrent “is responsible for approximately 50% of the industry’s global P2P piracy problem.”

One of the sites reported to the USTR is TorrentHound, and this week the RIAA put the wheels in motion to find out who is operating the torrent site. The music group obtained a subpoena from the U.S. District Court of Columbia and has ordered Namecheap’s WhoisGuard service to hand over all identifying information they have on the owner of the domain.

“We believe your service is hosting the above-referenced domain name on its network. This website associated with this domain name offers direct links to files containing sound recordings for other users to download by such artists as Lady Gaga, Michael Jackson, Coldplay, Madonna and Kanye West,” the RIAA writes in a letter to Whoisguard.com.

“As stated in the attached subpoena, you are required to disclose to the RIAA information sufficient to identify the infringer. This would include the individual’s IP-address and e-mail address,” the RIAA adds.

Interestingly, the identification request is not for the actual torrent site TorrentHound.com, which is registered through Katz, but for TorrentHound.net. The latter domain redirected to the .com site in the past, but it currently points to an entirely different site.

Despite the non-infringing nature of TorrentHound.net, WhoisGuard is expected to hand over the domain owner’s details.

In their Service Agreement they specifically mention that all personal information will be revealed when it’s “necessary to comply with any applicable laws, government rules or requirements, subpoenas, court orders or requests of law enforcement.”

The question remains, however, what the RIAA is planning to do with the information. Are they preparing to strike on torrent sites in the US? Last summer the music group also requested the personal information of the domain owners of three other torrent sites – LimeTorrents, BitSnoop and Monova – but thus far no notable action has been taken against the owners.

TorrentFreak contacted the RIAA for a comment, but we have yet to receive a response.

Source: RIAA Orders WhoisGuard to Identify Torrent Site Owner

It all started in 2007 when a jury hit Thomas with a $222,000 verdict when she was found guilty of sharing 24 songs using the file-sharing client Kazaa. In 2008 Thomas appealed this verdict and a mistrial was declared, with the judge ruling that the fines were “disproportionate to the damages suffered.”

The case went up for re-trial before a new jury in 2009 where Thomas lost and was ordered to pay $1.92 million in fines. She then filed for a re-trial and in November 2010 a jury again found her guilty and awarded a total sum of $1.5 million .

Last year the case moved in another direction. Describing the massive damages as “monstrous and shocking” U.S. District Judge Michael Davis significantly reduced the earlier fine. Instead of $1.5 million, the judge ruled that $2,250 per song, for a total award of $54,000, is the maximum consistent with due process.

“The Court concludes that an award of $1.5 million for stealing and distributing 24 songs for personal use is appalling. Such an award is so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense and obviously unreasonable,” Judge Davis wrote.

The RIAA was disappointed by the verdict of the federal court, and is now hoping to reinstate the initial $222,000 damages award through an appeal. This week the music lobby group filed a brief in which they claim that this amount is not “monstrous and shocking,” and neither was the $1.5 million fine.

“Neither the first jury’s $9,250-per-work award nor the third jury’s $62,500-per-work award is more substantial than the Constitution allows,” the RIAA concludes.

The RIAA further criticizes Judge Davis’ ruling that any fine higher than $2,250 per infringed song requires some proof of actual damages. In other words, the RIAA would have to show that there is “some” relation with actual damages suffered by the copyright holder. According to the RIAA, neither the copyright act nor the due process clause requires this.

“Neither its legal analysis nor its factual analysis supports the court’s holding that the relationship between actual and statutory damages renders any award greater than $2,250 per work unconstitutional,” writes the RIAA.

The RIAA is not alone in their assessment, as they are now joined by the MPAA who this week filed an amicus brief in the case.

“That ruling improperly would require copyright owners who elect statutory damages to present proof of actual damages. Requiring such proof would significantly alter well-established ground rules for copyright litigation, add substantial practical burdens and unreasonably increase the costs of pursuing such litigation,” the MPAA writes.

In addition, the RIAA argues that Judge Davis made a mistake by ruling that “making a work available” is not part of the distribution right protected by the Copyright Act.

“The District Court erred in rejecting the first jury’s verdict on the mistaken ground that the Copyright Act does not protect the copyright holder’s long-established exclusive right to control the terms on which a work is ‘made available’ to the public,” the RIAA writes.

Again, the MPAA sides with the RIAA in its writing to the court.

“That right is, in fact, an international copyright norm. The right has particular importance in a digital age where unauthorized third parties routinely make available valuable copyrighted works for instantaneous dissemination to millions of Internet users around the globe,” they write.

It is now up to the court to decide if the arguments provided by the billion dollar entertainment companies hold any ground.

To be continued, indefinitely.

Source: MPAA Joins RIAA in “Monstrous” Jammie Thomas Appeal

One Year Later: Google’s Report Card on Making Copyright Work Better Online is the embarrassingly patronizing title of a new report from the IFPI detailing Google’s progress on copyright infringement issues over the past 12 months. Unsurprisingly the whole thing reads like a school report, with the IFPI setting out what Google should have achieved and then noting what ‘grade’ the search engine actually achieved in each task.

“While Google has taken some modest steps to deal with copyright infringement online, the promises made by Google remain unfulfilled,” the report begins.

“Despite its steps, the simple fact is that Google continues to both (i) receive financial benefits from sites and applications that engage in piracy and (ii) place artificial road blocks in rights holder efforts to protect their content online, contrary to the DMCA.”

The report notes that Google made a promise to act on reliable copyright takedown requests within 24 hours and is commended for exceeding that. Nevertheless, a company capable of returning search results “in nanoseconds” should be doing better, IFPI suggests. Furthermore, the music group states that Google has put a limit on the number of infringement reports that can be filed each day that “do not scale to the scope of piracy online.”

Google is also criticized for not adequately screening apps for compatibility with the music industry’s interests before allowing them onto the Android Marketplace, and then profiting from them in the period before they are taken down.

Surprisingly, given the recent and wrongful Mega Song takedown, IFPI criticizes Google for giving users the right to issue copyright claim counter notices without them “having a clear understanding” of the rights issues involved.

“We find it disturbing that Google admonishes rights holders to ensure their claim is valid and warns them about penalties for false claims, but fails to hold the average user to similar standards. Is that neutral, or is that tipping the scales in a manner that benefits Googles bottom line?” the report asks.

On the issue of censorship of its AutoComplete feature it’s noted that some progress has been made but, no surprise, Google needs to do better. “For example, when “lady gaga mp3″ is typed into the search bar, Autocomplete directs a user to choose “lady gaga mp3 free” or “lady gaga mp3 download,” results that lead to illegal sites,” IFPI complains.

Referencing Google’s AdSense program, IFPI says that Google should proactively screen all sites to which it serves ads to ensure they aren’t “pirate sites,” a truly massive and almost impossible task given that music licensing is IFPI members’ responsibility and area of specialty, not Google’s.

The search engine is also criticized for not prioritizing “authorized” over “unauthorized” sites in its search results. Google’s YouTube doesn’t avoid criticism either.

“Increasingly, music-oriented videos posted on YouTube include links to download the sound recording associated with the video illegally. This is in violation of YouTube’s own policies. In addition, YouTube hosts videos explaining how to game the Content ID system and how to rip the audio content to create an MP3 file from a music video,” the report notes.

Overall, Google is told that it must do better if it is to meet the standards required by the music industry. However, what is also clear from the language in the report is that improved results will only lead to demands for even greater “grades” next year.

The school report ends with Google getting admonished for its negative attitude in class.

“While professing to agree that copyright infringement is a serious problem that needs to be addressed, Google raises alarmist, self-serving criticism to any legislative proposal to deter or thwart rampant copyright infringement,” notes the report (pdf).

“Google should stop engaging in destructive rhetoric and come to the table with constructive proposals to address this problem,” it concludes.

There’s no doubt that Google has its faults, but treating the company as if it is the one engaging in rampant copyright infringement can’t be a sustainable tactic. Admonishing and patronizing it in public won’t help either.

Source: IFPI and RIAA Patronize Google With Anti-Piracy “Report Card”

Others maintain that they are absolutely necessary to protect the livelihoods of the world’s creative industries, and without them the world would be a worse place.

Whatever the belief held, proponents and opponents alike are nevertheless intrigued by what happens behind the closed doors of anti-piracy groups, particularly when viewed through the prism of their press announcements.

Just this week Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) Chairman & CEO Cary Sherman commented on the White House launch of a new awareness campaign along with PSAs designed to alert the US public to the apparent perils of piracy.

“As a community still plagued by the rampant theft of our work, we have seen firsthand the devastating effects this theft can have on the lives of hard-working, passionate musicians, songwriters, producers and countless others,” said Sherman.

While the RIAA’s support of this type of campaign is nothing new, the last decade witnessed a much more controversial way of spreading the anti-piracy message – massive legal action which saw the music group settle with thousands of individuals for millions of dollars and sue a few unfortunate souls to within an inch of their lives for millions of dollars each.

As the RIAA previously told TorrentFreak, that legal campaign was designed to attract attention after PSAs previously run by the group were shown to make “little difference”. But there are also other techniques available to the RIAA to tip the market in their favor.

During November, Tennessean.com ran an article titled Music Row spent $4 million on lobbying in 3 months in which they state that the industry’s focus on lobbying “comes after the music industry’s use of a tactic, now almost universally acknowledged as a failure, in which it filed lawsuits against individuals accused of illegally downloading songs to stop piracy.”

So a failure then? Absolutely not, says the RIAA in a just-published response.

“Our legal efforts served as an essential educational tool: Fans know far more now about copyright laws and the legal consequences of stealing music than ever before. Before initiating lawsuits in 2003, only 35 percent of people knew file-sharing on P2P was illegal; afterward, awareness grew to 70 percent,” writes RIAA Director of Communications Liz Kennedy.

“Where there was virtually no legal digital market before the lawsuits, today the market exceeds $3 billion annually, and revenue from online platforms will comprise more than 50 percent of total industry revenues this year,” she continues adding that doing nothing would have meant illegal downloading would have “skyrocketed further”.

The RIAA’s conclusion is shown in the title of the piece – RIAA largely succeeds in goal of bringing piracy under control – but that seems scarcely compatible with Sherman’s comments that the industry is being subjected to rampant theft, unless “controlled rampant theft” is something the RIAA associates with a successful outcome to an anti-piracy campaign.

While Sherman may be offering support to the new PSA’s issued by the government, it’s clear that from previous comments the RIAA have little faith in them. The sue-em-all campaign certainly raised awareness, but it hasn’t negated the need for millions to be spent on lobbying, most recently in support of PROTECT IP and SOPA.

And here’s the thing. There are few people outside the music industry (maybe even inside) who think that suing customers turned out to be a particularly clever thing to do. Similar numbers are supportive of the industry’s championing of SOPA. All of this only adds credibility to the arguments of those who say that anti-piracy groups do a hateful and cynical job, and achieve little else other than generate negativity.

Worryingly, this is a view widely held by the ‘Internet Generation’ who are the ones expected to forget the past and utilize RIAA-sanctioned music services in the future. The cry of F*** THE RIAA didn’t exist before the lawsuits and it will take a long time to forget – support of draconian SOPA-style legislation only succeeds in prolonging the memories.

Of course, the RIAA will always justify their worth, characterizing questionable former campaigns as a success but noting that there is a new crisis in the piracy war that means they’re needed more than ever before.

However, all is not lost, because the RIAA already have the solution. I’ll leave you with Liz Kennedy’s words from The Tennessean which show that rather than throwing millions at lawyers and lobbying, maybe the RIAA should spend some time getting advice from Valve and Steam, and learning how influencing the public is really done.

“To be clear, no legal efforts are a panacea,” says Kennedy, “compelling legal consumption options are the most important.”

Source: RIAA: Piracy is “Under Control” But Wait – “Rampant Theft” Continues

Aside from making streaming of copyrighted content a felony, the pending bill aims to make it easier to put sites that facilitate copyright infringement out of business.

Should SOPA become law authorities and copyright holders will have a broad range of tools to censor sites they deem to be facilitating copyright infringement. Aside from domain seizures, they can demand that search engines remove ‘rogue sites’ from their results, order ISPs to block these domains, and cut off their payments providers.

One of the problems with the legislation is that the definition of such infringing sites is open to interpretation. Today we can reveal which sites are on the hit list of the RIAA, and it comes as no surprise that all the major BitTorrent sites are prominently featured.

The RIAA was kind enough to send TorrentFreak a copy of their latest overview of “notorious” websites that was sent to the Office of the US Trade Representative (the MPAA submitted theirs earlier). We were asked not to share the letter in full, but below is a rundown of some of the most prominent sites that are mentioned.

“RIAA members are excited about the potential of the internet and other communication technologies to provide an efficient means of distribution to music lovers globally. Regrettably, this potential remains largely unrealized—mired in a morass of piracy,” the letter addressed to the USTR reads.

The RIAA hopes that their list of sites will help the government to focus their anti-piracy efforts, and in a way it can be viewed as a priority “hit list” should SOPA become law. If it was up to the music group, this list would include all prominent BitTorrent sites.

“P2P file-sharing remains a huge problem for the record industry. BitTorrent, a P2P filesharing protocol, is responsible for approximately 50% of the industry’s global P2P piracy problem and in some international markets the figure is as high as 90%. BitTorrent sites and services, across the board, are high priority pirate markets,” the RIAA writes.

Based on visitor count, the number of pirated music files that are linked, and the sites’ failure to take steps to address the massive piracy problem, they arrive at the following list:

Under SOPA, all the above domains could be put out of business without due process, the only requirement is that the Attorney General has to sign off on it.

Aside from BitTorrent sites the RIAA also wants cyberlockers such as Megaupload, Filesonic and 4shared to be dealt with, as well as the search engine FilesTube, and the forum Warez-BB.org. And there is more.

The RIAA points out that there are also several foreign sites that have copyright infringing “features” such as Russia’s main social networking site VKontakte and the Chinese search engine Sougou.

“In some sense, services such as Russia’s VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, and China’s Sougou and Xunlei are the most reprehensible of actors given that they want to appear as legitimate actors, and have functions unrelated to piracy, yet operate network services that include features that intentionally and effectively induce infringement,” the RIAA explains.

This last example shows that the definition of infringing sites can become very subjective down the line. It only requires a little creative writing to make half of the websites on the Internet appear as a rogue site, and thus eligible to be shut down.

Aside from the copyright issues, there is a broader international censorship issue at stake here. SOPA would grant U.S. authorities to seize the .com domains of Russia and China’s top tech companies with a strike of the pen. We doubt that these countries will be very pleased with that – just imagine how the U.S. would react if the opposite was true…

That would mean war.

Source: RIAA Wants To Shutter Torrent Sites, And More

Over the past months, fears that SOPA will “break the Internet” have been repeated dozens, if not hundreds of times. But both the MPAA and RIAA feel that people are blowing things out of proportion, forecasting an Internet doomsday where none exists.

In his article “Predictions of Internet’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated”, the MPAA’s Paul Hortenstine points out the inconsistencies between the historical predictions concerning the consequences of 2005′s “Grokster Decision” and the actual effect the ruling had.

The next day Hortenstine was back again, this time with a post titled “Critics of Current Legislation Have Been Wrong in the Past about Content Protection Law.”

The piece begins by highlighting an article by Variety which chronicles anti-Protect IP and Stop Online Piracy Act comments made by Consumer Electronics Association CEO Gary Shapiro, noting that he was wrong not only about the predicted chilling effect of the Grokster ruling, but also that of 1998′s DMCA. The implication is that since Shapiro was “wrong” then, he must be wrong now.

But powerful people like the MPAA need outspoken opponents to bring them into line and with SOPA they certainly have them. When tech giants such as Google and Yahoo are prepared to leave the US Chamber of Commerce over its support for this proposed legislation, something is seriously amiss.

Later in his article Hortenstine goes on to call Shapiro out again, this time over his claims that passing the DMCA had been “a huge mistake,” going on to state that eventually the DMCA was recognized by Wired as the “law that saved the web.”

“So when you hear Gary Shapiro and others proclaiming that the current legislation will be the end of the internet just remember that they’ve been wrong before and they’re wrong again this time,” concludes Hortenstine.

As Wired noted in their comprehensive article, “….it was the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown provision [that] has proven even more crucial to the growth of the internet. The provision grants immunity to so-called ‘intermediaries’ — ISPs, for example.”

So when we read  via a CNET report, that the RIAA are now saying that the DMCA isn’t working, one won’t be surprised to hear what is coming next.

“I think Congress got it right, but I think the courts are getting it wrong,” RIAA lawyer Jennifer Pariser said during a panel discussion at the NY Entertainment & Technology Law Conference. “I think the courts are interpreting Congress’ statute in a manner that is entirely too restrictive of content owners’ rights and too open to [Internet] service providers.

“We might need to go to Congress at some point for a fix,” Pariser added. “Not because the statute was badly drafted but because the interpretation has been so hamstrung by court decisions.”

Essentially, since courts have ruled time and again that the burden of policing infringement is the responsibility of the content owner and not the service provider, the RIAA want that revisited, reworded or otherwise changed.

One of the court decisions that “went against” the RIAA’s interests was in the case of Viacom versus YouTube. Viacom is now asking the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn last year’s ruling which deemed that YouTube is not liable for copyright-infringing Viacom material uploaded to the site. Viacom argued that YouTube should not have safe harbor under the DMCA.

Nevertheless, despite lacking this protection, Viacom chief Philippe P. Dauman collected a raise of nearly 149% last year, a renumeration of $84.5 million. This is not an enterprise in trouble from infringement, clearly.

But in addition to Viacom and indeed the RIAA wanting to tighten up or reinterpret the DMCA to hold the likes of YouTube more responsible, for good measure they also want PROTECT IP / SOPA.

So when “opponents of content protection legislation” (as Hortenstine describes them) make predictions that don’t immediately come catastrophically true, they aren’t necessarily guilty of getting their predictions wrong, only of not putting an accurate enough date on the impending doomsday.

The Internet may not break tomorrow or even next year, but there are people out there that really care, people that simply don’t want to risk it all for an ill-conceived attempt at stopping illicit downloads.

Because, as these “nay sayers” know and as history has shown, once one set of legislation is sent through the MPAA and RIAA only come back for yet more. And when those don’t go as planned they come back for an adjustment here, and a tweak there.

It is this environment of much-wants-more that leaves the likes of Gary Shapiro, Google, Yahoo and everyone else concerned that although the Internet isn’t broken now, there’s a real danger that in the name of copyright protection these corporations will keep fixing it until it is.

So-called “opponents of content protection legislation” can see the end game, and fighting that starts now.

Source: Internet Doomsday: Wrongs and Rights of Copyright Fortune Telling

His case has been dragging on for half a decade already. In 2009, a jury found Tenenbaum guilty of “willful infringement” and awarded damages mounting to $675,000.

July last year judge Nancy Gertner ruled that the penalty was excessive and unconstitutional and the jury-awarded damages were subsequently reduced by 90%, a decision that was reversed two months ago after a new hearing at the Court of Appeals. And this week the case moved forward again.

“The defendant seeks an en banc hearing on one ground: that it is unconstitutional to instruct a jury that it can return an unconstitutionally excessive award,” Harvard law professor Charles Nesson now writes to the court.

Nesson, who along with a group of students defends Tenenbaum, claims that it was unconstitutional for the judge to allow the jury to award damages that she later found to be unconstitutionally high.

“To instruct the jury that it may ascribe an award in a range of up to $4,500,000 against a noncommercial copyright infringer is punitive, excessive, not authorized by statute, and a denial of due process. Indeed, it is difficult to find the right word,” the petition reads.

“The trial judge misinstructed the jury that it could legally ascribe an award 67 times what she herself later found to be the legally permissible constitutional maximum. For each of thirty separately listed songs, the verdict form directed the jury to fill in a blank answering the question, ‘[W]hat damages do you award the Plaintiff for this copyrighted work, from $750 to $150,000?’: This was error, plain and simple.”

Tenenbaum’s legal team is asking for a rehearing before the full court in the hope of getting the fine reduced or thrown out altogether, as they argue that the RIAA’s campaign was not warranted in the first place.

“The defendant has challenged as unconstitutional the use of federal law and process to threaten catastrophic fines against the generation of kids who were downloading and sharing music peer-to-peer. The massive campaign of lawsuits initiated by the recording industry against people who copied music for personal use and never sold or considered selling it in any commercial way was entirely unprecedented,” the petition reads.

In an interview last year Tenenbaum described himself as someone with a passion for music, who paid for music, perhaps even more than the average consumer. For him, file-sharing was a means to discover new bands at a time where there were few legal alternatives online.

“I often have bought music as a result of the free exploration I’ve done. In that respect, I’m much like the average downloader, who actually spends more money on music than people who don’t download at all,” he said.

Although the RIAA stopped pursuing casual file-sharers years ago, for the music industry group this case is now a matter of principle. They are paying much more in lawyer fees than they will ever be able to get back from Tenenbaum, but they feel an example must be set.

To be continued, indefinitely.

Source: Tenenbaum Demands Rehearing of $675,000 RIAA File-Sharing Case

Nevertheless, many reach for the antibiotics. But as more and more people are becoming aware, not only are they ineffective on a virus like the common cold, taking too many of them actually makes matters worse. Inappropriate overuse of these medications helps create resistant strains that require stronger and more powerful doses of antibiotics to treat.

And herein lies the problem. The mainstream music and movie industries are treating online piracy with the broad-spectrum antibiotics of three strikes regimes, site blocking and domain seizures. Initially, as we shall no doubt see from their reports, these digital medications will quickly reduce the levels of file-sharing bacteria on the Internet.

With these cosmetic successes will come larger and larger doses of the solutions, applied liberally wherever a problem surfaces. But underneath it’s already too late. The smart bacteria have begun to adapt and are disseminating their knowledge from cell to cell, from generation to generation.

The copyright enforcers will quickly learn that in common with the microscopic organisms present in us all, file-sharers have become resistant to even the most-powerful of anti-piracy antibiotics available today. The fightback has already begun, and the potions are being rendered useless.

Worse still, while the most aggressive anti-piracy solutions are still waiting in the wings, their recipes are already public knowledge. Sites like Newzbin2 have already adapted to the poison awaiting them, and it hasn’t even been administered yet.

And according to news just out this week, signs are that the most important pirates – the ones that provide much of the initial content – are becoming more and more difficult to find. According to Denmark’s RettighedsAlliancen, who are better known by their former name of Antipiratgruppen, adapting file-sharers are causing them huge issues.

“It is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to trace these people,” said Maria Fredenslund, head of RettighedsAlliancen. “It’s a huge problem.”

Fredenslund says that that “increasingly hardcore” file-sharers are using VPN connections as a matter of course, but for Danish Piratgruppen chariman Troels Møller, the reaction is to be expected.

“When anti-piracy groups worldwide move so violently forward, it is clear that people have to protect themselves,” he explains.

But while solutions like VPNs and encrypted connections to sites like Newzbin2 are the preserve of today’s tech-savvy, the aggressive anti-piracy movement will ensure that they will soon become mainstream, just like the uptake of file-sharing itself before it.

And in common with the inappropriate overuse of conventional antibiotics that also kills the helpful bacteria that we all need to function effectively, restrictive blocking and censorship will claim endless victims with its collateral damage.

So, the only effective treatment is prevention via liberal doses of media, on demand, at a fair and friendly price. After all, history has shown that when the price of that treatment is too high or too difficult to obtain, the bacteria – quite literally – go viral.

Try treating that with antibiotics.

Source: Watch Out MAFIAA, Antibiotics Don’t Work On Viral Pirates

The appeal in the case, which has now been active since 2008, follows a decision last month by a federal court to reduce the amount Thomas-Rasset has to pay the RIAA in damages to ‘just’ $54,000.

According to court documents filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in St. Louis, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) says it is appealing at least three decisions made during the long-running file-sharing case.

Questions 1 and 2

Whether the District Court erred by concluding that making a copyrighted work available for download on an online file-sharing network is insufficient to constitute a ‘distribution’ under 106(3) of the Copyright Act, and therefore refusing to enjoin Defendant from making Plaintiffs’ copyrighted sound recordings available to the public.

Whether the District Court erred by concluding that it had committed an error in instructing the jury that making a copyrighted work available for download on a online file-sharing network constitutes a “distribution’ under 106(3) of the copyright Act and therefore vacating the jury’s verdict and ordering a new trial.

Previously U.S. District Judge Michael Davis ruled that by simply ‘making available’ music tracks on a file-sharing network (by having them in a shared folder or similar) an individual is not guilty of distribution. With these two questions the RIAA challenge that assertion.

Questions 3

Whether the District Court erred by holding that the jury’s award of statutory damages for defendant’s willful copyright infringement violated the due process clause even though it was well within the range of damages awards authorized by 504(c) of the Copyright Act.

This final question concerns the damages awarded against Thomas-Rasset. Perhaps understandably the RIAA would like her to face an amount easily confused with a telephone number, but that may prove difficult considering the history of the case.

In 2007 a jury hit Thomas-Rasset with a $222,000 verdict. She appealed and in 2008 a mistrial was declared. Judge Davis ruled that the fines were “disproportionate to the damages suffered.”

In 2009 the case went to re-trial before a new jury and resulted in yet another guilty verdict, this time with even harsher punishment. Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay $80,000 per infringement, a massive $1.92 million in total. But this amount was deemed unconstitutional and was duly slashed to $54,000.

In November 2010 the appeal of the retrial was heard and again Capitol Records won the case. The jury decided that Thomas-Rasset had to pay a $62,500 fine per shared song, a total of $1.5 million. It was this decision that was overruled by U.S. District Judge Michael Davis last month. He described the amount as “appalling”.

Disputes over the size of the damages aside, a positive outcome for the RIAA on the distribution question above could result in an almost unbelievable third trial in the case.

Source: RIAA Appeals Following Latest Jamie Thomas File-Sharing Ruling

Although it’s quite common for the major music labels to send takedown requests to YouTube, as far as we’re aware this is the first time the RIAA has filed legal action against the video hosting site in order to obtain the personal details of an uploader.

In a declaration to the court the RIAA’s Vice President of Online Piracy, Mark McDevitt, requests a subpoena ordering YouTube to reveal the IP-address, email address, and any other information that may be used to identify the person who uploaded the concert.

TorrentFreak asked the RIAA for a response but their spokesman declined to comment on the case. The video in question has since been removed from YouTube but copies of the full concert can still be found elsewhere on the video site.

Although YouTube is listed as a defendant in the court documents, this doesn’t mean YouTube is being held liable for copyright infringement. The filing is for a so-called DMCA subpoena which the RIAA occasionally files as part of ongoing investigations into more ‘severe’ acts of copyright infringement.

The court docket shows that the RIAA filed the legal action against YouTube last month, and that the case was closed after a week. A copyright lawyer informed TorrentFreak that this most likely means that the subpoena was granted by the court and that YouTube agreed to hand over the personal details that were requested.

Earlier this year the RIAA filed a similar declaration at a federal court in California, where it requested a subpoena to obtain the personal details of several Box.net users. These individuals were allegedly storing pre-release music on their accounts. Box.net said at the time that they would hand over the requested details if the subpoena was granted.

“We take the confidentiality of our customers’ information very seriously, but just like all other businesses, we are legally required to comply with court orders,” the company told THR.

Thus far we are not aware of any lawsuits that have appeared as a result of the RIAA’s efforts to track down these alleged copyright infringers. In 2008 the RIAA announced that it would no longer start mass-lawsuits against alleged copyright infringers using P2P networks. However, they reserved the right to go after individuals who leak unreleased content.

Source: RIAA Targets YouTube Over Leaked Britney Spears Concert

As is tradition, the RIAA is the biggest spender of the two entertainment industry lobbying groups. In the first two quarters of this year the music industry representatives spent over $3.8 million in Washington.

The topics covered by the RIAA are as expected. They lobbied at the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives in favor of ACTA, the PROTECT IP Act, and to support new legislation that will make streaming of copyrighted material a felony.

And then there’s the MPAA.

Thus far, the MPAA’s lobbying efforts have cost over $1.2 million dollars this year. Nothing out of the ordinary there, but some of the topics they are lobbying for in Washington are quite interesting to say the least. Aside from focusing on the traditional copyright-related matters, the movie industry group is also concerned with reforming Wall Street.

By hiring Michael Torrey Associates, the MPAA has spent tens of thousands of dollars to advance the implementation of the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Unusual, since the topic doesn’t relate to the interests of the thousands of movie industry workers whose jobs are at stake.

No, these lobbying efforts are only meant for MPAA’s Chairman and CEO Chris Dodd.

The Wall Street Reform Act the MPAA is heavily invested in is also known as the Dodd-Frank Act, as the current MPAA Chairman proposed the act late 2009 when he was still a senator.

Looking at the history of MPAA’s lobbying efforts we see that Wall Street Reform was already a topic the movie studios where interested in while Dodd was still acting as senator. Dodd was officially announced as MPAA Chairman March 2011, but the MPAA’s lobbying efforts already started in the last quarter of 2010.

The timeline above suggests that the MPAA was putting money into supporting Dodd’s legislation in the hope of convincing him to join them as Chairman. And it worked, as he signed on for the job by the end of February.

And it looks like the MPAA and Dodd made a long tern deal to support his old work. Even today the MPAA continues to put money in supporting Dodd’s Wall Street Reform plans ($180,000 and counting), all at the expense of those poor lighting technicians and makeup artists who work in the movie business.

Update: It appears that we jumped to conclusions.

The MPAA informed TorrentFreak that the lobbying efforts with regard to The Wall Street Reform Act are limited to combating a proposal to let financial traders speculate on motion picture box office revenues.

“Contrary to TorrentFreak’s accusation that this matter “doesn’t relate to the interests of the thousands of movie industry workers whose jobs are at stake,” derivatives based on box office futures are “no more than over-under bets on a movie’s performance and would have a detrimental impact on movies industry workers and businesses,” as we said at the time, working together with a broad coalition that included entertainment industry unions, independent filmmakers and distributors and theater owners.”

“Both the House and Senate, through their respective Agriculture Committees, wisely decided to examine this issue closely. Recognizing the serious problems that could be caused by these proposals, Congress approved a ban on trading box-office derivatives, sponsored by Senator Blanche Lincoln, as part of the much larger financial reform bill.”

“Because the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is still in the process of implementing these provisions of the financial reform bill, the MPAA is continuing to monitor the situation. We are NOT, nor have we ever been, engaged in lobbying any other issues concerning the financial reform bill.”

Source: MPAA Lobbies For Wall Street Reform

“It’s a bittersweet moment for me. On the one hand, I’m thrilled about my new gig. I’ll be running the leading trade group for the automobile manufacturing industry. Like music, cars are pretty cool. I also truly believe that this sector, like music yet for different reasons, is central to our economy and way of life.

“And I’m ready for a new adventure. A leadership challenge in such a significant industry was too compelling to resist.”

As former politician Bainwol heads off to become CEO of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers on September 1st, the same day will see him replaced at the RIAA by lawyer and current president of ten years standing, Cary Sherman.

Separately, both say that 2011 will go down as an important year for the RIAA, a turning point in their decade-long fight against online piracy.

“LimeWire is shut down and while some users are migrating to Frostwire and other illegal options, more are not,” continued Bainwol, a sentiment echoed and actually enhanced by Sherman in an interview with Am Law Daily.

“We actually feel the shutdown of LimeWire has made a difference in the health of our marketplace. It’s really quite amazing,” said Sherman. “The shutdown of LimeWire occurred in October 2010 and digital sales improved for the first time in a very long time in November. And since then, we’ve had better digital sales over the prior year consistently.”

Sherman says that while other possible explanations have been explored for this increase, he believes that most people are acknowledging that LimeWire’s closure made a bigger difference than anticipated.

“More people than we expected, once they felt that LimeWire wasn’t going to serve their needs, went to the legitimate marketplace than to another illegal source,” Sherman added.

In his farewell letter, Bainwol quoted some of the RIAA’s stats.

“The number of Americans engaged in illegal music consumption fell from roughly 30 million in May of 2010 to about 24 million in May of this year, a noteworthy 20% reduction,” he said. ” The battle isn’t over, but finally, we have momentum and we are winning.”

Even sales of digital albums are doing well – up by almost 20% – while the fall in physical sales is not as bad as expected at just 5%.

“Net net, finally, we’re up 4%,” says Bainwol.

Unsurprisingly, both Sherman and Bainwol believe that last month’s “Copyright Alerts” agreement with the United States’ leading ISPs will prove to be a turning point.

“We have made profound progress, as a community, in the fight to make the Internet a place of order rather than chaos, where legitimate players work together to encourage legal activity and suppress illegal activity. The recent deal with the ISPs, negotiated so ably by Cary, Steve and Vicky, is perhaps the most vivid example,” says Bainwol.

Sherman believes that cooperation between the content industries and ISPs, and the relationships between ISPs and their subscribers are built on economics. Hardcore pirates, he implies, represent the 5% of ISP subscribers eating up much of the available bandwidth and therefore potentially reducing the legitimate Internet experiences of the majority.

ISPs, he says, will have to continue with massive infrastructure investment to support enormous growth in legitimate online streaming. That will only be hampered by additional illicit content uptake.

“Do they really want huge amounts of illegal activity on top of that? They have an interest in making sure that the growth of the Internet is based on legitimate commerce,” says Sherman.

Interestingly, while acknowledging that a hardcore will got to “amazing lengths” to get free music, Sherman belives that the majority of file-sharers are casual, and all they need is a gentle reminder that their behavior is not anonymous (read: a warning letter from their ISP) and they will begin to turn to legitimate sources.

Going forward, both outgoing and incoming CEO’s praise the anti-piracy partnerships the RIAA is forging with payment processors such as PayPal and Mastercard. Sherman also hints at their future legal strategy.

“We choose our litigation strategies very carefully to try and make the most of our budget,” he explains. “We basically look to where the law needs clarification, so that the rules of the road online are clear and protect creators.”

One area that has never been tested in a US court is the legality of torrent sites, which may be why that with the LimeWire case out-of-the-way the RIAA has filed lawsuits to discover the identities of the individuals behind Bitsnoop.com, Limetorrents.com and Monova.org.

So, as Bainwol leaves with Grokster, KaZaa and Limewire’s deaths under his belt, Sherman steps into his shoes. Already the similarities in their approaches and reasoning are marked.

Meet the new boss…..

Source: New and Old RIAA CEOs Agree: “We’re Beating Piracy”

The jury found her guilty of infringing the rights of Capitol Records and awarded a $62,500 fine per song punishment.

Sharing just 24 songs using the file-sharing client Kazaa was set to cost her a cool $1.5 million.

But now, following a decision by a federal court, that verdict has been slashed to ‘just’ $54,000. In delivering his verdict, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis slammed the November decision.

“The Court concludes that an award of $1.5 million for stealing and distributing 24 songs for personal use is appalling. Such an award is so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportioned to the offense and obviously unreasonable,” Judge Davis wrote in his verdict.

“In this particular case, involving a first-time willful, consumer infringer of limited means who committed illegal song file-sharing for her own personal use, an award of $2,250 per song, for a total award of $54,000, is the maximum award consistent with due process.

“This reduced award is punitive and substantial. It acts as a potent deterrent.”

This latest verdict marks the third occasion that Judge Davis has overruled the decision of a jury in the RIAA’s case against Rasset-Thomas.

In 2007 a jury hit Jammie Thomas-Rasset with a $222,000 verdict. She appealed and in 2008 a mistrial was declared. Judge Davis ruled that the fines were “disproportionate to the damages suffered.”

The case went for re-trial before a new jury in 2009 and a guilty verdict was reached yet again, this time with even harsher fines. Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay $80,000 per infringement, a massive $1.92 million in total.

Just a few months on and this amount was slashed to $54,000 when the award was deemed unconstitutional.

In November 2010 the appeal of the retrial was heard and once again the RIAA and Capitol Records came out on top. The jury decided that Thomas-Rasset had to pay a $62,500 fine per shared song, a total of $1.5 million, a verdict which has today been overturned by Judge Davis.

Today’s decision is unlikely to mark the end of the road in this case. The RIAA are said to be dissatisfied with the result and are reported to be considering their options.

Lawyer Ben Sheffner, who broke the news, posted a copy of the decision online (embedded below).

Order on Motions to Amend/Alter Verdict in Capitol v. Thomas-Rasset

Source: “Appalling” $1.5m File-Sharing Verdict Slashed To $54,000

Unlike their counterparts at the MPAA, BitTorrent sites have not been prime targets for the recording industry association’s lawyers. However, recent court filings obtained by TorrentFreak show that the RIAA might have just changed course.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has granted a request from the RIAA to subpoena the privacy protection services utilized by three large torrent sites. The site owners use these services to hide their personal details from otherwise publicly available WHOIS domain records, but the RIAA wants to know who they are dealing with.

The targeted sites are Monova.org, Bitsnoop.com and Limetorrents.com, which all have hundreds of thousands of daily visitors. According to the RIAA, these sites are infringing on the copyrights of many artists.

“We believe your service is hosting the above-referenced website on its network. This website offers direct links to files containing sound recordings for other users to download by such artists as Lady Gaga, Micheal Jackson, Coldplay, Madonna and Kanye West,” the RIAA writes in a letter to Whoisguard.com.

“As stated in the attached subpoena, you are required to disclose to the RIAA information sufficient to identify the infringer. This would include the individual’s IP-address and e-mail address,” the RIAA adds.

One of the torrent site operators targeted by the RIAA told TorrentFreak that the subpoena comes as a surprise. He always responded swiftly to RIAA’s DMCA requests while the court documents suggest that he hasn’t been cooperative at all.

“The RIAA has sent us several DMCA requests in the past and we always honored these,” Bitsnoop’s owner informed us. “Apparently that wasn’t enough, so now they pull this stunt.”

At this point it is unknown what the RIAA is planning to do once they obtain the personal information of the site’s owners. Although it could theoretically be the beginning of a full-fledged litigation campaign against the torrent sites, it seems more likely that the subpoenas will be used to pressure and threaten operators.

During the past year several music industry associations in Europe and Asia have sent requests to domain registrars with a similar objective. The ultimate goal is to make it harder for BitTorrent site operators to continue their business by putting pressure on them, and the companies that provide services to these sites.

A good example is the following sentence in the letter to Whoisguard.com, which goes far beyond the attached subpoena for information.

“We are asking for your immediate assistance in stopping this [linking to torrent files] unauthorized activity. Specifically, we request that you remove the infringing files from the system, or that you disable access to the infringing files, and that you inform the site operator of the illegality or his or her conduct.”

Whatever the true motivation of the RIAA is, with the recent news about domain seizures, extradition requests and these recent subpoenas, operating a BitTorrent site has become a stressful job. Whether this will have the desired outcome for the music industry group in the long run remains to be seen.

TorrentFreak asked the RIAA to comment on our finding but we have not received a response.

Source: RIAA Starts Going After BitTorrent Sites

At the center of their plan is a system to notify and educate suspected copyright infringers by sending them so-called ‘copyright alerts’.

According to the participants, including the MPAA, RIAA and all major ISPs, the warning system is likely to result in a massive decrease in online piracy in the U.S. All partners stress, however, that the agreement is merely a ‘common framework’ to deal with copyright infringements and it doesn’t oblige ISPs to disconnect users’ Internet access.

So what the plan?

The new agreement will streamline the current avalanche of DMCA notices Internet providers are already forwarding to their customers. A third-party will monitor file-sharing networks and collect the IP-addresses of suspected infringers. These will then be added to a database and forwarded to the Internet provider who will send a corresponding copyright alert.

This alert will inform the Internet subscriber that his or her account was allegedly used to share copyrighted content, and how to prevent this from happening in the future. If the same IP-address is spotted again a similar alert will be sent, and only after 5 ‘strikes’ will the Internet provider take action.

The ISPs have several options on how to deal with repeat infringers. One of the suggestions is to slow down their connection speed, but ISPs may also temporarily redirect the customer to a landing page which offers instructions on how to engage in a friendly and educational chat with the abuse department.

Before any of the above sanctions go into effect Internet subscribers have the right to call for an independent review at the cost of a $35 filing fee.

But will it be effective?

Not really. First of all this agreement only covers a few of the many sources of online piracy. The millions of U.S. Internet users who download via cyberlockers are not affected by this agreement at all, as these downloads are impossible to track by third parties. The same is true for the many online streaming portals which have become very popular recently.

The agreement is mainly targeted at BitTorrent users, but these can also bypass the copyright alerts quite easily. Signing up for a VPN or proxy does the trick, and the same is probably true for more obscure private BitTorrent trackers which are less likely to be monitored.

A recent survey in France, where Internet users can actually lose their connection, revealed that the new agreement might not be worth the cost. Only 4% of the polled file-sharers said they stopped sourcing music from illegal services out of fear of detection. In the UK, a recent survey by an ISP revealed similar results.

Despite the relative ease with which copyright infringers can bypass the warning system and the lack of deterrence, all parties involved are ecstatic about the new agreement.

“This groundbreaking agreement ushers in a new day and a fresh approach to addressing the digital theft of copyrighted works,” RIAA’s Cary Sherman trumpeted in a comment.

We have our doubts.

Source: MPAA, RIAA Team Up With ISPs to ‘Alert’ Pirates

The mechanism preferred by the big recording and movie studios is the so-called ‘graduated response’ scheme, whereby Internet users are subjected to ever increasing punishments for their infringing behaviors.

Now, having faced resistance for so long, it seems that the MPAA and RIAA will get their way in the United States.

According to CNET, some of the country’s largest ISPs including AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon are close to striking a deal with Hollywood and Big Music to put in a framework of measures to progressively punish errant subscribers.

Although a final agreement is yet to be signed, plans are said to be “on track” and could be officially unveiled next month. The deal is believed to be structured as follows:

- Rightsholders track infringing Internet users and send notices to ISPs
- ISPs used this data to send warnings, called “Copyright Alerts”, to subscribers
- If subscribers fail to improve their behavior, further warnings will be issued

Eventually though, ISPs have agreed to get tough with customers who don’t heed warnings.

Sources quoted by CNET say that ISPs will be a given flexibility to select from a “menu” of sanctions, including throttling a subscriber’s connection through to limiting web browsing. One scenario would see the web almost completely removed, with access granted only to the top 200 websites. Other more gentle measures include copyright-awareness programs.

However, unlike the legislative changes already implemented in the UK, the range of sanctions in the US will not include the dreaded “3rd strike”, i.e complete termination of the subscriber’s account. Currently there is no mention of temporary suspensions either; they could prove a deal-breaker in this sensitive environment.

The agreements between the MPAA, RIAA and ISPs in the United States will be completely voluntary. The ISPs will insist that they are completely within their rights to amend their Terms of Service to accommodate such an agreement and will almost certainly do so quickly.

In March, during the House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on Intellectual Property, Competition, and the Internet, it became increasingly clear that the US government would be backing voluntary agreements to deal with the subscriber end of infringement, rather than the legislative change approach favored for dealing with file-sharing and streaming websites.

“Voluntary cooperative solutions are a priority focus and we believe that, in combination with law enforcement action, voluntary actions by the private sector have the potential to dramatically reduce online infringement and change the enforcement paradigm,” said U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel.

“We will continue to push forward to encourage voluntary cooperative actions on multiple fronts. Our ultimate goal is to reduce infringement online so we will continue to assess our approach to ensure that it is as effective as possible.”

The costs of the ‘graduated response’ will be shared between the entertainment industries and ISPs, meaning that regular Internet subscribers will, as always, pick up the enforcement tab.

Source: MPAA, RIAA, Major ISPs Preparing ‘Graduated Response’ To Piracy

The evidence further showed that LimeWire marketed its application to Napster users and that its business model depended on mass copyright infringements.

Following the injunction LimeWire immediately disabled its file-sharing client, but the trouble for the company was far from over. Record labels and music publishers kept chasing LimeWire demanding compensation for the losses they claim the file-sharing service operator had caused.

The labels calculated that the company behind the popular file-sharing client owed them up to a billion dollars, and they filed a claim to collect it.

Last week, a New York federal jury trial started, but before this came to an end the two parties agreed to settle the case for $105 million. The RIAA brought in 9,715 tracks as evidence, which means that the amount translates to $10,808 per track instead of the maximum $150,000 the jury could have awarded.

The labels are obviously pleased with the outcome of the case. They’ve successfully argued that LimeWire caused both them and their artists significant losses.

“The resolution of this case is another milestone in the continuing evolution of online music to a legitimate marketplace that appropriately rewards creators,” RIAA Chairman Mitch Bainwol said in a comment.

Too bad, however, that the RIAA isn’t sharing any of the ‘damages’ with the artists, to reward them. Despite presenting thousands of artists as victims in the case, none of them are expected to see any of the settlement money in their bank accounts anytime soon.

RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy previously told TorrentFreak that the ‘damages’ accrued from piracy-related lawsuits will not go to any of the artists, but towards funding more anti-piracy campaigns. “Any funds recouped are re-invested into our ongoing education and anti-piracy programs,” he said.

Thus far the RIAA has not announced officially how the LimeWire settlement will be spent, but we don’t expect them to steer away from their previous course. This makes today’s decision on compensation a victory for the major labels, but certainly not one for musicians.

Source: LimeWire Pays RIAA $105 Million, Artists Get Nothing

Google were tight-lipped, saying only that the company removes products that violate their terms and conditions. Last year, however, Grooveshark’s app was removed from Apple’s store on the same grounds. It was later confirmed that Apple had received a complaint from Universal Music.

Perhaps inevitably, some observers have added these two events together and come to the conclusion that if Apple and mighty Google both have issues with Grooveshark there must be a pressing legal issue with the service.

Not according to Senior VP of Information Products at Grooveshark, Paul Geller. In a statement responding to the “misleading press” created by the company’s “detractors and competitors”, he insists that his company’s product and operations are entirely legal.

“Google hasn’t specified what it was in their ‘Terms of Service’ that we allegedly violated, but there does appear to be some confusion about whether Grooveshark is a legal service,” Geller first told Digital Music News.

“So let’s set the record straight: there is nothing illegal about what Grooveshark offers to consumers.”

Geller goes on to clarify the difference between a ‘legal’ service and one that is ‘licensed’.

“Laws come from Congress. Licenses come from businesses,” he explains. “Grooveshark is completely legal because we comply with the laws passed by Congress, but we are not licensed by every label (yet).”

According to Geller, Grooveshark is a technology company, and one which operates firmly within the boundaries of the DMCA.

“Some would have you believe that those of us who use the DMCA to innovate are inherently infringers and that claiming Safe Harbor under the DMCA is as good as admitting guilt. Not so,” he insists.

Geller suggests that the DMCA’s Safe Harbor provision was put in place to allow companies like YouTube (and indeed Grooveshark) to innovate and create ways around the problems being suffered by the content industries.

“If it weren’t for this notion, many of the products and services that are now taking a bite out of piracy would never have been born,” he notes.

On licensing, Geller says that Grooveshark has agreements with thousands of labels all over the world and also pays the three largest US performing rights organizations.

“We pay for our streams, and we actively negotiate with virtually every single content owner,” says Geller.

“We’ve taken down over 1.76 million files and suspended upload privileges to 22,274 users. These are not the characteristics of a company ‘dedicated to copyright infringement’. As we work with artists and labels to make more content available to our users, Grooveshark becomes more competitive as an alternative to piracy.”

Grooveshark is hardly a small affair. Geller says they serve twenty-five million unique monthly users spanning more than 150 countries and will fight for their business.

“In light of the recent misleading press concerning Grooveshark’s application, it is important to make clear that we will defend our service, and the letter and the spirit of the law, in court and in Congress.”

“We will defend our name and our ideals for the sake of our users who expect modern delivery systems and comprehensive access across devices, for the sake of artists and content owners who fear another decade of decline, and for other innovators who continue to bring new ideas to market through the expression of creativity in the form of technology,” he concludes.

In departing, Geller asks Google and Apple to reinstate the Grooveshark apps to their stores. Considering the pressure both companies are under and the negative noises coming from the RIAA, he could be waiting for a long time.

Source: Grooveshark Bites Back at the RIAA: We’re Completely Legal

A landmark ruling, and one The Hollywood Reporter went so far to describe as “the most important decision to date in the ongoing mass-litigation campaign against thousands of individuals who traded copyrighted movies on BitTorrent.”

But then, a few days later we reported that Judge Beryl Howell may not be the most objective person to rule on these types of cases. After a quick background check we found that Howell earned close to half a million dollars as an RIAA lobbyist in previous years. At the time, she was the Managing Director and General Counsel at a consulting firm with expertise in digital forensics.

This unveiling of Howell’s close ties to the RIAA was again widely reported in the press, and it now seems that this may have had an effect. In two new orders that came out of the same cases where Judge Howell previously gave a carte blanche, she is now putting several restrictions on what the copyright holders can and can’t do.

In Maverick Entertainment cases, Judge Howell orders (pdf) the copyright holders to dismiss all the cases for which they indicated they would not name the defendants. This means that it will result in a dismissal “for all John Doe defendants for which the plaintiff has received identifying information as of February 1st, 2011.”

In the cases related to the Call Of The Wild movie (pdf), the judge appears to want to kill the case for the same reason John Steele’s CP Productions, Inc. case v. Does 1-500 case was killed in Illinois (violation of Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 4m). That is, defendants had to be served within 120 days after the complaint is filed.

However, the copyright holders are being given the opportunity to give a good reason why the defendants should not be dismissed, and in both of the above cases they have the option to name new defendants in an amended complaint.

TorrentFreak talked to Texas lawyer Robert Cashman, who represents several defendants in mass-BitTorrent lawsuits, to find out how he sees the remarkable turnaround and what the latest orders mean for the current defendants.

“Whether these defendants get dismissed or not is based on the coming acrobatics of the plaintiff attorneys, and how hard the judge claps her hands in amusement,” Cashman told us in a response.

Interestingly, Cashman agrees that it appears the negative attention on her RIAA past may have had an effect on her ruling. He thinks that bringing the nefarious nature of the cases to Judge Howell’s attention may have led to the latest orders.

“I do not think she was aware when she wrote her opinion, that the plaintiffs were using the legal system (her court) to harass and extort thousands of dollars from each of the John Doe defendants while pretending to her as if they were merely conducting evidence gathering,” Cashman said.

“It appears she — consistent with her previous ruling — is finding another way out of these cases while still keeping her past pro-copyright stance in accordance with the current US administration’s policy against copyright infringement,” he added.

Whatever the true motivations for Judge Howell are, the end result is more positive for the defendants than Howell’s previous verdicts. Together with the thousands of dismissals we’ve seen in recent weeks, it’s beginning to look like the mass-BitTorrent lawsuits may not be that profitable for the copyright holders after all. Not even with an former RIAA lobbyist as a judge.

Source: RIAA Lobbyist Turned Judge Backpedals On BitTorrent Cases

One of these lawsuits has now been concluded with EMI, Warner Bros., Universal, Sony and several other major music publishers reaching a settlement agreement with LimeWire. No details on the deal have been released, except the court filing which note that both parties “shall each bear its own costs of suit, including attorney’s fees.”

While this settlement brings to an end a lawsuit started in June last year when LimeWire was still operational, by no means does it mark the end of LimeWire’s legal troubles. Due to the complex copyright pyramid the music industry has set up, many of the same companies are still fighting the company in a separate case as copyright owners (vs. publishers).

This case is where the permanent injunction which forced LimeWire to shut down was issued last October. According to the injunction, LimeWire “intentionally encouraged infringement” by LimeWire users, its software was used “overwhelmingly for infringement” and the company knew about the “substantial infringement being committed” by its users.

The evidence further showed that LimeWire marketed its application to Napster users and that its business model depended on mass copyright infringements.

The injunction was the result of a lengthy and ongoing litigation process which dates back to 2006, and soon after it was awarded the record labels filed a claim to recoup damages said to have been caused by LimeWire. The labels calculated that the company behind the popular file-sharing client owes them up to a billion dollars.

The case dragged on and in recent weeks dozens of documents were submitted to the court in a noteworthy side-battle. To get to the bottom of how the music industry sets up licensing deals with other Internet companies, LimeWire subpoenaed internal emails from Apple, Amazon, Yahoo, Google, MySpace and others.

Thus far a quarter million pages of emails have been collected, leading LimeWire to draw some interesting conclusions. Among other things, they found that unauthorized downloads actually boosted the revenue of music labels, and that their income took a dive when LimeWire shut down.

Both parties continue their dispute in the coming weeks and a trial has been scheduled for May, in which the damages claim will be assessed.

While the record labels are hoping to catch a big score against LimeWire, many ex-users of its file-sharing client have moved on to one of the many LimeWire alternatives, or the resurrected pirate edition.

Source: LimeWire Settles With Record Labels, Still Faces $1 Billion Claim

In the United States, where diplomats helped to draft the Spanish legislation, several copyright holders have responded with delight at the passing of the law. However, according to the RIAA and the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), this is just the first step.

In their advice to the US Trade Representative the groups have included Spain in the Priority Watch List, the highest category for countries that are considered to be ‘piracy havens’. Spain is joined by other defiant states such as Canada, Russia and China, all countries that are labeled as a major threat to the US entertainment industries.

The recommendations of the RIAA will be considered by the US Trade Representative when it prepares its annual Special 301 Report. This report is meant to identify countries that obstruct or deny proper copyright enforcement, thereby hurting the profits of US industries. Last year Canada was also included (pdf) on the priority watch list, while Spain was placed a category lower on the regular watch list.

Despite the passing of the ‘Sinde law’ the RIAA and IIPA say that Spain should be listed on the priority watch list this year. The fact that file-sharing sites have been ruled as operating within the boundaries of the law is something that needs to be addressed in particular, the pair insist.

“The sky-high Internet piracy levels in Spain can be attributed to government policies that have created an Internet-wide safe harbor for infringing activities. Spanish enforcement authorities have established the de facto decriminalization of illegal downloading of content distributed via P2P file-sharing,” they argue.

Another issue that should be resolved is the lack of ability to identify and report copyright infringers. “Spain’s laws fail to meet the minimum requirements of the EU E-Commerce Directive regarding liability for ISPs, or to establish the necessary tools to obtain the identity of the direct infringer,” the groups add.

Aside from Spain, Canada is another candidate for the 2011 priority watch list. In a statement RIAA’s Neil Turkewitz specifically mentioned Canada’s slow progress on revising their copyright law..

“The Canadian Government has inexplicably consumed yet another year without modernizing its copyright regime, leaving a legal structure in place that is not adequate to respond to present challenges,” Turkewitz said.

The claimed result is that Canada is now one of the world’s true pirate havens. In their advice to the US Trade Representative RIAA and IIPA write the following.

“Canada is home to some of the world’s most popular illegitimate Internet sites, including illegitimate P2P download and streaming sites.”

“Canada is viewed as a country in which laws to address digital piracy are weak, ineffective or non-existent, and as a result many sites dedicated to piracy or information sources about them claim that locating or operating in Canada is to their advantage because their services are legal in Canada.”

“Canada has been home to the operators or hosts of five of the world’s top ten pirate BitTorrent sites, and it continues to be a major source of online theft in Canada and around the world.”

Although the latter statistic is open to interpretation, the RIAA and IIPA urge the US Government to include Canada, Spain and 11 other countries on the priority watch list of the 2011 Special 301 Report. In a few weeks we will learn to what extent the advice of the US copyright industry has been heeded.

Source: RIAA Labels Spain and Canada As Piracy Havens

With a view to correcting this and other misconceptions about their operations, RapidShare took the unprecedented step last year of hiring Washington-based Dutko, the same lobbying firm retained by Google. The lobbying registration form filed in November clearly set out their aims.

“Develop and implement a coordinated government affairs/public relations program for RapidShare targeted at Congress, the Administration and the media to help counter negative attacks on the company from U.S. copyright interests,” it read.

U.S. copyright interests = MPAA and RIAA.

By ordering Dutko to counter the political efforts of these two organizations, RapidShare appears to be acknowledging that they are the biggest threat to its expansion or, more negatively, the biggest threat to its survival in the US.

But despite this rivalry, comments from spokesman Daniel Raimer suggest that the differences between his company and the content industry are not insurmountable, particularly when RapidShare is offering something they need.

“There are plenty of reasonable people in the content industry. Those people know that a file hosting company that is truly dedicated to fight online infringement may be of high value to them,” said Raimer.

“We therefore want to convince people in Washington and in the content industry that we are such a legitimate company. I would be surprised if anyone in Washington or anyone within the content industry is going to have an issue with that.”

This olive branch approach is not particularly new. Last year, leaked documents showed that RapidShare’s outgoing General Manager Bobby Chang had tried to curry favor with the entertainment industries by offering to distribute licensed content alongside the implementation of tougher measures to close the accounts of users who use RapidShare to share infringing content.

“We are more aggressively than before terminating accounts of users who have been caught uploading copyright protected content,” Chang wrote.

However, while a tougher line towards uploaders would be welcomed by the entertainment industries, the signs point to them seeking a more proactive response to the infringement problem. Last year RapidShare told TorrentFreak that copyright holders have been pushing hard for the company to install filters that will prevent users from uploading copyrighted material in the first instance, a prominent theme in the ongoing isoHunt case.

But just how keen is RapidShare to install filters?

Although in a different jurisdiction, if one looks at recent legal battles RapidShare has fought in Germany, the signs are that although it is prepared to take some anti-piracy measures, filtering is not one of them. After being previously ordered by a court to install a filter to keep certain ebooks off its servers, RapidShare was hit with a fine of 150,000 euros for failing to do so.

This week, the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf ruled that RapidShare does not have to install filters to stop an Atari video game appearing on its servers and that its current measures are adequate.

“The ruling demonstrates once again that RapidShare is operating a fully legal range and has taken measures against the misuse of its service which go beyond the level that is legally required,” said Raimer about that case. “We are confident that copyright holders will gradually come to accept this conclusion.“

So while RapidShare may have announced that it’s dedicated to fighting online infringement, its recent actions indicate that it would seek to fight the introduction of filtering technology, something the entertainment industries desperately want. Indeed, the company already feels that it goes beyond the requirements of the law and the comments by Raimer seem to show that the olive branch – and the line of cooperation – will be drawn right there.

It will be fascinating to see how and where this particular battle plays out, both in the legal arena and, perhaps more importantly, on Capitol Hill. RapidShare almost certainly operates entirely legally under current US law, and the company – with the help of its lobbyists – will be keen that the government doesn’t implement changes to alter that position.

Source: RapidShare: We’re Dedicated To Fighting Online Infringement

In describing the file-hoster’s activities, the RIAA suggested that many of the files posted to RapidShare – whose URLs were then posted to blogs – contained pre-release content, an eye-catching offense in the US for those that posted the files and links, but not necessarily RapidShare.

In its submission to the Office of the US Trade Representative, the MPAA said that cyberlockers such as RapidShare were put forward because their main source of traffic is driven by the availability of vast amounts of infringing content on their servers.

“As you can imagine, we’re not very happy about that,” said Daniel Raimer, attorney and spokesman for RapidShare, in a just published interview.

As illustrated by the Lobbying Registration form shown below, RapidShare is now out to present their side of the story. The company has hired Washington based lobbying firm Dutko to send a clear message to the RIAA and MPAA that they aren’t the only ones who can lobby the US Government.

Drawing comparisons with Google, Daniel Raimer says the inclusion of the company on the “most notorious” list is unfair since RapidShare, like the search giant, is prepared to filter content. While some cooperation with the entertainment industries seems inevitable, it remains to be seen how interested they will be in an informal filtering agreement, especially since even enforced ones can easily go off course.

When it comes to lobbying, RapidShare will be up against formidable and well practised opponents. As revealed this month, in the last quarter alone the MPAA and RIAA spent a combined total of $1.8 million on lobbying in Washington. Public records reveal that these entertainment industry groups focused heavily on legislation and authorities involved in domain name seizures.

Of course, following the recent domain name seizures carried out by DHS and ICE, it seems that lobbying paid off nicely. RapidShare will be keen to avoid a similar devastating fate, particularly given its status on the “most notorious” list.

However, even for the mighty US Government, taking on RapidShare in a domain war would be an entirely different prospect to picking a squabble with the relative minnows targeted in November, but RapidShare has much to lose and is taking no chances.

The aim is for RapidShare to be removed from the list of “Notorious Markets” by early 2011. They’re in for one hell of a fight.

Source: RapidShare Shows MPAA/RIAA: We Can Lobby Lawmakers Too

The Big Music (RIAA) labels make their fortunes by promoting and marketing artists who usually only pocket a few percent of album sales. Their control over the distribution channels has given them a great deal of power, but the Internet is taking this monopoly away bit by bit. Today, independent artists and labels can easily reach millions of customers, something unimaginable only a decade ago.

That said, the advancement of the Internet has also brought in new threats. Apple. for example, is taking a big chunk of the revenue music generates online and their growing power is frustrating artists more and more. Musicians are forced to cut up songs because Apple deems them too long, and track listings are shuffled by mistake without an option for the artist to restore his art.

One of the first musicians who revolted publicly against Apple was Benn Jordan aka The Flashbulb, who found his album on iTunes in early 2008 without being aware or paid for it. In a counter move Jordan decided to share all his music on BitTorrent for free, which turned out to be one of the best business decisions he has made in his career.

On Christmas eve, where sharing is on the minds of millions of people, we sit down with Benn to talk about what has happened in the past three years. How did he fare financially? Has his opinion towards Apple or the RIAA labels changed? Where does he think the music industry is heading?

TF: You first published your music for free on BitTorrent nearly three years ago. Could you take us back to that moment and explain why you took this decision?

Jordan: I just figured that if someone was going to upload my new album to these sites, it may as well be me. I can make sure the rip is a good one and I can personalize it with a message. It wasn’t marketing or anything political at first either. Trent Reznor and some other big names released stuff in a similar fashion a few months later and the same crowd applauded, but I felt like it was more about marketing.

TF: How has this decision changed your stance toward “piracy”?

Jordan: It oddly put me in a hot seat for a bit and for a limited time, made me an pseudo expert in a field of study that doesn’t really exist yet. Again, this was all undeserved and weird. Music piracy is still a huge issue and people want answers, but they’re not sure who to ask.

I’m grateful now because it made me think, generally, file trading is just a peephole to a much larger picture. Copyright, in its current state, holds information at ransom for monetary value. While in music it can stifle culture and art, with literature and education it can be nothing more than a weapon of class warfare.

TF: How are you doing financially compared to three years ago? Have you benefited from giving away your music?

Jordan: In this particular case, yes. It expanded the amount of people who pirate my music, therefore it has expanded those who bought CDs, donated to me, or came out to shows. Another interesting thing is that it wound up in some licensing company’s hands that I’ve never worked with before, and got me additional placement in TV/film/etc, which is a good portion of my income.

TF: What are your thoughts on the big labels. Are they good or bad for the majority of artists?

Jordan: I have to be honest. Big labels that aren’t being innovative are little more than delusional laughing stocks at this point. Their numbers get worse and worse, and they push the artists to do dumber and dumber stunts to try and stay on top of things.

The shows and festivals they book are sponsored by 8 different alcoholic beverages and 10 different energy drinks, and they just punish their customers while validating their own demise. I’m not worried about them and neither should you. Its a dozen senior citizens trying to stop a stampede of fresh culture. Good luck boys.

TF: And what about Apple?

Jordan: Apple, love or hate their products, is fucking scary. On one hand, hats off. They’re business and marketing geniuses. On the other hand, they might single handedly be the worst thing that has happened to entertainment media in the last 3 years. The major record industry collapsing should also mean that artists are more free to do what they want.

For example, iTunes completely screwed up the track listing of my last album Arboreal. Their network is so influential that over half of the people who have bought the CD from my label now have botched track titles on their mp3 players. Apple doesn’t have ANY accessible artist support to deal with things like this.

They reject my cover art if I don’t have my name and the title in bold. If I want to sell a 30 minute long track (Louisiana Mourning, for example), they require me to split it up into a bunch of separate tracks. Their distribution system is so unorganized that artists have to pay business like Tunecore upwards of $40 per album (and annual fees) to do Apple’s job for them.

Again, its genius on the business side. But they’ve wedged themselves in so well that now, if I don’t have an album on iTunes (under their insane rules and lack of support), a large portion of my listeners simply won’t know how to put my music on their iPods/iPhones.

I know I sound preachy, but think about it, how is that any better than what existed 15 years ago? I still maintain that I’d rather have my stuff “illegally” downloaded than have to go down that path.

TF: What advise do you have for artists who consider giving away their music?

Jordan: That being a “consideration” is always funny to me. You either release it knowing it will be distributed for free or you keep it locked up on your hard drive. If the last decade has taught us anything, it is that no amount of bitching, threatening, lobbying, suing, or file protecting is going to stop information from being spread to those who want it.

The way I look at it is, if hundreds of thousands of people are downloading my album, I’m contributing to culture and my music will likely outlive me. Money is pretty insignificant in the face of immortality.

TF: What changes in the industry would you like to see in the coming years?

Jordan: It makes me nervous because I feel like we’re at a really big crossroad. We’re facing three big issues at the same time that are eventually going to be connected: Net-neutrality, free speech, and piracy/copyright laws. We need to make a bigger deal about it because we don’t want information to be controlled by an entity that only exists for its investors.

We don’t want a situation where if Amazon refuses to carry a book, nobody will be able to read it. Or if iTunes refuses to carry an unabridged album, nobody will be able to hear it. Most importantly, we don’t want poor people to continue being less educated than wealthy people because of the illusion created that information has a monetary value. News, history, media, and culture is made by everyone, and it is intolerable to me that we allow the messengers to hold it from us at such a high price, whether monetarily or contextually .

Now’s the time to get involved.

Source: Music Is Better Off On BitTorrent, Than With Apple or Big Music

Both the recent domain name seizures and the proposed COICA bill were encouraged by the MPAA and RIAA. However, the role of the RIAA and MPAA has not been limited to passively applauding the actions of the Government. On the contrary, both groups lobbied extensively for more Government control over domain names.

A look at public filings reveal that the outfits spent more than $1.8 million in the third quarter of 2010 on lobbying efforts directly targeted at the COICA bill and the authorities that carried out the recent domain name seizures. Money, that as it stands now, was well spent.

The RIAA’s filings at the Office of the Clerk reveal that the music industry trade group invested the most, $1.29 million in total. This money was spent on a variety of subjects, including the COICA bill and ACTA. In total, the RIAA listed nine copyright/trademark lobbyists including its CEO Mitch Bainwol.

The MPAA on its turn spent $520,000 on lobbying efforts in the third quarter. Part of the money went to lobbying efforts at the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the authorities that were responsible for the recent domain seizures.

In addition, the MPAA lobbied for three-strikes anti-piracy initiatives such as ‘graduated response’ and legislation that targets digital piracy on ‘rogue sites’ such as COICA. The MPAA lists three lobbyists including Michael O’Leary who previously served as counsel to the former Senator Joe Biden.

Indeed, the same Joe Biden who is now the Vice President and declared war on digital piracy earlier this year. “Piracy Is Theft, Clean and Simple,” Biden said at the time.

Although it is no secret that the MPAA and RIAA spend millions of dollars in Washington every year, it is worth looking into where that money goes. From public filings it becomes apparent that the US Government’s move to commercial censorship is also reflected in the lobbying efforts by the entertainment industry.

And that’s just part of the influence. Aside from trying to influence lawmakers and the authorities, both groups are also playing their role in law enforcement. As we reported last Friday, the MPAA helped out Homeland Security with the application for the seizure order of Torrent-Finder and other sites.

It is of course impossible to measure if any of the lobbying efforts did indeed have an effect on the increased anti-piracy actions by the US Government, but considering the money that the MPAA and RIAA spent on lobbying, it wouldn’t come as a total surprise.

Source: MPAA/RIAA Lobbied Extensively In Favor of Domain Seizures

Today, CNET reports that the RIAA is claiming in court papers that due to the existence of LimeWire Pirate Edition, somehow the official LimeWire company is in breach of the injunction handed down by a federal judge.

“Defendants have demonstrated in no uncertain terms that they either will not or cannot do what the injunction commands,” CNET quotes the RIAA as saying.

But how could LimeWire be responsible for the actions of those behind LimeWire Pirate Edition? Simple. The RIAA is claiming that the site which carried links to the software was created by someone “either formerly or presently a Lime Wire employee.”

To this end, the RIAA has asked for LimeWire’s assistance to find out the identity of “Meta Pirate”, the individual fronting the LimeWire Pirate Edition operation. Following this pressure, LimeWire took action against the Pirate Edition’s website – and had it shut down.

Unsurprisingly, Meta Pirate is not happy and has told TorrentFreak that the RIAA is exploiting the release of LimeWire Pirate Edition to gain leverage in its case against Lime Wire.

“This is nothing more than cheap and dishonest opportunism,” he told us.

“The monkeys who created LimeWire Pirate Edition are not associated in any way with Lime Wire LLC. Because of the RIAA’s underhanded tactics, Lime Wire has used a court order from the U.S. Southern District Court of New York to shut down our website.”

Meta Pirate is well aware that it’s impossible to contest the court order while remaining anonymous so the site will stay down for now. Nevertheless, the software remains available from The Pirate Bay and other websites.

“LimeWire is and always has been open source software, licensed under the GNU GPL,” he concludes. “We created a derivative work from the published source code, as any user of LimeWire has the right to do. We encourage other curious monkeys to do the same.”

Source: LimeWire Pirate Edition Site Nuked By “Cheap and Dishonest” RIAA Action

Among the “rogue websites” are some interesting and in some case unusual targets. On the top of the RIAA’s list is China’s Google equivalent, the search engine Baidu. This “rogue” search giant is a publicly traded company and was the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ-100, traded on Wall Street. Nevertheless, the RIAA has informed the US Trade Representative that Baidu is likely to be the largest facilitator of illicit music downloading that can be found online.

“Few if any of the links provided by Baidu connect the user to legitimate versions of copyright-protected materials. It is undoubtedly one of the largest distributors of infringing music in the world. While the infringing materials may or may not be stored on Baidu’s servers, it is clear that Baidu’s music service is wholly premised on inducing infringement through the provision of access to infringing materials,” the RIAA writes in the submission.

The RIAA also sees Russia’s Facebook equivalent VKontakte as a “rogue website” because it allows members not only to upload photos, but also music and video files. This functionality was recently used by the Mulve music download download. The RIAA further names the Russian and Ukrainian MP3 stores such as Mp3ninja and MP3fiesta as targets that hurt the United States economy.

But of course, no list of sites that “actively encourage and facilitate music theft” would be complete without the mention of BitTorrent sites. And indeed, no less than five of the leading torrent sites are included by the RIAA (The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, isoHunt, BTjunkie, Demonoid). Interestingly, the meta-search engine Torrentz got a mention from the RIAA, where the MPAA left it out intentionally a few days ago. The descriptions of the five torrent sites as well as the other targets are in the submission below.

The cyberlocker RapidShare is another facilitator and promoter of illicit music downloading if we have to believe the RIAA. The fact that the United States District Court of California ruled that RapidShare is not guilty of copyright infringement earlier this year was conveniently not mentioned by the music association. Also, the many file-hosting services that have outgrown RapidShare in terms of traffic recently didn’t get a mention.

The last target that we want to mention here is RLSLOG, one of the world’s most popular release news sites, which has had its fair share of copyright related issues with hosting companies in the last year. Although the site does not host any copyright infringing material, the site operators and users do often post links to external sites were the files in question can be downloaded. The RIAA describes the site as follows:

“www.rlslog.net has thousands of pre-release or recently released music titles available on the site. For each title there are multiple one-click download links known as ‘mirrors’. Having mirror copies of a title ensures that if one link is removed there is still a working download link available. Users will post mirror links which can result in there being tens of copies of the same title available on the site and this can continue for weeks and months after a title was first added to the site. Due to the speed of which content and mirror links are added, this site enables users to download pre-release titles quickly but also request new links if older links have been removed,” the RIAA writes.

Aside from the “notorious markets” that can be found online, the RIAA’s submission to the US Trade Representative also lists physical piracy threats including the markets on the Polish border with Germany and La Salada Market in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Although it is unlikely that the submission will result in any direct action from the US Trade Representative, they will probably be taken into consideration when future policies and governmental actions are discussed.

Source: RIAA Reports Torrent Sites, RapidShare and RLSLOG to US Government

It all started in 2007 when a jury hit Jammie Thomas-Rasset with a $222,000 verdict in her case against the RIAA. Thomas-Rasset later appealed and in 2008 a mistrial was declared, with the judge ruling that the fines were “disproportionate to the damages suffered.”

The case went up for re-trial before a new jury last year and again a guilty verdict was reached with even harsher fines than first time around. Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay $80,000 per infringement mounting up to a total of $1.92 million in fines.

Fast forward a few months and this jury-awarded fine was reduced significantly to $54,000 at the beginning of this year, as the excessive damages were ruled to be unconstitutional.

Then this week, the appeal of the retrial was heard and once again the RIAA/Capitol Records came out as the big winner. The jury decided that Thomas-Rasset has to pay a $62,500 fine per shared song which adds up to a total of $1.5 million (compare that to Germany).

A massive win for the RIAA again, but not one that will benefit any musicians.

Previously, the RIAA told TorrentFreak that if they manage to recoup any of the damages, it will not go to the artists but will instead be used to fund new anti-piracy campaigns. “Any funds recouped are re-invested into our ongoing education and anti-piracy programs,” RIAA’s Jonathan Lamy said.

The RIAA sees these cases not as a means to recoup money, but as a good way to communicate their anti-piracy message to the public. These cases create awareness about the consequences illicit file-sharing may have, the group argues. That they lose money on them by paying millions in lawyer fees is a calculated decision.

Even after this third jury verdict the RIAA is set to get even more exposure, as this re-retrial is probably not the end of the road. Thomas-Rasset’s legal team has already announced that they will file a new appeal.

Source: RIAA Wins Big Against File-Sharer, $1.5M for 24 Songs

In July this year judge Nancy Gertner ruled that the penalty was excessive and unconstitutional and the jury-awarded damages were subsequently reduced by 90%.

Soon after this judgment both the RIAA and Tenenbaum appealed once again, and the case continues. Although many scholars, journalists and commenters have discussed this high profile case in detail over the years, Joel himself hasn’t shared his thoughts that often.

But, for an introductory course on the production of digital media, Joel is opening up. Brett Caraway, a lecturer in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas informed TorrentFreak about the newly launched discussion platform on copyright issues. One of the first of many high profile individuals involved in recent P2P litigation that is featured on the site is Joel Tenenbaum.

“The intention of the site is to bring together interested parties with various perspectives and have them interact with students and each other. It is my hope that my students and the public can find something of value in these discussions which will help them make up their own minds,” Caraway told TorrentFreak.

With permission we’re posting the interview with Joel Tenenbaum here. Those interested in discussions around copyright issues should keep a close eye on the Copy Grounds website. Coming up are guest posts from MPAA’s Fritz Attaway, former porn star Jennifer Ketcham and many others.

Joel Tenenbaum Interview

1. I download hundreds of songs every month from artists very few people know about that have a lot more to lose than the popular ones you downloaded from and I’m not going to get in trouble. Does that seem fair to you?

Joel: Well, no. It’s not fair. Then again, it’s not fair that out of 40,000 people who have been sued for file-sharing, I was the one who was was lucky enough to have my parents behind me, Professor Charles Nesson and his colleagues, and dedicated passionate students working for free to help me out. I might be unlucky, but I’m also damn lucky for what I’ve been given and for who I have standing with me.

2. Did you plan to fight against the RIAA to this extent, or did it just slowly escalate into what it is today?

Joel: I didn’t plan to fight at all. I wasn’t looking to become the “poster child” for all file-sharers. I tried to settle — multiple times. I offered $500 from the outset and $5250 in court, but by then, this offer was apparently not enough for the music labels. And besides, the idea that someone could just call you up and ask you for thousands of dollars, showing no hard evidence, without your getting a fair day’s representation in court seemed absurd.

3. What are you hoping to change by “fighting back” against the RIAA? Of course you understand that peer to peer file sharing has to be controlled in some way, so if it were up to you, how would the problem of file sharing be handled?

Joel: I’m not “hoping to change” anything. The RIAA sued me. I just want to have a fair day in court for the allegations against me. I’m not the one who can dismiss the lawsuit. Maybe the better question is: What are they hoping to change?

4. Has this ordeal changed the way people treat you?

Joel: Every time I appear in the Metro (the free Boston paper) all my friends and my graduate advisor get a kick out of it. Most people that recognize me are generally appreciative and tell me to stick with it. Thankfully, no one seems to be as hostile in person to me as I’ve seen on the internet.

5. Joel, I am curious as to whether your focus with your case is to argue simply that peer to peer file sharing is completely fair, or if you’re arguing that the way the RIAA is approaching these cases is unjust? One of the questions I have for Joel Tenenbaum is, “What do you feel your punishment should be for illegally downloading music and sharing files, do you believe you should face consequences at all?”

Joel: I’m not saying that file-sharing is right. I’m not saying that it’s wrong either. What I’m saying is that file-sharing is. What I’m fighting in court is that $675,000 — and even $67,500 — for 30 songs is unjust. Turns out that you can NOT use a civil law suit to “deter” other individuals: it’s an abuse of court. And so, “making an example” out of me to scare others is more than just unfair. I wouldn’t be averse to some sort of penalty in line with 99 cents per song or somewhere remotely in that neighborhood if the RIAA can actually show harm, which they haven’t.

6. If you somehow knew that this much of a fuss would be caused for downloading 7 songs, would you still do this to prove this point?

Joel: Complicated question, and a tempting one, I know. Charlie Kaufman writes, “There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make.” I’m grateful for how things have gone. Had this not happened, I wouldn’t have had the experiences I’ve had and met all the amazing people that I’ve met. But again, I’m not doing this to prove a point. I didn’t start the lawsuit. They’re the ones with a point to prove.

7. In your opinion, should lawsuits such as these even exist? In other words, do you even recognize what you did as wrong, or do you think that the RIAA is stepping outside of its bounds to prosecute?

Joel: I believe that the RIAA has the right to pursue what they believe they are entitled to under the law of the land just as I have the right to speak out against them and defend myself. That’s the way our court system works. But the way the “scales of justice” are weighed down on their side; in a way, they get to buy more “justice” by having the deep pockets necessary to pay dozens of lawyers to fabricate an interpretation out of a statute we believe wasn’t intended. They use raw power to silence anyone who dares say otherwise… that’s an abuse of taxpayer money, resources, and one of the most respected justice systems in the world.

8. By and large, have netizens had a positive outlook on the case, or a negative one?

Joel: You can get a decent sense of the proportions just looking at the comments on our blog, youtube videos, or the comments of the articles themselves. They seem to come out 5:1 in favor of us. I did a radio show and people called in: same comments, same ratio. The archetypes are:

9. Why do you feel you have the right to these files? Do you not think you should support the artists that you think are good? Also, do you simply amass files that you rarely listen to, or do you get rid of what you don’t like/want/need?

Joel: I like music. I like to listen to it. I listen to it the way everyone around me listens to it. I’m not pioneering a new distribution system that makes sure everyone can get music for free. I’m just jumping in the pool with everyone else. I also believe and have always believed that artists I derive enjoyment from deserve to be paid for their work. There’s this image of me as the “FREE MUSIC” guy who refuses to pay on principle that’s just flat-out untrue. I often have bought music as a result of the free exploration I’ve done. In that respect, I’m much like the average downloader, who actually spends more money on music than people who don’t download at all.

10. How does Joel envision the future of the music industry?

Joel: I hope it will be a vibrant place, full of sharing, creativity, and the ability for artists to connect straight to their fans without legal intervention. Other than that, I’ll have to rely on the visionary expertise of John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, who’s been around a lot longer than me, and has the benefit of greater perspective I don’t. Barlow wrote:

Source: Confessions Of A Convicted RIAA Victim Joel Tenenbaum

The question is, however, whether this is a laughing matter as some seem to think. The true aim of the RIAA has never been to gain financially from lawsuits against individuals, they wanted to make a statement and used the United States legal system as their ultimate anti-piracy campaign.

TorrentFreak contacted the RIAA to find out more about their side of the story and how they justify the millions of dollars spent in legal costs. Jonathan Lamy, Senior Vice President Communications at the RIAA, was kind enough to give us some insight.

“Before we announced the lawsuits, we spent years on various educational campaigns. PSAs. Magazine advertisements. Artists speaking out. Instant messages to millions of Kazaa users. You name it. We made extensive efforts to engage fans and inform them about the law. It made a little difference,” Lamy told TorrentFreak.

So, the next step for the RIAA was to go after people who shared songs online, to send out a clear message that they were breaking the law. Since everything else had failed thus far, they believed that suing thousands of people was a good way to communicate their message to the public.

“But it’s simple human nature that for some people – and I’m not suggesting everyone – when tempted to do something that is easy and anonymous and perhaps they do not appreciate that it is illegal, it is very difficult to their change behavior WITHOUT introducing the threat of consequences,” Lamy told us.

“Do you think people would not speed if there were no cops? You slow down more often than not because you think you might get caught.”

“I remember sitting in a focus group of college students and the moderator kept asking the students what would it take them to stop downloading illegally: more than one said, ‘You have to sue me or my roommate. We need to see first hand that getting caught could lead to trouble’,” Lamy said.

So the real question that should be asked is whether the RIAA actually got any bang for its bucks. If you look at the expenditure as an investment in an anti-piracy campaign it might actually not be as bad for them as it looks. Over the years tens of thousands of news reports carrying their anti-piracy message have been published in the mainstream media. No PR agency could have ever given them the massive exposure they’ve got from these lawsuits.

But was it worth it? The question still stands whether this PR has been an effective deterrent.

Although there are still a lot of people who share music illegally it would be hard to make the claim that the message had no effect on the piracy rate. The well-informed might not be scared as easily, but we can safely say that for quite a few people the press about million dollar fines might have been a scary enough reason not to pirate.

Whether the big music labels actually profited from the few percent less file-sharers is yet another question, especially when one doubts that there are any losses at all. The bottom line is, however, that the RIAA made a conscious choice to spend all these millions of dollars on lawsuits and that they believe that the money was well spent.

Luckily for those who kept on sharing the RIAA has stopped their actions against individual file-sharers. They claim that the music piracy rates have decreased enough and studies show that more people buy music instead of pirating it.

Nevertheless, the legal campaigns have been quite costly, and not only for the RIAA. In the process, the music labels hit thousands of people financially with settlements and the two file-sharers whose cases made it all the way through court are pretty much financially ruined.

The RIAA doesn’t seem to hold much compassion for these victims though, and appears to see them as collateral damage. “Well, there are thousands of folks who have been laid off because of the decline of the music business. That wasn’t pleasant experience for them either,” Lamy said.

Ouch…

Source: Why the RIAA Doesn’t Mind Losing Money on Lawsuits

In the RIAA’s case against Jamie Thomas, the jury-awarded damages were reduced significantly as the excessive damages were ruled to be unconstitutional. Today, the same thing has happened with the case against Boston University student Joel Tenenbaum.

The ruling issued by District Judge Nancy Gertner states that the constitutional issues are clear, and that attempting to avoid the constitutional challenges (that the damages are excessive in proportion to the crime) by reducing the damages would be the best way to handle these.

The verdict comes as no surprise to many, and may even come as a relief to the RIAA, who have faced some negative publicity over the damages awarded. It’s unclear, though, if this modification will stand, as the RIAA will have to accept it. If they don’t, a retrial will be called.

Judge Gertner finds a retrial likely, stating in the judgment: “The plaintiffs in this case, however, made it abundantly clear that they were, to put it mildly, going for broke. They stated in open court that they likely would not accept a remitted award.”

“The Constitution protects not only criminal defendants from the imposition of ‘cruel and unusual punishments’, but also civil defendants facing arbitrarily high punitive awards,” Gertner added.

The meat of the subject can be found on page 6, though.

I reduce the jury’s award to $2,250 per infringed work, three times the statutory minimum, for a total award of $67,500. Significantly, this amount is more than I might have awarded in my independent judgment. But the task of determining the appropriate damages award in this case fell to the jury, not the Court. I have merely reduced the award to the greatest amount that the Constitution will permit given the facts of this case.

There is no question that this reduced award is still severe, even harsh. It not only adequately compensates the plaintiffs for the relatively minor harm that Tenenbaum caused them; it sends a strong message that those who exploit peer-to-peer networks to unlawfully download and distribute copyrighted works run the risk of incurring substantial damages awards. Tenenbaum’s behavior, after all, was hardly exemplary. The jury found that he not only violated the law, but did so willfully.

Reducing the jury’s $675,000 award, however, also sends another no less important message: The Due Process Clause does not merely protect large corporations, like BMW and State Farm, from grossly excessive punitive awards. It also protects ordinary people like Joel Tenenbaum

This judgment relieves some of the PR pressure around the RIAA. While they were clearly happy with the height of the damages, hoping it would intimidate filesharers, it also became a rallying cry for others. The reduced damages proposed by Judge Gertner may silence the opposition to some extent, and reduce the impact of campaigns.

Joel Tenenbaum was somewhat relieved upon hearing the verdict. In a telephone interview with the Boston Globe he said: “Obviously, it’s better news than it could have been. But it’s basically equally unpayable to me.”

Even if he could pay it, none of the money – be it $675,000, or $67,500 – would find its way into the pockets of the artists whose songs were involved. The RIAA told TorrentFreak that the damages will be used to fund new anti-piracy campaigns instead.

Whether or not there will be a retrial, the current verdict is a blow to their anti-piracy campaigns, while the Constitutional concern may preclude any further strengthening of copyright laws and punishments in the near future.

Breaking story…

Source: Judge Slams RIAA, $675k Fine Ruled Unconstitutional

Although these copyright infringement warnings are nothing new, little was known about the scope of these operations, until now.

This week the RIAA revealed that, since October 2008, it has sent out infringement warnings to 1.8 million Internet subscribers and 269,609 to colleges and universities in the United States. This translates into an average of well over a million infringement warnings a year.

Since the RIAA stopped pursuing individuals for sharing music online a long time ago, these infringement notices are merely a warning. However, the RIAA is confident that a significant number of the recipients will change their downloading habits once they’re notified.

An RIAA spokesman declined to inform TorrentFreak whether the number of infringement notices sent out are increasing or declining. The RIAA has no hard facts on the effectiveness of the notices either, but told us that university administrators usually see “very few” repeat offenders.

It does indeed seem plausible that some who are warned will think twice before they fire up their BitTorrent client unprotected, especially with all the talk about lawsuits recently. However, the effect of the warning campaigns are not noticeable in the number of file-sharing users and the traffic that they generate. Both are still increasing year after year.

RIAA’s openness with regard to their infringement notices comes right after the US put into effect a new requirement for colleges and universities to stop illicit file-sharing on their networks.

Starting this month, a provision of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 puts defiant schools at risk of losing federal funding if they don’t do enough to stop illicit file-sharers on their campus.

In recent years colleges and universities had to undertake measures to reduce piracy, and go after students who use file-sharing networks to share copyrighted files. Those who failed to do so will now lose their eligibility for federal student aid.

Effective or not, the new rules have proven to be quite costly for US educational institutions who spend between $350,000 and $500,000 a year to decrease piracy. With continuing doubts, even from the Government, as to whether or not piracy is causing losses to the entertainment industry, one has to wonder if it’s all worth it.

Whether the measures installed at colleges and universities are successful has to be doubted. We’ve reviewed the effectiveness of a few of the measures in the past and they provided little hope. If we add that users of file-hosting services such as Rapidshare and Megaupload are untraceable by the RIAA and its partners, the newly installed anti-piracy measures seem to be just symbolic.

Source: RIAA Warns 1 Million Copyright Infringers a Year

Last month, a US Court ruled that the Lime Group, the company behind Limewire, was liable for the copyright infringements committed by its users. Two weeks later the Lime Group asked the court to reconsider this judgment. This request was followed by one from the RIAA, asking the court to shut down Limewire via a permanent injunction.

The RIAA argues that Limewire’s operation has to be stopped immediately, to avoid it doing any more harm to the music industry in the future. Interestingly enough, very little argumentation or evidence is given for any real losses suffered by the record labels.

“It is patently obvious that the rampant illegal conduct that Lime Wire intentionally induced, and for which it has been adjudged liable, will continue uninterrupted day after day unless and until the Court issues an injunction to rein in this massive infringing operation,” RIAA’s lawyers wrote to the Court.

“Every day that Lime Wire’s conduct continues unabated guarantees harm to Plaintiffs that money damages cannot and will not compensate,” RIAA’s legal team continues. “The scope of the infringements that Lime Wire induced – and that continue to this day – boggles the mind.

The RIAA is right in saying that Limewire users have committed, and are committing many millions of infringements, but there is very little evidence for the massive damage that this has cost. Thus far, a real assessment of the claimed losses has been lacking in most file-sharing related legal cases.

“It does not require sophisticated mathematics to calculate that the likely damage award in this case will run into the hundreds of millions, if not the billions of dollars,” the RIAA argues. However, one of the few academic papers (pdf) that looked at the relationship between actual downloads and lost sales to the music industry has found that there’s no direct correlation.

With that said, the outcome of this case could potentially change the file-sharing landscape for good. Despite BitTorrent being the leading file-sharing protocol for several years already, Limewire is most likely the most installed P2P application on the market. In 2008 LimeWire was the most installed P2P application with an impressive market-share of 37%, compared to 14% for runner-up uTorrent.

If the RIAA score a victory in court against Limewire, hundreds or millions of people will have to seek an alternative download client, which might mean a significant boost in user numbers for some of the major BitTorrent applications.

Source: RIAA Wants Court To Shut Down Limewire

Interestingly enough, this format shift was nothing new for the music industry. The exact same pattern also applied to the LP/cassette battle, with cassettes eventually taking over from LPs in the early 80s. Now, three decades after cassettes started to dominate the music business, the CD is losing ground.

This time around there is a new enemy in town, digital piracy. For nearly a decade the U.S. music industry has seen a decline in sales of physical CDs and all this time it has put the blame on digital piracy. By doing so, the labels conveniently ignore the most drastic format shift music has ever seen – the digital revolution.

With the growing popularity of the Internet, computers and most importantly MP3-players, music fans have started to trade in their CDs for MP3s and other digital files. Initially, the public had to convert CDs themselves, but in 2003 the iTunes store opened, selling over a million tracks in the first week.

With this shift from physical to digital, another important change hit the industry, one that may in part explain why the labels’ revenues in the U.S. continued to decline. With the introduction of paid downloads, consumers no longer had to buy a full album if they were only interested in two or three songs. This new freedom for consumers has dramatically changed the music sales landscape.

According to statistics taken from the RIAA shipment database, between 2004 and 2008 the number of single tracks sold in the U.S. increased by 669 percent while the number of album sales dropped 42 percent. Consequently, the income of the big labels suffered since single track sales are less profitable than full albums. As can be seen in the chart below, the number of music ‘units’ sold continues to grow rapidly nonetheless.

So where does piracy fit into this picture? Truth is, we just don’t know.

File-sharing is obviously a by-product of the digital revolution in music, but its effect on revenues has been much overstated. In every annual report that comes out, the music industry blames piracy for its troubles, even though digital sales are booming and even though these are directly competing with piracy.

We believe that the format shift from physical to digital music, and the change in buying habits that came along with it, may explain the decline in revenue more than piracy can. To back this up we’ve compared the labels’ revenues in two countries on opposite ends of the digital / physical rift, the U.S. and Germany.

Although piracy is rampant in both of these countries, the local music consumption habits are very different according to data published by IFPI. In Germany physical CDs are still very popular, with digital sales representing less than 25% of all music ‘units’ sold. In the U.S. on the other hand, digital outsells physical with 70% of all sales.

If the theory that the shift towards digital music is negatively impacting revenues holds up, then the German record labels should do much better. Indeed, between 2004 and 2008 the net revenue (in dollars) of the U.S record companies fell more than 30%, compared to less than 5% in Germany.

If the data above is not convincing enough, there is also another unexplained anomaly in the sales data.

If digital piracy is such a problem one would expect that it will mostly hurt digital sales, but these are booming instead. Many younger people don’t even own a CD-player anymore, yet the music industry sees digital piracy as the main reason for the decline in physical sales. Strange, because digital piracy would be most likely to cannibalize digital sales. This anomaly also refutes the excuse that the U.S industry could be hit more by piracy than the German.

So what does the music industry have to say about this all? TorrentFreak asked the RIAA to comment on our findings and they released the following statement.

“We’ve always said there are multiple reasons for the decline of the industry during the past ten years: Competition for the entertainment dollar. Diversification of music consumption and access. But we also think people being able to steal music online is the primary reason. Not the only, but the primary.”

We obviously have to differ with the RIAA here. The digital revolution in music has changed the entire industry by altering the consumption habits of music fans. Although piracy could also be a factor, the data we’ve seen thus far suggests that it plays only a minor role, if it has any effect at all.

Source: Is Piracy Really Killing The Music Industry? No!

As part of the Act, President Obama appointed Victoria Espinel as the new copyright czar last year. Espinel announced a public consultation a few months ago, looking for comments and suggestions from the U.S. public on how to deal with piracy.

For this consultation the RIAA and MPAA have now jointly submitted (pdf) their suggestions, calling for a future without piracy.

As expected, the submission starts with bitter complaints about the massive losses the entertainment industries have to endure because of online piracy. The same old bogus studies and reports are cited, publications that were heavily criticized and labeled as inaccurate by the U.S. Government earlier this week.

What follows are a set of recommendations that, if they become law, would turn the Internet into a copyright police state. The EFF has cherry picked some of the most draconian recommendations in a recent blog post, but these are just the tip of the iceberg. We highlight some of the suggestions below.

If the RIAA and MPAA had their way…

- The public would be encouraged to install anti-piracy software on their computers which would monitor their network for copyright-infringing materials. They are most likely referring to the Digital File Check application that they’ve been plugging for a while.

- Internet service providers would have to allow third parties to spy on the files that are transferred by their customers and check them against a reference database of “fingerprints” to check whether the files are infringing copyright or not.

- Torrent sites and file-hosters would have to preemptively filter content that is uploaded to or indexed by their sites. The reasoning behind this suggestion is that the regular notice and takedown procedures are time consuming and ineffective because content quickly reappears.

- Search engines, hosting companies, payment processors, advertising agencies, social networking sites and domain registrars would be encouraged to team up with copyright holders in order to prevent online piracy. The purpose of this collaboration would be to cut off sites that ‘facilitate’ copyright infringement.

- Consumers and websites that repeatedly infringe on the rights of copyright holders would lose their Internet access.

These are just a few of the recommendations that are listed in the submission. It is quite clear that the copyright industries want full control over the Internet by building a copyright police state. Let’s hope that the politicians responsible for drafting the legislation will use their brains, instead of blindly accepting such proposals.

Source: MPAA and RIAA Call for Copyright Police State

Dozens of contributing artists waived their rights and performed free of charge to maximize the revenue for Africa. In an attempt to replicate this success, a group of artists recorded “We Are the World 25 for Haiti” following the devastating earthquake in Haiti, hoping to raise money to help those in need.

Although most people realize that donating directly to Doctors Without Borders or the Red Cross is a more efficient way to donate, the initiative was obviously started with the best intentions by most of the people involved. According to the RIAA however, there is also a group of people who deliberately try to “steal” from this fundraising campaign – music pirates.

In a recent blog post the RIAA dramatically claims that “the album is now widely available on illicit BitTorrent sites like The Pirate Bay, Torrentz and more. The posting highlights a truly ugly side of P2P piracy – the undermining of humanitarian fundraising efforts via online theft of the ‘Hope for Haiti Now’ compilation.”

The RIAA basically says that pirates are purposely stealing money from Haitians. But are they?

In a response to the RIAA’s writing, Music Ally dug up some numbers and they found out that compared to most other popular singles the number of downloads the song gets are really low. Aside from this, one has to wonder if those who downloaded the song would have paid for it if it was not available on BitTorrent. Perhaps they already donated through a more direct channel?

Techdirt further notes that the RIAA blames sites like Torrentz which doesn’t even store torrent files, while they leave out Google, the site through which their source actually found the torrents.

What most people missed though, might make the RIAA’s post look even more hypocritical. Charity singles such as “We Are The World” actually bring in a lot of cash for the record industry and related businesses. This could be easily framed as “Stealing from Haitians” as well.

Columbia Records fared well with the release of the first “We Are The World” single and the performance rights that still come in today continue to benefit the “copyright holders.” In addition, charity songs including “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” ended up on thousands of compilation albums for which the charities probably never saw a penny.

We were unable to find out exactly how long the profits of the new Haiti single will actually go to Haiti, but we’re sure that the music industry will take a cut regardless. Similarly, iTunes will give up their share for a few months but will be profiting from the single later on.

These examples show that reality is always a bit more balanced than how the RIAA portrays it. Nonetheless, those who actually like the song should definitely consider buying it or at least donate to one of the other charities that benefit Haiti.

Source: RIAA Claims Music Pirates Hurt Haiti Fund Raising

While the panel consisted of representatives from IFPI, Center for Democracy & Technology, Computer and Communications Industry Association and the UK government. Notably missing were representatives from the RIAA and MPAA. They were present, says Curtis, but unusually observing quietly from the audience.

Those on the panel in favor of the “graduated response” are said not to have shied away from their positions.

In a discussion on whether the punishment fits the alleged crime, Shira Perlmutter, Executive Vice-President of Global Legal Policy at IFPI said sending infringement notices just isn’t enough, adding that termination of a user’s Internet account, however, is preferable to suing them.

When asked if “3 strikes” should come to the United States, Perlmutter pointed to the existence of the DMCA (disabling access to illicit content is already provided for under the legislation) and noted that there are “many conversations going on at different levels.”

Writing on the apparent disinterest in “3 Strikes” shown by the MPAA and RIAA by their lack of participation on a panel such as this, Curtis goes on to list several filings to the FCC which contain pro-disconnection statements by the groups, indicating that they are indeed asking the government to take action. Indeed, Curtis feels that their low profile at this panel points to the existence of “back room deals” already underway and aimed at putting their plans for the US into action.

Given that the music industry has all but given up on their strategy of suing new individuals for file-sharing (the MPAA never really started) and that IFPI has put its full-blown support behind proposed “3 Strikes” legislation in several different countries (even now carefully escalating a campaign in Sweden), it seems likely that at some point the United States will follow.

If it doesn’t come via a government mandate, says Curtis, it could come via a private arrangement between your ISP and content providers. And when you think about it, with all previous plans to end online piracy having failed, there’s very little for the copyright holders left to try. At this stage there can be little doubt that Big Media wants “3 Strikes” to become the global standard.

Source: 3 Strikes Coming To The United States Via The Back Door?

Thus far, two US file-sharing cases involving individuals have gone to trial. Both resulted in victory for the recording industry, one of them twice.

In 2007, Jammie Thomas was sentenced to pay damages of $222,000 for 24 counts of infringement ($9,250 per infringement). Later, a retrial was granted, and in June 2009 a jury returned a similar decision, but with increased damages of $1.92 million ($80,000 per infringement).

Meanwhile, in July 2009, Joel Tenenbaum was also found to be willfully infringing, and a jury awarded damages of $675,000 ($22,500 per infringement).

On July 6th 2009, Thomas filed with the court that the damages were constitutionally excessive, and now Tenenbaum has too.

The central point of the case revolves around a US Supreme Court precedent, which is quoted in the filing as “few awards exceeding a single-digit ratio between punitive and compensatory damages, to a significant degree, will satisfy due process.”

Compensatory refers to an amount to make up for actual losses (the damages suffered) and the punitive damages are designed to act as a deterrent for others and to punish. In this case, states the filing, at best it’s in the low 5-digits (22,500:1), and could easily actually be in the upper-5 digits (65,000:1 or greater).

Other considerations are put forward as well, including that the DRM imposed on music until 2007 (and still imposed on audiobooks) encouraged the use of P2P economically; or that the ‘egregiousness’ of the offense is low in comparison to the penalties – that it’s at most as bad as shoplifting – but the constitutionality of the damages is the main thrust, as it is with the Thomas case.

Time will tell as to how the courts will decide, but it may be that the very success in gaining such large damages awards will lead to a great diluting of the power of statutory damages. Very much a case of winning the battle, but losing the war; not what was expected when the papers were first filed, all those years ago.

Source: RIAA Victim Files for New Trial, Damages Excessive

The researchers surveyed a few hundred undergraduate students who were asked if they would buy the single “Right Round” from rapper Flo Rida for X amount of money. The price tag for the song was based on the last two digits of their social security number, ranging from 0 to 98 cents. The regular 99 cent price was excluded.

The students further had to indicate the likelihood of being faced by a lawsuit from the RIAA and what the expected settlement costs would be. On top of this, they were asked to fill out a morality questionnaire along with questions regarding their download behavior, all anonymously.

With this data in hand the researchers were able to draw some interesting conclusions.

First of all, they found that the students who were said to have pirated their latest track, were willing to pay less for the “Right Round” song. For every $0.01 students were willing to pay more, the likelihood decreased that their last song was pirated by 0.3%.

Even though the researchers claim that this means that pirates are cheapskates, it could also mean that pirates don’t like the song “Right Round” from rapper Flo Rida that much. Perhaps they have different music tastes?

Taste aside, the researchers conclude that dropping the price of a single track to $0.63 would decrease piracy by 50%.

Besides the pricing issue, the study also showed that pirates (compared to non-pirates) think the chance of getting sued by the RIAA is relatively small, and that the settlement fees are lower. The usual conclusion from this data would be that pirates are well informed since their guesses were closer to the real answer, but the researchers twist it somewhat different.

“If the goal of the RIAA was solely to deter piracy, it should not have abandoned its policy of suing the people it caught pirating digital music,” they write, referring to RIAA’s promises to stop mass-lawsuits against copyright infringers.

The latest insight from the study is that those who indicated that they had pirated their latest addition to their music library scored lower on the morality ‘proxy’ scale. However, the researchers note that the mean and modal respondents score very high on morality, which basically means that pirates are more normal (morality wise) than those who pay for music.

To summarize, the study makes it look like pirates are immoral cheapskates, but all it really suggests is that the music industry should lower the price of downloads if they want to sell more music and increase their net profit.

Source: Music Pirates are Immoral Cheapskates, Or Are They?

According to a recently published paper by Prithula Dhungel, Di Wu and Keith Ross, these effort are a waste of time and money. In the paper titled “Measurement and mitigation of BitTorrent leecher attacks,” the researchers show that BitTorrent swarms are hardly influenced by attacks from anti-piracy outfits.

The research looked into the effectiveness of two popular attack methods used by companies such as MediaDefender. The first is a ‘piece attack’ where the hostile leecher attempts to slow down downloads by creating as many hash fails as possible. The second method is the ‘connection attack’ where the hostile leechers try to tie up as many TCP connections as possible in order to make it impossible for downloaders to connect to real peers.

The different methods were tested in a real-life BitTorrent swarm of a popular music album that was targeted by these attacks. “We present measurement results for a torrent for a new album, which was verified to be under attack,” the researchers report, adding “This popular album was released a few weeks before our experiments. At the time of the experiment, it held the number 1 position on the UK album chart and iTunes ranking list.”

The researchers then downloaded the ‘attacked’ torrent several times with both Azureus (Vuze) and uTorrent. For each download they recorded the time it took to complete, both with and without using blocklist software that bans (some) of the attackers’ IP-addresses.

The results were quite remarkable. The researchers found that, on average, downloads with a blocklist were 30 to 35% faster. In other words, the efforts of the anti-piracy outfits do slow down the targeted swarms, but only for a few minutes at most, and not long enough to deter anyone from downloading.

A more detailed look at the peer distribution of the two BitTorrent clients further reveals that without the IP-filters, uTorrent encounters only 2% of malicious peers, who all use the ‘piece attack’ method. Azureus on the other hand encountered no ‘piece attack’ peers at all, but 18% ‘connection attack’ peers.

Not surprisingly, the researchers conclude from their research that the methods used to attack BitTorrent swarms are highly ineffective. “The anti-P2P companies are not currently successful at stopping the distribution of targeted assets over BitTorrent. We have also found that blacklist-based IP filtering is insufficient to filter out all the attackers,” the researchers write.

What the researchers have overlooked is that both Azureus and uTorrent have implemented various technological measures against these automated attacks. The results may differ for other BitTorrent clients. Azureus (now Vuze) has put a lot of work in preventing ‘piece attacks’ and uTorrent has implemented similar anti-pollution measures.

The overall conclusion put forward in the article is most likely the right one, and to most people not even that surprising. The millions of dollars spent by the entertainment industry to protect their works from being shared on BitTorrent is at best only a mild annoyance to the ‘pirates’.

Via.

Source: RIAA and MPAA Can’t Stop BitTorrent, Study Finds

From the start it was clear that the only thing that the jury had to decide on would be the the size of the fine. The fair use defense was thrown out a few hours before the trial started, which shut down the only escape route left.

Tenenbaum’s defense team, headed by Harvard Professor Charles Nesson and his law students, were left powerless. “Undoubtedly, we were a creative and nontraditional legal team. But going into trial, we were stripped of all our attempts to mitigate Joel’s liability, so today’s outcome has been in the cards all week,” student Debbie Rosenbaum wrote.

This is the second win in little over a month for the RIAA. In June, Jammie Thomas-Rasset lost her retrial against the RIAA and was ordered to pay $1.92 million for the 24 songs she shared via Kazaa.

RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy told TorrentFreak that the ‘damages’ will not go to any of the artists, but to more anti-piracy campaigns. “Any funds recouped are re-invested into our ongoing education and anti-piracy programs,” he said.

In total, the RIAA has spent over a million dollars on this case alone, to set an example to the millions of people who share files every day. Time will tell whether or not the verdict will have any impact at all, aside from ruining a student’s life and alienating a few million music fans.

Source: Student Hit With $675,000 Fine in RIAA File-Sharing Case

“DRM serves all sorts of pro-consumer purposes,” he said at the time, without going into detail about the alleged benefits.

However, in the year that followed the numbers of consumers calling for DRM-free music increased and more labels and music services started to offer music without digital restrictions. Still, the RIAA was not convinced that there could be a future without it, and predicted a comeback for DRM last year.

Quite the opposite happened. Although DRM is still present in the majority of the legal music stores, most of the big players have decided to ditch it. Most importantly Apple announced in early 2009 that all music sold via the iTunes store would be free of DRM. This time even the RIAA doesn’t believe that it can be resurrected.

Jonathan Lamy, chief spokesperson for the RIAA declared DRM dead, when he was asked about the RIAA’s view on DRM for an upcoming SCMagazine article. “DRM is dead, isn’t it?” Lamy said, referring to the DRM-less iTunes store and other online outfits that now offer music without restrictions.

Update July 20: Yes, it seemed to good to be true and it is. We just learned the the RIAA never used the word dead in its reply to the reporter. Lamy told TorrentFreak that he only said that there is almost no DRM on (downloaded) music anymore nowadays. In other (our) words: it’s an endangered species, not extinct.

When the most vocal forefighters of DRM say so, it must be for real. Although this is the first time that the RIAA have actually said on record that DRM is dead, other players in the music industry have seen the light before them. Most notable IFPI, who said earlier this year that stripping DRM would “significantly boost download sales.”

In this we have to agree with them. All DRM has ever done is annoy consumers who actually paid for their music. No single piece of DRM has ever stopped anyone from pirating music, it’s quite the opposite as the music industry now realizes.

Source: DRM is ****, RIAA Says

BDE doesn’t want to limit their service to music downloads though, and they recently introduced a groundbreaking new feature.

According to the press release issued yesterday they are about to “shake up the online media industry.” Their masterplan? They will implement new technology that will allow their users to share photos, videos and even documents with each other.

This announcement is indeed quite a shocker. However, the press release has more surprises in it, such as the following product endorsement (or warning) by a ‘web hacker’ named Jonathan James.

“Jonathan James, Web Hacker spoke of the endless possibilities the software provides to the Kazaa community. “They are going to come at you like they came at ‘tereastarr,’” the press release reads.

First of all, it is kind of strange to include an endorsement from a seemingly unknown hacker in a press release. This aside, the statement doesn’t make much sense at all to those who have never heard of ‘tereastarr,’ and even less sense to those who do.

As P2P blog points out, ‘tereastarr’ was the Kazaa username of Jammie Thomas who was slapped with a $1.92 million verdict in her case against the RIAA last month. Thomas had been found guilty of sharing 24 songs using Kazaa, and was fined $80,000 per track.

Not really the sort of person you want to refer to in a press-release to ‘promote’ a product, unless you want to imply that the people who use your legal service might face such fines as well. The strangeness doesn’t stop there though.

The quote attributed to Jonathan James is in fact a quote from Jammie Thomas’ lawyer Joe Sibley who used the one-liner in her trial.

To make things even more disturbing, the web hacker Jonathan James most likely refers to Jonathan Joseph James, a convicted NASA hacker who ended his own life last year at the age of 24. Again, not an ideal person to quote and a particularly unhelpful image to paint when promoting a product.

The sentence has now been removed from the original press release indicating that Kazaa indeed regrets publishing this fabricated and insulting quote. Nevertheless, it can still be found online on several sites that copied the original release.

So what happened here? Did Kazaa think it was funny to put the names of Thomas and James in its press release? Have they lost their minds completely? We sincerely hope that this wasn’t intentional and that they’ve been pranked by some wannabe PR-agency.

Source: Kazaa Uses RIAA Victim Jammie Thomas in PR-Campaign

High ranking people at the record labels soon declared victory claiming that justice had been served. However, many of the artists to which the record label executives owe their well paid salaries are disgusted by the outcome of the case and the witch-hunt on their fans.

One of the artists that has shared his disappointment at the disproportionate fines is the American musician Moby. “Argh. what utter nonsense,” he writes on his website. “This is how the record companies want to protect themselves? Suing suburban moms for listening to music? Charging $80,000 per song?” he questions.

“I don’t know, but ‘it’s better to be feared than respected’ doesn’t seem like such a sustainable business model when it comes to consumer choice. How about a new model of ‘it’s better to be loved for helping artists make good records and giving consumers great records at reasonable prices’?”

Moby is right that the sue and scare tactics of the RIAA are not the ideal business model in the long run. However, thus far they have made millions from all the settled cases alone. In recent years over 30,000 people have allegedly settled with the RIAA for an average of $3500 dollars. This means that the RIAA have raked in more than 100 million dollars without even having to go to court.

In the UK, a coalition of top artists have spoken out against the actions of a music industry that chooses to criminalize their fans, and expressed their growing discomfort with record labels abusing copyrights for their own benefit.

Radiohead, who are also part of the coalition, even showed interest in testifying against the RIAA in the case of a Boston University student also accused of sharing several music recordings. Tenenbaum’s troubles started in 2003 when the RIAA rejected an offer to settle for $500. After a few more settlement attempts and legal quibbles, the case eventually went to court.

Moby, a proponent of Net Neutrality – another topic dear to most file-sharers – is equally dissatisfied with the RIAA’s tactics. In his view, it would be better for both artists and fans to end all the legal quibbles and focus on the art of music instead.

“I’m so sorry that any music fan anywhere is ever made to feel bad for making the effort to listen to music,” Moby writes, ending his blog post with some solid advice for the record labels that pump millions of dollars into the non-profit organization.

“The RIAA needs to be disbanded,” he writes.

Source: Moby: The RIAA Needs to be Disbanded

The case went up for re-trial before a new jury, who found her guilty and surprisingly handed out even harsher fines than in the first trial. Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay $80,000 per infringement mounting up to a total of $1.92 million in fines.

Thomas-Rasset, like many others, couldn’t believe her ears when the court read out the verdict, and later said that it was “kind of ridiculous”.

Unlike most people, Thomas-Rasset never opted to settle with the RIAA, determining that she had the law on her side. Unfortunately for her the jury in this landmark case ruled she did not.

“We appreciate the jury’s service and that they take this issue as seriously as we do,” said Cara Duckworth, an RIAA spokeswoman. “We are pleased that the jury agreed with the evidence and found the defendant liable. Since day 1, we have been willing to settle the case and remain willing to do so.”

In the US juries can hand out fines up to an unbelievable $150,000 per infringement on a single song. The average settlement in related RIAA cases is around $3000, which is peanuts considering this recent verdict. In this light many people might be inclined to settle with the RIAA even when they don’t even own a computer.

How’s that for a business model?

Source: Woman Hit With $1.92 Million Fine in RIAA Case

In their most recent writeup TechCrunch published new details which were provided by another source, and in the article they hint at the following doomsday scenario. “Their parent company [CBS] supplied user data to the RIAA, and that the data could possibly be used in civil and criminal actions against those users.” TechCrunch makes it sound really scary, but how useful is this data really in a court of law?

Let’s start with a little background. Last.fm’s data is provided by its users who report their recently listened-to songs to allow the site to track their listening habits. The data comes from the ID3 tags or similar metadata formats that MP3s and other digital music files carry. These list the artist name, title of the track, name of the album and more info related to the music file.

So what can the RIAA do with this data? Since the metadata doesn’t state that a track was pirated, only pre-release tracks that appear on Last.fm would be worth looking into. However, since the RIAA only have access to metadata reported to the site there is not much they can prove with it, even if they have access to Last.fm’s entire database.

The RIAA would only be able to check which IP addresses played a music file tagged as ‘track X’ by ‘artist Y’, but since everyone can easily edit these tags they can never really be certain that an individual was indeed in possession of the track, let alone that they shared it with others.

So, suggesting that the RIAA is going to use Last.fm’s data (if they indeed got their hands on it) to go after file-sharers is complete nonsense. As evidence, Last.fm’s data is not going to be worth much in court. In fact, there are plenty of better ways to track down copyright infringers and the RIAA is well aware of that. They are experts by now.

The only thing the RIAA has to do is hire someone to monitor various public BitTorrent trackers where the music is traded, and they can easily catch thousands of people in the act. The upside of this method is that they can verify that the person on the other end is actually sharing the data. Plus, they will know that the files are indeed the titles they are looking for.

The RIAA of course knows all of this, and if they indeed requested the data it was for purposes other than taking legal action. So, assuming that the RIAA was indeed requesting data from Last.fm, why would they want to know what music people are listening to on their computers?

Most likely the RIAA is interested in the business intelligence value of the data. For years record labels have been tailoring their music releases to the listening habits of ‘pirates’, and it is not unlikely that they are interested in Last.fm’s data for similar purposes. IP-addresses can come in handy here to spot some of the regional differences in popularity of artists or tracks.

Whatever their reasons are, dragging pirates to court is not likely to be one of them. Perhaps the TechCrunch tipster is an insider at one of the record labels who wants to scare the shit out of Last.fm’s users? Or has Michael Arrington himself been hired as one of the footsoldiers in the RIAA’s war on piracy? Who knows, but anything is more plausible than the RIAA taking people to court for reporting “copyright infringing” metadata to Last.fm.

Update: Apparently Last.fm’s official client also does fingerprinting as LANjackal points out. However, the ‘evidence’ would still be far from usable in court.

Source: Last.fm’s User Data is Useless to the RIAA

We don’t make (much) music here at the Free Software Foundation, so it’s natural for people to wonder why the FSF has been standing up for individuals targeted by lawsuits launched by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Most recently we filed an *amicus curiae* brief in the case of *Sony BMG Music Entertainment, et al. v. Joel Tenenbaum* showing the RIAA’s theory of statutory damage awards to be unconstitutional.

Some would prefer that we refrain from fighting these lawsuits, suggesting that they are a distraction from the FSF’s core charter. But opposing them is actually an important part of our mission to support free software. First, these lawsuits represent a concerted attempt to rewrite copyright law in a way that threatens to undermine the ultimate goals of the free software movement. Second, a vocal minority in the entertainment industry uses these lawsuits as warrants to justify DRM technology and other measures to monitor and control the flow of information over the internet. Third, if unopposed, these lawsuits create a culture in which people are afraid to share, presuming sharing to be theft.

In their response to our brief, the RIAA says, “The FSF is not a neutral friend of the Court. Rather, FSF is an organization dedicated to eliminating restrictions on copying, redistribution, and modifying computer programs, classic intellectual property, much like the sound recordings at issue in this case [*sic*].” It’s unclear what legal aim the RIAA lawyers from the firms of Holme Roberts & Owen and Dwyer & Collora think they are accomplishing with this attack. Having an interest in the outcome of a case is the reason organizations file such briefs. William Rehnquist defined *amicus curiae* as, “a phrase that literally means ‘friend of the court’ — someone who is not a party to the litigation, but who believes that the court’s decision may affect its interest.”

But here, it is the public’s interest that we are defending, not our own. While we don’t agree — as the RIAA claims — that we are more “virulent” than an organization that intimidates everyone from the elderly to college students to the severely disabled into either paying “settlement” money or facing the crushing expenses of defending against unwarranted prosecution in faraway jurisdictions, the RIAA is correct that the FSF does have a position on copyright. Although we are primarily concerned not with music, but with how software can be made and shared so as to benefit and empower everyone, neither are the impacts of the RIAA’s actions restricted to the distribution of music. Their lawsuits are a deliberate campaign to rewrite copyright law through the courts. They are attempting to set precedents which will affect all works governed by copyright law, including software.

The RIAA, which in its litigation campaign represents exclusively EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and their affiliates, would like to change copyright to be an ordinary physical property right. Through these lawsuits, they seek to establish near exclusive permanent control over each and every use of the recordings their members distribute, expanding the power of copyright owners to include things which are not part of the existing body of law, and extracting financial penalties from the largely defenseless individuals accused of disobeying them.

But copyright is not and was not intended to be a right like this. In fact, copyright requires that the public give up some of its rights, such as to free speech and free association, in order to promote another of its fundamental interests — progress in the sciences and useful arts. In “Misinterpreting Copyright,” FSF president Richard Stallman draws an analogy between this tradeoff and government procurement. When doing any kind of purchasing necessary to do the public’s work, the government seeks (if imperfectly) to minimize the amount of taxpayer money spent to obtain the needed goods. This means paying a price that suppliers will find acceptable, while avoiding being gouged by those suppliers who may claim that the goods are worth a lot more than they really are. When the U.S. Navy was accused of paying Lockheed $640 per toilet seat for some of its aircraft, people were understandably outraged, because the government had squandered the public’s money.

In the case of copyright, it’s the public’s freedom that the government is spending, to obtain in return for the public scientific and cultural goods. Right now, governments are squandering this freedom. They are spending far too much and getting far too little in return. Plenty of authors and artists are telling the government that works can and will be made without such expenditure. The international free software movement has been proving this for many years now, having successfully produced a fully functional operating system in GNU/Linux that can be freely used, shared and improved upon by anyone who wants to do so; and more recently there have been people doing similar things in encyclopedias, textbooks, and the world of the arts (including music).

Previously, because the required equipment was large and expensive, normal readers and listeners did not have the means to easily make copies. Restrictive copyright did not negatively affect them. But now, because so many more people do have the ability to easily exercise this freedom, the burden imposed by copyright restrictions on our society has become unacceptably heavy. Even while these restrictions have become more burdensome, they have become less necessary — with the cost of publishing so much lower now, less incentive is required. Instead of acknowledging this, the government has been taking the side of those who, out of greed akin to selling us $640 toilet seats, see an opportunity to freeze what should be a contingent and evolving bargain into a permanent and natural right for themselves, expanding ownership powers under copyright law far beyond its current and historical borders.

In the U.S., the new administration continues to side against the public. Vice President Joe Biden recently spoke at a MPAA luncheon. He adopted the entertainment industry’s loaded “piracy” language, saying, “It’s pure theft.” Biden also assured the MPAA that President Obama would find the “right” copyright czar. His attitude is not surprising, given his past eagerness as a senator to sponsor and support RIAA-backed legislation. He was, after all, one of four U.S. senators invited to a champagne celebration of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) hosted by the MPAA, RIAA, and the Business Software Alliance. Obama himself has already appointed Tom Perrelli and Donald Verrilli, both former lead attorneys for the RIAA, to be associate and deputy associate attorney general.

If we are going to achieve sane copyright law, we have to avoid confusing this institutionalization of corporate greed with “art.” In fact, it seems most artists disagree with the RIAA. Sony artists reportedly earn a tiny $0.045 for each song sold on iTunes, and most of them will never receive even that much from Sony. As one example among many, singer Courtney Love answers the charge of piracy by saying: “What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist’s work without any intention of paying for it. I’m not talking about Napster-type software. I’m talking about major label recording contracts.”

The RIAA doesn’t stop at manipulating copyright law to gouge artists and the public. They also use their lawsuits as leverage to argue for control over any technology that could be used to distribute music. For example, they have pushed to require all wireless access points to be encrypted and closed, to restrict technologies like BitTorrent and other forms of peer-to-peer distribution, to impose bandwidth caps on home internet users, and to monitor traffic through service providers. Such efforts directly hurt free software. Because free software authors around the world work by collaboration, they rely on open distribution networks to move software, data, and conversation around. In particular, peer-to-peer technologies make this easier and cheaper for people with less bandwidth, and so are a powerful means of boosting grassroots free software distribution and development efforts.

The RIAA further attacks free software when they use these filesharing cases as ammunition to advocate DRM under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). It was the RIAA that attacked Princeton scientist Ed Felten for wanting to publish useful mathematical information, because this generally useful information might possibly be used to decrypt their specific DRM scheme. Sony saw no problem with secretly installing a rootkit on users’ computers, to facilitate spying on them and blocking certain activities. These efforts to turn computers against their users and to restrict technical information are on-face incompatible with free software. If we allow the RIAA to win outrageous damages in these lawsuits, then we are letting them manufacture evidence of losses due to illegal copying, which they will then use to demand from Congress more control over our technology.

Among both the government and the public, the RIAA lawsuits create a culture which frames these issues in terms that make it harder for free software to succeed, by creating a culture that fears sharing. This leads to confusion like the recent case of a schoolteacher who assumed that a student handing out GNU/Linux discs in class was breaking the law. One can hardly blame her for having this impression when the RIAA lawsuits and propaganda thoroughly permeate the news media, encouraging everyone to assume that sharing is wrong unless they are told otherwise.

The RIAA’s framing of the issue as “intellectual property” is another key way they foster this fear. They cite our opposition to this concept in their reply to our brief, and they are correct. The use of “intellectual property” language threatens to undermine the free software movement. The term lumps together disparate concepts like copyright, patents, and trademarks, which are legally distinct. The RIAA would like to lump them together because doing so increases the size of the gouge they can extract. By drawing an analogy with physical property, they erase the actual histories behind these specific areas of law and rationalize the obscene damages they are demanding. It skews discussion of the issues involved so that good solutions can’t be found, and if it is used in place of a clear discussion about copyright in the arena of music then people will accept it when discussing software as well.

The bottom line is that for art and software alike, sane copyright law should facilitate and promote sharing so that everyone can benefit from what is produced, and participate meaningfully in making it. For software, the easiest way to share is to put source code in the public domain, and not require any End User Licensing Agreement (EULA) or patent licenses. Anyone can then study and use the software, make changes to it, and redistribute changed versions to anyone they want. However, this leaves the door open for other people to use copyright law to make some changes to that software and strip away the freedom, redistributing their version without the freedoms that were originally there. Copyright law allows people to play middleman like this, intercepting works that are intended to be free and turning them into proprietary programs to control users.

To ensure that software written to be free remains free, the FSF uses a copyright license called the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL says that anyone is free to use, copy, change, and distribute modified versions of the software to which it is attached — as long as they pass on those same freedoms to whomever else they give the software. The GPL can do this because copyright law gives copyright holders the authority to outline those terms. Instead of using that authority to make copying illegal, the FSF uses that authority to make it illegal to make copying illegal.

Despite this, the FSF will continue working to reduce the power of copyright restrictions by fighting these lawsuits, filing briefs in specific cases, and collecting contributions to the RIAA Expert Witness Fund. We do not intend to shoot ourselves in the foot by supporting proposals to reduce the scope of copyright that would weaken the way the GPL protects freedom without simultaneously weakening the way companies like Microsoft and Apple use it as a weapon to take away freedom. But neither will we support the RIAA’s expansive approach to empowering copyright owners at the public’s expense on the grounds that it would make the GPL “stronger.” We will not accept losing the GPL as an effective shield unless as part of a plan that we could be confident would make software generally free. But neither will we confuse it with the end goal, which is a world where people are not called criminals when they want to see what the software on their computer is actually doing, or to share a copy with their neighbors, or to improve it and share their improvements.

Executives like Rolf Schmidt-Holtz of Sony Music Entertainment should get the message and back off. Although they claimed in December that they would stop filing lawsuits against individuals, the RIAA filed 62 more in the month of April alone. Citizens are tired of watching their governments squander their freedom to enrich this handful of corporations, and they are tired of being intimidated. We will continue our work to support this opposition to the War on Sharing, and to restore or replace copyright law for its intended purpose — progress in science and the arts, for everyone.

CC-BY-ND

Source: The War on Sharing: Why the FSF Cares About RIAA Lawsuits

Last year we reported that the RIAA’s website had suffered an XSS attack and just a couple of days ago we revealed how the MPAA site was vulnerable to an XSS attack too, one which left it embarrassingly displaying torrents from The Pirate Bay.

Now it is the RIAA’s turn (again) to suffer the same fate. Vektor, who also discovered the MPAA site exploit, told TorrentFreak that he had managed to find a security hole in RIAA.com too. He demonstrated this by using an iframe – an HTML element which makes it possible to embed an HTML document inside another HTML document – TorrentFreak for example.

As with the MPAA site exploit, Vektor explains that his work on the RIAA site is a proof of concept and should be taken as a joke.

We’re sure the RIAA and MPAA coders will be laughing heartily as they try to plug these holes.

Source: RIAA Site Features TorrentFreak’s Latest News

The apparent strategy:

1. Outlaw file sharing
2. Outlaw personal encryption and anonymization services
3. Set up a global, privately-run Internet surveillance program to spy on everybody all the time without a warrant — run by ISPs and paid for by the taxpayers
4. And finally, get the authority to block anyone from the Internet entirely, without the involvement of police, courts or any verifiable trail of evidence

We can not let this happen.

“It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.” – Bruce Schneier

One of the main reasons why the recording industry are currently succeeding in this hostile takeover of the Internet, is that most people simply don’t understand what file sharing is, or why it matters to them in the first place. Whenever civil liberties are sacrificed, it is always on the bonfire of ignorance. We need to educate the world – neighbors, parents, judges and lawmakers – as to why the Internet must remain free, neutral, and uncensored.

It sometimes helps to explain that a file sharing technology like Bittorrent is the digital society’s equivalent of the wheel. It allows fast and easy transportation of data between users and businesses alike. But like the wheel, file sharing needs a stable, flat surface to perform at its best. In this analogy, The Pirate Bay is nothing short of the largest, best maintained, and most stable network of such ‘digital roads’ in the world. And it’s free to use for anyone, at any time, for any purpose.

Naturally, as is always the case where people congregate in a free society, some of the people who drive their wheeled carts on this network of roads will be carrying things in their carts of questionable quality, purpose or origin. In any system or society that is based on freedom rather than censorship or distrust, there is no question that individual transgressions can take place. This is the most basic cost of liberty.

As a digital society in its teens, we have yet to realize the enormous potential of file sharing in culture, education, knowledge sharing, and business. But already, we are seeing massive opposition against it from the likes of IFPI, the RIAA and the MPAA. This opposition, of course, stems from some of the aforementioned wheeled carts transporting ‘questionable goods’, in the form of copyrighted material.

The ensuing battle has been disguised as a legal matter concerning rights holders and ‘pirates’, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. It is true that the recording industry wants to stop criminals, but they are attempting to prohibit the wheel and all building of roads to pull it off. These lawyers are prepared to sacrifice our liberties, our privacy and our digital freedom in order to reach their goal. It is a grossly disproportionate and misdirected attack, and it has already begun: Once the verdict of the Spectrial was in, the Swedish anti-piracy office immediately began issuing legal threats against other file sharing networks. They are bulldozing every street and burning every car to prevent any possible (mis)use of the wheel. And worse yet – we are letting it happen.

The case of The Pirate Bay was not a case of artists vs. freeloaders, or even the recording industry vs. pirates. There were no artists on the accusing side, nor were there any pirates on the defending side. It was, and is, a case of misguided frustration by industry executives and lawyers, directed not against the actual violators of copyright law, but against the most outspoken proponents and enablers of a fundmental digital technology. A technology that allows fast and easy transportation af data – all data – between users and businesses alike.

We must never blame the network for the actions of individuals. Both rights holders and lawmakers must respect the fundamental principle of personal, individual responsibility. Let each peer be responsible for his own actions, just as every driver is liable for his own car.

The Pirate Bay is not illegal. File sharing is not illegal. Using file sharing for illegal purposes is illegal. The difference may be subtle to a layman, but in legal terms, the distinction is clear as day. The fact that the judges in the Pirate Bay case failed to recognize this, is a judicial travesty bordering on flat out corruption.

It cannot be stressed enough: this is not a question of copyright, of music, or of piracy. This is a question of a private organization now aiming to subvert several of the most important digital inventions since the World Wide Web, and our judges and politicians turning a blind eye in a staggering display of ignorance and corruption. This fight is about much more than The Pirate Bay. When our liberties are taken from us, we must rise, united in one voice, and fight for them.

It is a fight for basic digital liberties. It is a fight for our right to privacy. It is a fight for net neutrality. There is no getting around it. This is the fight of our generation, and it is too important to lose.

This is a guest post by Jens Roland. Jens is a computer scientist by training, but a technology forecaster by trade. He has worked at international think tanks as a consultant and researcher in emerging technologies and has written more than 300 articles and a book on the subject.

Source: RIAA’s Hostile Takeover of the Internet