RIAA Victory Over LimeWire – The Implications
The largest remaining P2P file sharing service goes down against the RIAA.
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.
How To Kill The Music Industry
Jens Roland just wrote a guest article over at ToreentFreak on how file sharing is not the sole culprit in the demise of the music industry: During The Pirate Bay trial, the music industry placed the blame for the decline in their revenues squarely on the shoulders of file-sharers. Their logic is clearly flawed, but [...]
How Harvard Law Threw Down The Gauntlet To The RIAA
[via arstechnica] Law professor Charles Nesson and John Palfrey, director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society (which Nesson co-founded), made their position clear. “Recently, the president of the Recording Industry Association of America, Cary Sherman, wrote to Harvard to challenge the university administration to stop acting as a ‘passive conduit’ for students downloading [...]
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 [...]
How To Keep The RIAA Off Your Back
There are a couple options for you to keep the RIAA off your back: 1) Don’t share copywritten files. OR 2) When the RIAA drops a lawsuit in your lap, just don’t show up and wait for them to give it up… like this.
Merry Christmas From The RIAA
If you somehow made it on the RIAA’s “nice” list, you got a little ecard from them this year. The copyright note at the bottom actually feels more like a tongue-in-cheek poke at the RIAA, but it’s actually from them. You can check it out here. The 2008 holiday ecard from the RIAA, modeling the [...]
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…
