In the News

The RIAA has settled a case against a grandmother in Texas who was accused of sharing music over the KaZaA network. Both the RIAA and Rhonda Crain, the defendant, agreed to a stipulation of judgment against Crain, but the record labels involved in the suit will not get any damages for any infringement that occurred.

Crain, a grandmother who was displaced by 2005's Hurricane Rita, was sued for copyright infringement in September 2006 after the RIAA's investigators flagged user "kcrain@KaZaA" for sharing 572 tracks on the P2P network, including tracks by 50 Cent and Usher. After Crain denied engaging in file-sharing and rejected the RIAA's $4,500 prelitigation settlement offer, the RIAA filed suit.

It is ironic that in recent months, label chiefs have been stealing center stage from their more illustrious label acts but for all the wrong reasons. Where Britney had teased to reveal too much of her inner self, Doug Morris, for a man in his position as Universal Music’s CEO shocked the industry with revelations of the basic inadequacies of his anterior cortex when he claimed to have been clueless on not only technology but as a CEO, unable to even organize and hire the right talents. The recent pronouncements and actions of Doug and his cohorts give us cause to wonder if they really know what they are doing and if they have learnt anything since the onset of digital music activity almost a decade ago. Either he was putting on an act of stupidity to hide the greater offense of devious and greedy turf protection which the labels had been engaging in for the best part of the past decade or else he was just simply too inane.

No Swiss DMCA

Referendum against the Revision of the Copyright act as of 5. October 2007

Important: the collection of forms is being organized. The form is changed, please distribute the new form from now on. Please consult with this listing of addresses to send your forms.

A dangerous law has been passed on the 5th October by both the Parliament and the National Council almost without resistance. The revision represents massive advances for legal protection of copy protection mechanisms.

A bipartisan group of Congressmen (and one woman) yesterday introduced a major bill aimed at boosting US intellectual property laws and the penalties that go along with them. While much of the legislation targets industrial counterfeiting and knockoff drugs, it also allows the government to seize people's computers.

The Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO IP... groan) Act of 2007 has the backing of many of the most powerful politicians on the House Judiciary Committee, including John Conyers (D-MI), Lamar Smith (R-TX), and "Hollywood" Howard Berman (D-CA).

These groups line up against tech interests in courtrooms and corridors of power across the country.

Their names keep coming up over and over again in courtrooms and corridors of power across the country--those groups whose interests always seem to run counter to those of technology companies and consumers. They come in many forms: associations, think tanks, money-raising organizations, PACs, and even other tech-oriented industries like telecommunications.

The tech issues that they're concerned with are what you might expect: digital rights management and fair use, patent law, broadband speed and reach, wireless spectrum and network neutrality. I talked to a good number of tech and media policy insiders in Washington, D.C.--mostly off the record--to find out who these groups are, how they operate, and who pays their bills. We'll start with the biggest offenders first and work our way down.

The state attorney general is resisting the music labels' demand for consumer identities.

Oregon is fast becoming Ground Zero in the contentious battle between the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the tens of thousands of consumers it accuses of illegal music sharing.

The state Attorney General's office this week filed an appeal in U.S. District Court in Oregon calling for an immediate investigation of the evidence presented by the RIAA when it subpoenaed the identities of 17 students at the University of Oregon who allegedly infringed music copyrights. It is the second time in a month that Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers has resisted attempts by the RIAA to force the university to turn over the names of individuals it says shared music illegally.

As the RIAA's legal battle against suspected file-sharers has unfolded, one of the arguments put forth by some defendants is that the statutory damages sought by the RIAA are unconstitutionally excessive. That's one of the defenses articulated by Ray Beckerman, attorney for the defendant in UMG v. Lindor. In a ruling issued yesterday, Judge Robert M. Levy ordered the record labels to provide Marie Lindor with the expenses incurred for each of the 38 songs at issue in the case, writing that Lindor's request may "lead to the discovery of admissible evidence."

Illegal downloaders of music and movies are at the forefront of technology—and it's time the industries caught up.

In 1701, Daniel Defoe wrote the satirical poem The True-Born Englishman, and it was a sensation. It was the bestselling poem of its day, but a large number of those sales didn't put any money into Defoe's pockets. This was a shame, because Defoe really could have used the cash. He had had money problems for a long time and was just managing to climb out of a bankruptcy as an estimated 80,000 unauthorized copies of his poem were being distributed. As far as we know, the people who made those copies and sold them in the streets are the first intellectual property thieves in history ever to be referred to as "pirates."

I can't find much difference between the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) members' business model and a band of large-scale ticket scalpers, but lately they and their music-industry cousins in the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are exhibiting the collective gall of a bank robber demanding change for the getaway car's parking meter.

During the past few weeks, the MPAA has asked both for Congress to pay for enforcement of their dubious and withering business model as if it were law (as, unfortunately, it is in some cases now), and for universities to conduct discovery for them by running the MPAA's privacy-busting monitoring systems.

Earlier this month, the RIAA announced that it had sent off yet another wave of prelitigation settlement letters to college campuses across the US. This time, the recording industry targeted 16 schools, including almost the entire membership of the Ivy League. There was one notable Ivy school missing from the roster, one that has failed to appear in any of the RIAA's press releases: Harvard.

Since beginning its campaign against college students in February, the RIAA has sent out 4,157 prelitigation settlement letters to 160 different schools in ten separate waves.

The schools targeted run the gamut. There are large state schools like Ohio State University, the University of Texas - Austin, and the University of Tennessee. There are also a handful of small liberal arts colleges on the list, including Swarthmore College, evangelical Christian school Bethel University in Minnesota, Gettysburg College, and Carleton College. And the elite schools in the US are well represented, too: Stanford, Northwestern, MIT, and the aforementioned Ivy League schools have all received missives from the RIAA. But not Harvard.