The Pirate Bay Trial: The Official Verdict – Guilty
Just minutes ago the verdict in the case of The Pirate Bay Four was announced. All four defendants were accused of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. Peter Sunde: Guilty. Fredrik Neij: Guilty. Gottfrid Svartholm: Guilty. Carl Lundström: Guilty. The four receive 1 year in jail each and fines totaling $3,620,000.
Pirate Bay Trial Witness: File-Sharing Not Bad For Music Business
[via ars] What happens when a professor who believes that file-sharing has been beneficial to the music industry takes the witness stand in The Pirate Bay trial, then learns that prosecutors have been talking to his boss about the quality of his research? Fireworks—and flowers. The Pirate Bay trial settled into something (sort of) approaching [...]
95% of Music Downloads are Illegal: IFPI
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) recently released a report concluding that despite initiatives by the music industry, 95% of music downloads continue to be illegal. The IFPI, considered by some to be the global version of the RIAA, says that 40 billion songs were illegally downloaded in 2008. Those songs don’t necessarily [...]
Judge: Illegal Downloads Don’t Equate To Lost Sales
US District Judge James P. Jones has ruled that copyright holders cannot equate each illegal download with a lost sale. Just because somebody downloaded your song, doesn’t mean that they would have purchased it otherwise. Practically what that means is that you cannot seek restitution based on the amount that hypothetically would have been gained [...]
RIAA to Abandon Mass Lawsuits
I just found this article in the Wall Street Journal.
;)
A quick look at album sales in the U.S. shows that they have been dropping consistently since 2004.It looks like the RIAA is abandoning mass lawsuits in favor of a new structure for combating illegal file sharing. I think that it’s a good call since the current practice of suing individuals was clearly not working on a large scale. The chances of getting sued were too slim for people to be scared out of sharing, and there was still never a way to say difinitively that the person being sued was the person who was file sharing anyway. Consider open wireless networks. The RIAA would have to seize computers to prove that the shared files were even taken by the person in question, and to my knowledge, that never happened. The anonymity of the internet must be combated before people think that their actions need to change. Offloading a lot of that hunting workload to the ISPs, which the RIAA plans to do in this new plan, will help bring more file sharers to the RIAA’s attention. What they do with that huge influx of new culprits has yet to be seen, as there will still be no way to prove that the holder of the ISP plan was the one file sharing. Do the ISPs then pin responsibility for network security on the customer? The RIAA plan is to issue several warnings to copyright violators provided to them by ISPs, as well as throttle their net speed as punishment…
Major Labels in Favor of P2P… Sort of…
Back in March of this year, Warner Music Group brought on digital music guru Jim Griffin to consult on how to combat illegal file sharing and recoup some revenue from an ever depleting amount of CD sales.
Music Industry Should Embrace Illegal File Sharing
It doesn’t look like illegal file sharing is going anywhere, so what should the new music distribution model look like? Here are a few lessons learned from Radiohead’s “pay what you want” experiment with In Rainbows.
