Anti-RIAA Site Folds: Via Threat Level.

Provocative website p2pnet.net, the online voice to one of the world’s most blistering and perpetual attacks on the Recording Industry Association of America, is shuttering amid financial doldrums. It was 9 years old.

“I can’t claim p2pnet has been protecting the world, but I’ve done my best to unspin some of the vested interest corporate spin, and expose a few of the lies and corruption,” the site’s voice and founder Jon Newton said in his “last post” Wednesday.

The Vancouver Island, British Columbia huckster is looking for donations or even a partnership in hopes of reviving the site that has become infamous for its mocking portrayal of the RIAA, which consists of Vivendi Universal, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner Music.

While Newton mocked the Motion Picture Association of America, the site is best remembered for referring to the RIAA as the “Big 4 Organised Music Cartel,” [ Read more ... ]

Lawyers Challenge Lowered Amount of ‘Shocking’ File Sharing Award: Via Threat Level.

Lawyers for a music file sharer said Monday they would challenge a judge’s order reducing from $1.92 million to $54,000 the amount their client, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, must pay the recording industry for copyright infringement of 24 songs.

The appeal concerns Friday’s head-spinning order by U.S. District Judge Michael Davis. The Minnesota federal judge dramatically lowered the amount a jury in June ordered Thomas-Rasset to pay — after being found liable in what at the time was the nation’s first Recording Industry Association of America file sharing case to reach trial. Most of the RIAA’s 30,000 lawsuits were settled out of court for a few thousand dollars during the record companies’ six-year litigation campaign, which is winding down.

Joe Sibley, Thomas-Rasset’s attorney, said in a telephone interview that even the reduced amount of damages is unconstitutionally excessive. It’s a penalty of 2,250 times an assumed $1 cost of a music download. [ Read more ... ]

"Three Strikes" and Verizon: Not Happening: Via Public Knowledge.

Yesterday’s CNET report that Verizon had secretly adopted a “three strikes” policy towards alleged copyright infringers had our office all atwitter last night - how could a charter member of our ad hoc copyright reform coalition be engaging in such radical activity? Well, it turns out they weren’t.

As their misquoted spokesperson explains here, what Verizon employs is a process for passing on warning notices to alleged infringers, but that process does not include automatic termination. My guess is that to the extent that she was talking about infringers having their internet access terminated, she was referring to people who had been adjudicated by a court to be infringing, and as such, they would be violating Verizon’s terms of service.

Passing on warning notices that do not involve deep packet inspection is a process for limiting infringement that PK wholeheartedly supports and which appears to be quite effective. [ Read more ... ]

Verizon Terminating Copyright Infringers’ Internet Access: Via Threat Level.

While it was not immediately clear whether other internet service providers were following suit, the move comes as the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America are lobbying ISPs and Congress to support terminating internet access for repeat, online copyright offenders.

All the while, the United States has been privately lobbying the European Union to “encourage” so-called three strikes policies, according to leaked documents surrounding a proposed international intellectual property accord.

Verizon was not immediately prepared to comment in detail on the developments, first reported by CNET, or to detail how many of its more than 8 million broadband subscribers it has terminated — although CNET said the number was “small.” The RIAA declined comment.

“We reserve the right to do that,” Verizon spokeswoman Bobbi Henson said in a telephone interview regarding the terminations. [ Read more ... ]

Court Reduces ‘Shocking’ File Sharing Award: Via Threat Level.

A federal judge on Friday reduced a $1.92 million file sharing verdict to $54,000 after concluding the award for infringing 24 songs was “shocking.”

A federal jury in June found Jammie Thomas-Rasset liable in what at the time was the nation’s only Recording Industry Association of America file sharing case against an individual to go to trial. The Minnesota federal jury dinged her $1.92 million for infringing 24 songs. She asked the judge to set aside or reduce that $80,000 per song in damages.

U.S. District Judge Michael Davis agreed on Friday, and said the RIAA may have a retrial if it does not accept his ruling.

“The need for deterrence cannot justify a $2 million verdict for stealing and illegally distributing 24 songs for the sole purpose of obtaining free music,” Davis wrote. “Moreover, although plaintiffs were not required to prove their actual damages, statutory damages must bear some relation to actual damages.” [ Read more ... ]

Senator Demands IP Treaty Details: Via Threat Level.

That a U.S. senator must ask a federal agency to share information regarding a proposed and “classified” international anti-counterfeiting accord the government has already disclosed is alarming. Especially when the info has been given to Hollywood, the recording industry, software makers and even some digital-rights groups.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) is demanding that U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk confirm leaks surrounding the unfinished Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, being negotiated largely between the European Union and United States. Among other things, Wyden wants to know if the deal creates international guidelines that mean consumers lose internet access if they are believed to be digital copyright scofflaws.

He also wants to know whether internet service providers could lose “safe harbor” protection for failing to police their customers’ digital content for copyright infringement violations. Such a move would heap copyright liability onto the ISP, and fundamentally alter U.S. copyright law.

What “legal incentives,” Wyden asked Kirk in a Wednesday letter, would “encourage Online Service Providers (OSPs) to cooperate with copyright owners to deter the unauthorized storage or transmission of copyrighted materials.”

The questions came weeks after leaked documents from the European Union suggested the United States was taking those positions on the accord’s draft internet section. [ Read more ... ]

Et Tu, U2? Bono, Net Surveillance and the Developing World: Via EFF.org Updates.

We feel compelled to add our comments about Bono's recent New York Times column, in which he appeared to express a strange hope that ISPs would start spying on their users in the name of protecting America's intellectual property. "We know," says Bono, "from America's noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China's ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it's perfectly possible to track content." He continues by hoping that "movie moguls will succeed where musicians and their moguls have failed so far, and rally America to defend the most creative economy in the world, where music, film, TV and video games help to account for nearly 4 percent of gross domestic product."

But Bono's new-found embrace of tracking Internet activity is in direct conflict with his own positions (expressed in the same article) about global freedom and equity. [ Read more ... ]

EFF minilinks for 2009-16-12: Via EFF.org Updates.

• NYT Editorial: Twitter Tapping
  The Times' editorial board speaks out in support of EFF's lawsuit seeking government guidelines for the monitoring of social networking sites.
  
• District Court: Personal E-Mail From Work Still Privileged
  A federal prosecutor had a reasonable expectation of privacy when he sent personal email to his lawyer over government computers, the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled.
  [ Read more ... ]
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Judge Sides With RIAA in ‘Sham’ Litigation Class Action: Via Threat Level.

A judge has dealt a major blow to a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that the Recording Industry Association of America’s nearly 6-year-old courthouse campaign against file sharers amounts to nothing more than “sham” litigation.

The judge ruled that the RIAA has the right to bring civil lawsuits and is protected under a legal doctrine allowing trade groups to protect the interests of their members. The RIAA, the judge added, had an “objective basis” to bring lawsuits against individuals (.pdf) connected to IP addresses over which file sharing is occurring.

“The court, therefore, concludes on this record that plaintiff has not established defendants filed a series of lawsuits based on a policy of initiating legal proceedings without regard to the merits,” U.S. District Judge Anna J. Brown of Oregon wrote Thursday.

Brown, however, did not immediately dismiss the proposed class action that represents the estimated 30,000 individuals the RIAA has sued, although her ruling seems to suggest that a dismissal is coming. [ Read more ... ]

Verizon to forward RIAA warning letters (but that's all): Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.

If you're a copyright owner who has gone to the trouble and expense of tracking down online copyright infringers, don't send warning letters to Verizon without striking a deal first; Verizon simply chucks them in the bin.

Do a deal with the "big V" and Verizon is willing to forward warning letters on to its subscribers, but that's it. No customer information is exchanged and no sanctions are implemented—and Verizon has been handling the issue this way for years.

Read Original Article:(Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.)

Setback for malicious prosecution lawsuit against RIAA: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.

Although the RIAA has decided to stop initiating new legal actions against music fans as part of its war on piracy, there are still a few cases in which the wheels of justice are rolling ahead slowly. One such case is Andersen v. Atlantic, where exonerated former RIAA defendant Tanya Andersen is suing the record labels for malicious prosecution, negligence, and conspiracy. That lawsuit hit a speed bump when a federal judge dismissed some of the claims in Andersen's lawsuit. [ Read more ... ]

Targeted Copyright Enforcement: Deterring Many Users with a Few Lawsuits: Via Freedom to Tinker.

One reason the record industry's strategy of suing online infringers ran into trouble is that there are too many infringers to sue. If the industry can only sue a tiny fraction of infringers, then any individual infringer will know that he is very unlikely to be sued, and deterrence will fail.

Or so it might seem -- until you read The Dynamics of Deterrence, a recent paper by Mark Kleiman and Beau Kilmer that explains how to deter a great many violators despite limited enforcement capacity.

Consider the following hypothetical. [ Read more ... ]

Judge Refuses to Punish Lawyer for Anti-RIAA Blogging: Via Threat Level.

An attorney defending against a music-piracy lawsuit didn’t cross ethical bounds by filing motions broadly attacking the recording industry and posting them on his blog, a magistrate judge has ruled, rejecting demands from the RIAA for monetary sanctions.

Attorney Ray Beckerman was “less than forthcoming at times” in defending a client against an RIAA lawsuit, but the music industry’s concerns were “largely overstated,” New York Magistrate Judge Robert M. Levy wrote Friday (.pdf).

“Although defendant’s counsel took an unusually aggressive stance and, at times, veered into hyperbole and gratuitous attacks on the recording industry as a whole, I do not find clear evidence of bad faith on counsel’s part,” [ Read more ... ]

Feeling guilt over P2P use? Piracy Payback wants to help: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.

Feeling a sense of remorse, contrition, guilt, shame, and self-loathing over all that unauthorized peer-to-peer downloading you've been doing? Salve that stinging conscience by giving some cash back to artists! [ Read more ... ]

Ignoring RIAA lawsuits cheaper than going to trial: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset and Joel Tenenbaum captured the nation's attention when they were defendants in the RIAA's first two trials against accused online infringers. But here's the mind-warping reality: both defendants would have been far better off monetarily if they had simply ignored the complaint altogether and failed to show up in court. [ Read more ... ]

Music piracy costs money; does fighting it cost more?: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.

Big Content often claims to be losing absurd amounts of cash to a peg-legged and eye-patched crowd of Internet pirates. To deal with the problem, entertainment lobbyists around the world have suggested that governments might want to mandate "three strikes" laws to punish repeat online infringers, and that Internet service providers should get involved in the battle. But three-strikes rules have their own significant costs, and ISPs are now waging a "bogus numbers" battle of their own in an effort to defeat the proposals. [ Read more ... ]

Who, Why, and What the EFF? Ask the Electronic Frontier Foundation about Copyright, Innovation, and the NSA: Via Google Tech Talk.

Google Tech Talk
April 27, 2009

ABSTRACT

Who, Why, and What the EFF? Ask the Electronic Frontier Foundation about Copyright, Innovation, and the NSA

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is one of the leading online civil liberties groups. Join EFF attorneys as they deliver the the latest on the fight against warrantless wiretapping, promoting increased government transparency, and protecting your right to use the media you own. From the DMCA to DefCon, NSA to RIAA, they'll spell out what's happening where law, tech, and civil liberties collide.

Panelists are Fred von Lohmann, Marcia Hofmann, and Kurt Opsahl. [ Read more ... ]

RIAA Asks Schoolkids To Assist With Propaganda: Via EFF.org Updates.

Last week, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced an update to Music-Rules!, its flagship "curriculum" for teaching copyright law to schoolkids.

We wrote about Music-Rules! and similar industry propaganda efforts in May, outlining some of their falsehoods and biases. For instance, the RIAA tells kids, "Never copy someone else's creative work without permission from the copyright holder" — omitting the important right to make creative fair use of existing content. It also coins a misleading term, "songlifting," (which the curriculum says is "just as bad as shoplifting"). Perhaps most disturbing of all given that the curriculum is supposed to be adopted by schools, it teaches kids bad math as part of its lessons on peer to peer file-sharing.

The updated curriculum goes a step further and asks kids to contact their local media and act as the RIAA's own unpaid public relations staff: [ Read more ... ]

Feds Support $1.92 Million File Sharing Verdict: Via Threat Level.

The Obama administration told a federal judge Friday the $1.92 million jury verdict against a Minnesota woman for sharing 24 music tracks on Kazaa was constitutionally sound despite defense claims it was unconstitutionally excessive.

After the June verdict against Jammie Thomas-Rasset, defense attorneys urged U.S. District Judge Michael Davis to set it aside or reduce dramatically the $80,000-per-song award, arguing it was “excessive, shocking and monstrous.”

In response to that challenge to the Copyright Act, with allows damages up to $150,000 per song, the Justice Department told Davis in a 26-page brief that the verdict should not be overturned on grounds it was unconstitutionally excessive. [ Read more ... ]

Big Content: ludicrous to expect DRMed music to work forever: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.

When Wal-Mart announced in 2008 that it was pulling down the DRM servers behind its (nearly unused) online music store, the Internet suffered a collective aneurysm of outrage, eventually forcing the retail giant to run the servers for another year. Buying DRMed content, then having that content neutered a few months later, seemed to most consumers not to be fair. [ Read more ... ]

RIAA File Sharing Trial Begins — Update: Via Threat Level.

Trial for the nation’s second file sharing defendant to go before a jury is beginning Monday in Massachusetts. The outcome is already shaping up to resemble the only other file sharing trial, which ended in a judgment in favor of the Recording Industry Association of America.

That’s because hours before opening statements were scheduled for late Monday, a federal judge in the case effectively gutted defendant Joel Tenenbaum’s defense. The 25-year-old Boston University student, represented by Harvard University professor Charles Nesson, claimed he had a fair use right to share copyrighted music on the file sharing network Kazaa.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner, ahead of jury selection, rejected that defense. “It seems clear that some portion of paying consumers would shift to free downloads if this activity were deemed a fair use,” Gertner ruled. [ Read more ... ]

A Freedom-of-Speech Approach To Limiting Filesharing - Part I: Filesharing and Spam: Via Freedom to Tinker.

[Today we kick off a series of three guest posts by Mitch Golden. Mitch was a professor of physics when, in 1995, he was bitten by the Internet bug and came to New York to become an entrepreneur and consultant. He has worked on a variety of Internet enterprises, including one in the filesharing space. As usual, the opinions expressed in these posts are Mitch's alone. -- Ed]

The battle between the record labels and filesharers has been somewhat out of the news a bit of late, but it rages on still. There is an ongoing court case Arista Records v LimeWire, in which a group of record labels are suing to have LimeWire held accountable for the copyright infringing done by its users. Though this case has attracted less attention than similar cases before it, it may raise interesting issues not addressed in previous cases. Though I am a technologist, not a lawyer, this series of posts will advocate a way of looking at the issues, including legal, using a freedom-of-speech based approach, which leads to some unusual conclusions.

Let's start by reviewing some salient features of filesharing. [ Read more ... ]

RIAA Seeks Web Removal of ‘Illegal’ Court Recordings: Via Wired: Threat Level.

The Recording Industry Association of America on Monday demanded a federal judge order Harvard University’s Charles Nesson to remove from the internet “unauthorized and illegal recordings” of pretrial hearings and depositions in a file-sharing lawsuit headed to trial.

“Enough is enough. For the past five months, this court has repeatedly warned defense counsel regarding his insistence on engaging unauthorized and illegal recordings of counsel and proceedings in this case,” RIAA attorney Daniel Cloherty wrote (.pdf) U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner of Massachusetts. Cloherty urged the court to sanction Nesson, the founder of the 12-year-old Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

“The idea that a court is being asked by them to order educational material to be removed from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society website seems a questionable intrusion both on my liberty and the public interest,” said Nesson in a telephone interview. “I certainly don’t agree that I am violating any law.” [ Read more ... ]

Judge OK's MediaSentry Evidence, Limits Defendant's Expert: Via Slashdot: Your Rights Online.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rasset, the judge has denied the defendant's motion to suppress the MediaSentry evidence for illegality, holding that MediaSentry's conduct did not violate any of the three laws cited by the defendant. The judge also dismissed most of the RIAA's objections to testimony by the defendant's expert, Prof. Yongdae Kim, but did sustain some of them. [ Read more ... ]

Thomas judge bars Fair Use defense, OKs MediaSentry evidence: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset's attempt to bar all MediaSentry evidence from her copyright infringement retrial next week has failed, as has her attempt to assert a "fair use" defense. [ Read more ... ]