Free Republic

POLITICIANS in the former British colony of Virginia are starting to wake up to the fact that its government is about to sign a secret treaty called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) that will give sweeping powers to the movie and music businesses to lock up filesharers. Two US senators are not happy about allowing the government to sign such a treaty, which is so secret that hardly anyone knows about it and the entertainment cartels have the right to send death squads around to the houses of people who are in the know but shouldn't be [you made the...

I was killing some rare free time this morning with a little trip around Archive org. With the recreation of al-Ekhlaas and a growing number of issues animating the jihobbist these days (Palestine, "revisions," Somalia, etc), expect Archive to remain the preeminent jihad media hosting site.

Its ISP faced a $70,000 fine if file-sharing site was allowed to continue File-sharing site The Pirate Bay went down today after its Internet service provider, Black Internet, cut its connection to avoid being fined by the Stockholm district court. A 500,000 Swedish kronor (US$70,000) fine would be the result if Black Internet did not comply with the decision in the district court. "The decision was made by the district court on Friday, but reached us today and we have decided to comply. ... We are a small operator and we haven't got the financial resources to pursue such a...

These days, Fung is still in Richmond and still fascinated by peer-to-peer technology. The record industry is still in a panic. But other things are different. The movie and television industries, for instance, have joined the music business in fear of wanton file sharing. And Fung is no longer watching from the sidelines. He's jumped into the fray and in the eyes of the entertainment industry has become one of its biggest problems -- a threat to be crushed..... Created by a Seattle programmer named Bram Cohen in 2002, BitTorrent was an ingenious piece of peer-to-peer software. Where its predecessors...

MINNEAPOLIS — A replay of the nation's only file-sharing case to go to trial has ended with the same result — a Minnesota woman was found to have violated music copyrights and must pay huge damages to the recording industry

File-sharing sites help make popular acts more popular, finds a study. The research, by industry body PRS for Music, showed the most pirated pop songs tend to be those at the top of the music charts. There was little evidence that file-sharing sites helped unsigned and new bands find an audience, it found. It suggests file-sharing sites are becoming an alternative broadcast network comparable to radio stations as a way of hearing music. Long tail The study, carried out by Will Page, chief economist at the PRS, and Eric Garland, head of media tracking firm Big Champagne, looked at patterns...

A court in Sweden has jailed four men behind The Pirate Bay (TPB), the world's most high-profile file-sharing website, in a landmark case. Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were found guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail.

The founders of file-sharing website The Pirate Bay have been sentenced to a year in jail in Sweden for breaking copyright laws by helping millions of users download music, movies and computer games for free. The four were also ordered to pay $3.6 m (£2.4m) in damages to copyright holders, including Warner Brothers, MGM, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox Films, Sony and Universal, according to Swedish media reports. In a Twitter posting before sentencing, Mr Sunde said: "Nothing will happen to TPB [the Pirate Bay], this is just theatre for the media." The Pirate Bay provides a forum for its...

According to some people who are paid lots of money to think about these sorts of things, the legal, ethical and economic questions facing the music business aren’t just about preserving the livelihoods of people who work in that industry. No, the very future of democracy is at stake.... At the heart of the debate is how to license peer-to-peer sharing of music files, widely blamed for the huge drop in sales of recorded music this decade. Sandy Pearlman, a veteran producer and McGill University professor, and entertainment lawyer Dina LaPolt raised the specter of a “darknet,” in which information...

Will your ISP block your Internet if you are accused of file sharing?That is exactly what the Recording Industry Association of America has asked Internet providers to do. Apparently, some are willing to cooperate. Under this plan, if the RIAA accuses you of illegal file sharing, you will have your Internet service terminated after receiving warnings. This practice is already underway in some other countries. Illegal file sharing is wrong, but having the RIAA as the judge and jury is a violation of American's rights. This plan would only be fair if businesses in the music industry have their Internet...

PITTSBURGH -- Target 11 has learned a Cranberry company that monitors peer-to-peer file-sharing networks discovered what it said is a potentially serious security breach involving President Barack Obama’s helicopter. Tiversa employees found engineering and communications information about Marine One at an IP address in Tehran, Iran. Bob Boback, CEO of Tiversa, said, ”We found a file containing entire blueprints and avionics package for Marine One,which is the president's helicopter." The company was able to trace the file back to its original source. "What appears to be a defense contractor in Bethesda, MD had a file sharing program on one of...

Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Center (IICC) January 26, 2009 The Internet and terrorism: Hamas has recently launched PaluTube, its new file sharing website. AqsaTube, the previous file sharing website, has changed its name and appearance and is now known as TubeZik. Those changes resulted from the refusal of French and Russian Internet service providers to continue hosting AqsaTube.

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama won applause from legal adversaries of the recording industry. Stanford law professor Larry Lessig, the doyen of the "free culture" movement, endorsed the Illinois senator, as did Google CEO Eric Schmidt and even the Pirate Party. That was then. As president-elect, one of Obama's first tech-related decisions has been to select the Recording Industry Association of America's favorite lawyer to be the third in command at the Justice Department. And Obama's pick as deputy attorney general, the second most senior position, is the lawyer who oversaw the defense of the Copyright Term Extension Act--the...

After years of suing thousands of people for allegedly stealing music via the Internet, the recording industry is set to drop its legal assault as it searches for more effective ways to combat online music piracy.(edit)Instead, the Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers(edit)If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.

There was fear and trembling on the Internets earlier this month when the word went out that storied Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson - "Billion Dollar Charlie" - had decided to go mano a mano with the most-hated institution in America. The Bush White House? No, the Recording Industry Association of America. (snip) Now 69, Nesson has become something of a legend, not necessarily for the right reasons. A few years ago he spoke openly about his occasional marijuana use, and of late he has been haunting the onanistic underworld of Second Life, a computer-generated, "virtual reality" universe. But...

It has been something of a David and Goliath battle, but the first skirmishes in the war on file sharing are over. While the RIAA jubilantly claimed success last year, it is another case that has has now silenced the RIAA, as it avoids drawing attention to the case it never had. If you read a mainstream media news report about file sharing or talk to a reporter about (illicit) filesharing, you would think that the only case involving the RIAA was Capitol V Thomas, a case that made news nationwide for the size of the fines. However, there are...

Kid Rock is part of an exclusive club whose only other members are The Beatles, Garth Brooks, and AC/DC. What do thse artists have in common? They're major artists whose music isn't sold oniTunes. In Kid Rock's case there is actually one album being sold by the online music giant, but that's just because he doesn't own the rights to it. So why doesn't he want to sell his music on iTunes? It's simple really. He sees it as simply a continuation of the way labels have treated artists for decades. In his words, "iTunes takes the money, the record...

As if P2P wasn't bad enough, now researchers have come up with a more efficient way to fileshare The international community may be preparing to launch the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) which will force ISPs to log filesharing and hand over user records to the government, will eliminate privacy tools, and allow ex parte border searches, but there is some good news on the horizon. Researchers at Yale have come up with a breakthrough in file sharing technology. The new system coordinates Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) software providers to raise internet efficiency, and perhaps file transfer speeds.

MediaDefender attacks and cripples Revision3 for locking out its spy-bots Posted by Cory Doctorow, May 29, 2008 10:14 AM | permalink MediaDefender, the thugs paid by the entertainment industry to spy on file-sharers and attempt to cripple file-sharing networks, attacked a legitimate Internet TV company called Revision3 over the weekend, launch as massive denial-of-service attack in retaliation for having their spy-bots locked out of R3's BitTorrent trackers: Revision3 runs a tracker expressly designed to coordinate the sharing and downloading of our shows. ItÂ’s a completely legitimate business practice, similar to how ESPN puts out a guide that tells viewers how...

Paul McGuinness, long-time manager of rock band U2, on Monday launched a verbal attack against illegal music downloaders, as well as internet service providers, device makers, Silicon Valley and even hippies in a speech at a conference in France. McGuinness blamed these forces for "destroying the recorded music industry," with illegal downloading through peer-to-peer file-sharing networks the single biggest reason for why the business is in decline. ISPs have for years profited from that illegal downloading, which occurs on their networks, and their arguments that it isn't their job to police the internet are no longer valid, he said. The...

EU court: downloaders can stay private By AOIFE WHITE, AP Business Writer 50 minutes ago   BRUSSELS, Belgium - Record labels and film studios cannot demand that telecom companies hand over the names and addresses of people suspected of breaking European copyright rules by swapping illegal downloads, the EU's top court ruled Tuesday. But European Union nations could — if they want to — introduce rules to oblige companies to hand over personal data in similar cases, the European Court of Justice said.The court upheld Spanish telecom company Telefonica SA's right to refuse to hand over information that would...

From today, feel free to download another 25 million songs - legally   Adam Sherwin, Media Correspondent, in Cannes   After a decade fighting to stop illegal file-sharing, the music industry will give fans today what they have always wanted: an unlimited supply of free and legal songs. With CD sales in free fall and legal downloads yet to fill the gap, the music industry has reluctantly embraced the file-sharing technology that threatened to destroy it. Qtrax, a digital service announced today, promises a catalogue of more than 25 million songs that users can download to keep, free and...

FCC questions Comcast on interference with file-sharing trafficJan 14, 2008 6:23 PM (4 hrs ago) AP NEW YORK - Comcast Corp. Monday said it has received letters of inquiry from the Federal Communications Commission regarding complaints that the company actively interferes with its subscribers' Internet traffic. A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars asked the agency in November to stop Comcast from discriminating against the sharing of certain types of Internet data among subscribers. Two groups also asked the FCC to fine the nation's No. 2 Internet provider $195,000 for every affected subscriber.And Vuze Inc., a company that...

Things are looking up for the World's Dumbest File Sharer, Jammie Thomas, who became the first American to go to court in a P2P case in October A jury of her peers found Thomas guilty of copyright infringement and set a fine of $222,000 - but now she's been dumped by the person most responsible for leaving her in this predicament (apart from Jammie herself) - her attorney Brian Toder. It was Toder who foolishly advised her to make a principled fight of the matter in court - thereby turning what would have been a $2,000 tax into a candidate...

A San Francisco Bay area subscriber to Comcast Corp.'s high-speed Internet service has sued the company, alleging it engages in unfair business practices by interfering with subscribers' file sharing. Subscriber Jon Hart based his claims on the results of an investigation by the Associated Press published last month that showed Philadelphia-based Comcast actively interferes with attempts some high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online.

British and Dutch police said they shut down Tuesday the website OiNK, the world's biggest source of pirated pre-release chart albums. OiNK distributed albums often weeks ahead of their official release date. More than 60 major album releases had been leaked onto the Internet so far this year. The site had an estimated membership of 180,000. People were only invited to become members if they could prove they had music to offer and had to keep posting tracks to maintain their membership. It is alleged the site was operated by a 24-year-old man who lived near Middlesbrough in north-east England....

A week after signaling her intention to appeal the $222,000 copyright infringement verdict handed down by a federal jury, Jammie Thomas has filed her notice of appeal with the US District Court for the District of Minnesota. Somewhat surprisingly, Thomas is citing the amount of the award as her grounds for the appeal, rather than the jury instructions. According to a copy of Thomas' motion seen by Ars, Thomas wants a retrial on the actual damages allegedly suffered by the record labels as the result of the sharing of the 24 recordings she was found to have distributed via KaZaA....

Internet RIAA Case Juror Speaks: 2 Jurors Wanted $3.6M Fine Jason Mick (Blog) - October 10, 2007 2:14 PM     It turns out that Jammie Thomas could have been worse off The tech news industry has been buzzing with news of the $222,000 verdict in the precedent setting civil case Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas, the first instance of an RIAA complaint going to a trial by jury. Now a juror from the case has opened up and discussed their feelings about the case and what went on inside the courtroom. While some may feel the $9,250 per...

San Francisco (IDGNS) - The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) won the first of many digital music file sharing cases Thursday against a single mother, with a U.S. jury finding her guilty of copyright infringement and fining her a total of $222,000. The U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota could have fined Jammie Thomas as much as $3.6 million, but opted not to. She was found guilty of stealing and giving away via Internet peer-to-peer Internet file sharing Kazaa a total of 24 songs from companies including Capitol Records, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and Warner Bros. Records....

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is making waves with a planned amendment to the Higher Education Reauthorization Act being introduced in time for the next school year. Reid's amendment holds select educational funds hostage for US colleges and universities that do not meet a set of criteria meant to bolster the war on file-sharing on college campuses. This is the legislative carrot-and-stick move that many colleges have feared would arise. The amendment would essentially put US colleges in the business of aggressively policing copyright on their network in order to stay off of a "blacklist" that would be comprised...

“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the Beatles album often cited as the greatest pop recording in music history, received a thoroughly modern 40th-anniversary salute last week... But off stage, in a sign of the recording industry’s declining fortunes, shareholders of EMI, the music conglomerate that markets “Sgt. Pepper” and a vast trove of other recordings, were weighing a plan to sell the company as its financial performance was weakening. ... Despite costly efforts to build buzz around new talent and thwart piracy, CD sales have plunged more than 20 percent this year, far outweighing any gains made by digital...

A federal judge has dismissed Elektra v. Santangelo with prejudice, leaving the door open for defendant Patti Santangelo to recover attorneys' fees from the RIAA. Last month, Judge Colleen McMahon denied the RIAA's motion to dismiss the case without prejudice, ruling that the case should either be dismissed with prejudice or proceed to trial so that Santangelo could have a shot at being exonerated of the RIAA's accusations of file-sharing and copyright infringement. A stipulation of discontinuance with prejudice was entered yesterday by both the plaintiffs and defendants, which means that Santangelo is the prevailing party and therefore eligible to...

Swedish file-sharing website The Pirate Bay is planning to buy its own nation in an attempt to circumvent international copyright laws. The group has set up a campaign to raise money to buy Sealand, a former British naval platform in the North Sea that has been designated a 'micronation', and claims to be outside the jurisdiction of the UK or any other country. The Pirate Bay says it is the world's largest 'bit torrent tracker', and is a popular way of sharing music, films, software and other copyrighted material online. It has been under the scrutiny of authorities in Sweden...

On a recent trip to New York City, Russell Crowe was asked by reporters why he had dropped out of negotiations to star in a new movie being directed by Baz Luhrmann and produced by 20th Century Fox. The Academy Award winner, never one to mince words, suggested it was, in part, the money. “I do charity work, but I don’t do charity work for major studios,” Mr. Crowe said. It seems the needy are not the only ones in Hollywood with their hands out. Movie and television studios, facing escalating budgets, rampant piracy and the uncertain future of new...

Mothers. You've got to love them. They give birth to us, feed us, clothe us, teach us to chew with our mouths closed, and go to bat for us against the RIAA. Sometimes they win (PDF). An Oklahoma mother, Debbie Foster, was accused by the RIAA of copyright infringement back in November 2004, and her daughter Amanda was added to the complaint in July 2005. According to the RIAA, the Internet account paid for by Debbie Foster was used for file sharing, with an unspecified number of songs downloaded. The music group offered to settle the case for US$5,000, but...

LONDON (Reuters) - The British music industry stepped up its campaign against illegal file-sharing on Monday by demanding that two Internet service providers suspend 59 accounts it believes are being used to swap copyrighted songs. The British Phonographic Industry trade group called on Cable & Wireless (CW.L) and Tiscali (TIS.MI) to join a crusade against consumer practices that have undermined music companies in recent years. "We have said for months that it is unacceptable for ISPs to turn a blind eye to industrial-scale copyright infringement," BPI Chairman Peter Jamieson said in a statement. "We are providing Tiscali and Cable &...

Louise: "No these are not my songs." They are however downloaded right onto her computer. Louise:"I was embarrassed when they gave me a print out of these songs." She got this printout because of lawyers. She also got this letter telling her she was being sued for copyright infringement.Parents, there are other popular file sharing programs you need to know about: Morpheus: morpheus.com Kazaa: www.kazaa.com Bearshare: www.bearshare.com Limewire: www.limewire.com Louise: "I was in shock..I was stunned." The letter is part of a music industry crackdown.Singers, songwriters and music companies tired of people downloading and burning copies of music without paying....

A Rockmart family is being sued for illegal music file sharing, despite the fact that they don’t even own a computer. Read more in source: http://news.mywebpal.com/news_tool_v2.cfm?show=localnews&pnpID=728&NewsID=713614&CategoryID=11575&on=1

Neuros Technology International CEO Joe Born in his open letter to congressmen James Sensenbrenner Jr. and John Conyers on HR 4569, the Digital Transition Content Security Act (aka: Analog Hole Legislation): …we believe the proposed bill will not only do nothing to protect against piracy, it will actually reduce legitimate media sales, unnecessarily harm consumers, and have a chilling effect on innovators of new media technologies…Today, we make a next generation digital VCR of sorts that would effectively be outlawed if HR 4569 becomes law….This device is meant to make it easier for consumers to adapt content they have already...

WHITE PLAINS, New York - It was Easter Sunday, and Patricia Santangelo was in church with her kids when she says the music recording industry peeked into her computer and decided to take her to court. Santangelo says she has never downloaded a single song on her computer, but the industry didn't see it that way. The woman from Wappingers Falls, about 80 miles north of New York City, is among the more than 16,000 people who have been sued for allegedly pirating music through file-sharing computer networks. "I assumed that when I explained to them who I was and...

Grokster, the free music-swapping website that prompted a legal battle ending in the US Supreme Court, agreed to shut down its service under a settlement with the US music industry, industry officials said. Grokster will shut down its peer-to-peer (P2P) network that had been accused of massive copyright violations, prompting a lawsuit that ended with the highest US court ruling that it contributed to piracy, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). "This settlement brings to a close an incredibly significant chapter in the story of digital music," said Mitch Bainwol, chairman and chief executive of the RIAA....

MILWAUKEE Nov 2, 2005 — A 67-year-old man who says he doesn't even like watching movies has been sued by the film industry for copyright infringement after a grandson of his downloaded four movies on their home computer. The Motion Picture Association of America filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against Fred Lawrence of Racine, seeking as much as $600,000 in damages for downloading four movies over the Internet file-sharing service iMesh. The suit was filed after Lawrence refused a March offer to settle the matter by paying $4,000. "First of all, like I say, I guess I'd have to plead...

An Oregon woman accused of illegal peer-to-peer downloading has countersued the Recording Industry Association of America, contending that the music trade group illegally invaded her privacy, searched her computer without her permission, and conspired with other companies to engage in "extreme acts of unlawful coercion, extortion, fraud, and other criminal conduct." At least one other defendant sued for downloading music online has sought to use laws typically applied to organized crime to countersue the RIAA. The lawyer who brought that case in New Jersey courts last year said Monday that his client had declared bankruptcy, and the case was no...

This is the case peer-to-peer file sharers have been waiting for. Tanya Andersen, a 41 year old disabled single mother living in Oregon, has countersued the RIAA for Oregon RICO violations, fraud, invasion of privacy, abuse of process, electronic trespass, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, negligent misrepresentation, the tort of "outrage", and deceptive business practices. Ms. Andersen's counterclaims demand a trial by jury. Ms. Andersen made the following allegations, among others:

File-Sharing Doomed, Warns Exec Peer-to-peer file-sharing companies in the U.S. will cease to exist in their current forms over the next few months, the president of MetaMachine, the company responsible for the eDonkey software, predicts. Speaking at a Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Sam Yagan said that in order to avoid expensive litigation, file-sharing companies will have to change their models to become similar to iTunes or the new Napster or face expensive legal battles. MetaMachine won't be an exception. "Because we cannot afford to fight a lawsuit--even one we think we would win--we have instead prepared to convert eDonkey's...

Two-thirds of U.S. college students see nothing unethical about downloading digital copyrighted files without paying, a survey found. In addition, 52 percent think downloading music without paying is acceptable behavior in the workplace, according to the survey released by Business Software Alliance. The survey reveals 45 percent of students are using campus networks for downloading activities. Downloading music is a gateway to downloading software, the survey found. Among students who say they would always download music or movies without paying for them, 27 percent said they regularly download software from a peer-to-peer network. Generation Y has largely grown up using...

The Supreme Court may have dealt file-swapping companies a blow on Monday, but its decision is unlikely to put a damper on the illegal sharing of music and other media online anytime soon, industry experts say. In its ruling, the nation's top court found that file-swapping companies Grokster and StreamCast Networks should be held liable for the widespread copyright infringement their technologies enable. The decision casts uncertainty on the fate of Grokster and other file-swapping companies, but not on the viability of file-swapping itself, an activity that has only flourished under legal attacks, observers said. That's because the software that...

If you had a chance to listen to the content companies' press conference on the afternoon the Supreme Court's decision in MGM v. Grokster was announced, you heard nothing but crows of victory. The word "unanimous" was repeated umpteen times (the decision was 9-0 against the peer-to-peer company defendants), and much was said about how unequivocal the record companies' and movie companies' victory was. As a technical matter the content companies won MGM v. Grokster; the decision remands the case to a trial court for further factfinding as to whether defendants "induced" infringement. But it's clear that they didn't win...

DALLAS - Christian teens are stealing Christian music through Internet downloads and CD burnings at the same rate non-Christians are stealing secular music, according to a new study. Christian pollster George Barna completed a study on teens and piracy for the Gospel Music Association. The study, which has not been made public, showed only 10 percent of Christian teens considered music piracy to be morally wrong, The Dallas Morning News reported. Of those, 64 percent have engaged in downloading or CD burning. That's virtually the same percentage as non-Christians. Last year, sales of Christian albums dropped 5.2 percent, to just...

Internet file-sharing services will be held responsible if they intend for their customers to use software primarily to swap songs and movies illegally, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, rejecting warnings that the lawsuits will stunt growth of cool tech gadgets such as the next iPod. The unanimous decision sends the case back to lower court, which had ruled in favor of file-sharing services Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks Inc. on the grounds that the companies couldn't be sued. The justices said there was enough evidence of unlawful intent for the case to go to trial. File-sharing services shouldn't get a...