Free Republic

BOSTON (AP) — A former Boston University student who was ordered to pay $675,000 for illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs on the Internet says he will continue fighting the penalty, despite the Supreme Court's refusal to hear his appeal. Joel Tenenbaum, of Providence, R.I., said Monday he's hoping a federal judge will reduce the amount, which he called "ludicrous." A jury in 2009 ordered Tenenbaum to pay after the Recording Industry Association of America sued him. A federal judge called the penalty constitutionally excessive, but the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated it.

The RIAA and MPAA would have you believe that piracy is responsible for their decline in sales. This is all of course blame to be laid at the feet of computers, the internet and the generic "digital boogyman." Even without getting deep into the flawed math in play, there are other reasons for the middling returns on investment Big Content is seeing. Cord-cutting is a big factor. Personal taste naturally varies, but in my view the advance of technology democratised content creation and enabled a generation of talented creators to capitalise on a resistance to innovation by established media. Reality...

Former senator and current head of the Motion Picture Ass. of America Chris Dodd hopes to resurrect the reviled SOPA anti-piracy legislation in another form, but it appears the US House of Representatives is beating him to it a new bill that makes SOPA look sensible. Dodd, speaking in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, said that he hopes to get a new version of the SOPA legislation ready for debate shortly, and that the MPAA was marshaling its forces for another attack on piracy. Dodd said he was confident that the new legislation would go through, and said there...

Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and other Internet service providers (ISPs) in the United States will soon launch new programs to police their networks in an effort to catch digital pirates and stop illegal file-sharing. Major ISPs announced last summer that they had agreed to take new measures in an effort to prevent subscribers from illegally downloading copyrighted material, but the specifics surrounding the imminent antipiracy measures were not made available. Now, RIAA chief executive Cary Sherman has said that ISPs are ready to begin their efforts to curtail illegal movie, music and software downloads on July 12.

Lobbyist bribery goes to waste for once, as Rep. Smith is forced to "postpone" SOPA indefinitely UPDATE: PIPA is "dead"/postponed too... details at the end of the piece. Over the weekend U.S. President Barack Obama's (D) cabinet hinted that he might veto the pending House's "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA) (H.R. 3261) and Senate's "PROTECT IP Act" (PIPA) (S.968) out of concern that the bills Orwellian takedown provisions could damage the legitimate internet economy.   I. The Rat Returns With the support of politically enemy-turned-friend House Oversight Chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Rep. Eric Cantor(R-Virg.) was compelled to promise to shelve any potential vote in the Republican-controlled House...

Consumer group Public Knowledge on Friday accused the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its head, former Sen. Chris Dodd, of trying to intimidate lawmakers into supporting a pair of controversial anti-piracy bills. In recent days, Dodd and other top Hollywood figures have threatened to cut off campaign donations to politicians who do not support their effort to crackdown on online copyright infringement. "Those who count on quote 'Hollywood' for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don't ask me to write...

Look for changes in the proposed antipiracy legislation that has giants in the entertainment and technology industries squared off against each other, but nothing extensive enough to please all of the legislation's opponents. That was the message from Michael O'Leary, the senior executive vice president for global policy and external affairs of the Motion Picture Association of America, during a telephone news briefing on Wednesday. "We will come forward with language that will address some of the legitimate concerns" of technology companies that have opposed the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House, and a similar Protect I.P. Act in...

EXCLUSIVE: I’ve learned that the Motion Picture Association Of America representing the Hollywood movie studios will be co-hosting a tribute to Ronald Reagan’s film career on November 14th in Washington DC. The other host will be the Ronald Reagan Centennial Celebration, which is the year-long commemoration of Reagan’s 100th birthday in 2011. All the movie studios are obtaining old footage of Reagan’s 53-movie legacy from 1937 to 1965 and are putting together around 5 cinematic profiles of the former Screen Actors Guild president for the bipartisan event. But I suspect the real reason behind this Reagan tribute is to remind...

Former Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, a veteran Washington insider, is Hollywood's new chief lobbyist. The Motion Picture Assn. of America said Tuesday that Dodd will become the new chief executive of the MPAA, the lobbying arm for the main studios that also oversees the film ratings system. Dodd succeeds Dan Glickman, a former Kansas congressman and Secretary of Agriculture, who stepped down a year ago after five years on the job. Dodd will pull down more than $1.5 million in salary, 25% greater than the $1.2 million Glickman received.

Over the last few months, Google has received more than 100 copyright infringement warnings from MPAA-affiliated movies studios: most are directed at users of Google's public Wi-Fi service but others are meant for Google employees. The MPAA is thus warning the search giant that it might get disconnected from the Internet. "Copyright infringement also violates your ISP's terms of service and could lead to limitation or suspension of your Internet service. You should take immediate action to prevent your Internet account from being used for illegal activities," the movie companies write in various letters, according to TorrentFreak. Although the copyright...

When federal authorities shut down five Web sites last month on suspicion of copyright infringement, they gave no warning and offered no details of their investigation, and they have not filed any criminal charges since But after the seizure warrant used in the operation was released last week, the operators of several of the sites said in interviews that they were innocent of infringement, and criticized the investigation for misrepresenting how their sites worked.

On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved a bill that would give the Attorney General the right to shut down websites with a court order if copyright infringement is deemed “central to the activity” of the site — regardless if the website has actually committed a crime. The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) is among the most draconian laws ever considered to combat digital piracy, and contains what some have called the “nuclear option,” which would essentially allow the Attorney General to turn suspected websites “off.” COICA is the latest effort by Hollywood, the recording industry and...

The MPAA, which is the Hollywood studios' lobbying organization, just made this announcement about the FCC's very bad decision. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: once again, Big Media shows that it doesn't want to share its profits with anyone else. Today's action allows the major movie studios to undercut the entire process of theatrical release. It would put the struggling cinema chains virtually out of business.

Measuring the exact cost of intellectual property theft is difficult, even for the government entities assigned to measure such activities.   There are a few facts though: China dominates the counterfeit world; digital reproduction technology is making counterfeit movies and music recordings commonplace and the counterfeit industry hurts the overall US economy. Those are but a few of the results of a look by the US Government Accountability Office at what the theft of intellectual property means to the US.  Critics have long said the US needs to do something to put a crimp in the over $200 billion counterfeit and...

The RIAA and MPAA have submitted a plan to the Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement. It's basically a plan that they want the government to enact, and it's terrifying. Here are some of the lovely things that they're calling for: * spyware on your computer that detects and deletes infringing materials; * mandatory censorware on all Internet connections to interdict transfers of infringing material; * border searches of personal media players, laptops and thumb-drives; * international bullying to force other countries to implement the same policies; * and free copyright enforcement provided by Fed cops and agencies (including the Department...

Of all the songs Whitney Harper of San Antonio downloaded from online file-sharing networks, the one that could best sum up the college student's situation now is Hanson's “Save Me.” A federal appeals court that covers Texas has ruled the 22-year-old must pay a total of $27,750 to five music companies for 37 copyrighted songs she accessed through Kazaa and similar sites when she was a teenager. Last week's opinion by a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower ruling that awarded the five recording companies $200 for each of the songs. The appeals...

Never let it be said that the folks in Hollywood aren't good at coming up with a totally fictional horror story. I just have a problem when they use it not to entertain, but to create a moral panic to push the government to pass laws in their favor. In discussing the recent 60 Minutes piece that was really nothing more than an MPAA scare tactic, some suggested that it was really just a first step in the process of getting the government to make sure net neutrality rules had a special Hollywood exception. So, it's interesting to note that...

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...

The MPAA apparently said that the “enemies of copyright have really done a good job at creating the false premise that the interest of copyright holders and the interest of society as a whole are antagonistic” during the World Copyright Summit. The worry is that their pro-copyright advocacy perspective is fading away in the public conscious. In an interesting report from IP-Watch where there were a few choice words levelled against those that disagreed with the view-points of the copyright industry. Apparently, Fritz Attaway suggested that it's false to assume that the rights of the industry and the interest of...

So the Copyright Office is currently in the middle reviewing proposed exceptions to the DMCA, and one of the proposals on the table would allow teachers and students to rip DVDs and edit them for use in the classroom. Open and shut, right? Not if you're the MPAA and gearing up to litigate the legality of ripping -- it's trying to convince the rulemaking committee that videotaping a flatscreen is an acceptable alternative. Seriously. It's hard to say if we've ever seen an organization make a more tone-deaf, flailing argument than this. Take a good look, kids. This is what...

Hollywood's major film and television studios on Tuesday began a new push to educate U.S. lawmakers about the entertainment industry by touting job creation in the recession and media's global trade surplus. The lobbying effort by the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents the key film and TV studios in governmental affairs, comes after the U.S. Senate in February stripped $246 million in tax breaks for entertainment companies from President Barack Obama's $787 billion stimulus package. In a study released on Tuesday, the MPAA said the entertainment industry employs 2.5 million U.S. workers and production is increasingly moving to...

If you were online and couldn't access some websites today, we might know the reason why. The FBI raided a Dallas building that houses servers for several different websites. CBS 11 News has learned that the raid is part of a general criminal investigation. Because of the confiscation of computers at Core IP Networks, a number of legitimate businesses have been affected. From the downtown office building in the 2300 block of Bryan Street, FBI agents seized what one source described as millions of dollars in computer equipment. Matthew Simpson, the owner of Core IP Networks, said in a letter...

Under pressure from the big record labels, several countries around the world are cracking down hard on illegal file-sharers with a "three strikes, you're out" policy — and the United States may be next. The basics are simple: Get caught three times sharing files illegally, and your Internet access gets cut off. But in a day and age when Internet access is almost as essential as a cell phone or electricity, should the music industry or Internet service providers [ISPs] have the power to determine who can and can't get online, particularly without criminal charges being filed? And what if...

A court case in British Columbia has the potential to drastically change the Canadian Internet landscape by making search engines such as Google and Yahoo illegal. A case brought against the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) by a small search engine for BitTorrent files, called ISOHunt Web Technologies Inc., is raising questions about whether search engines are liable for the sharing of copyright-protected content online. The question before the British Columbia Supreme Court is, if a site like ISOHunt allows people to find a pirated copy of Watchmen or The Dark Knight, is it breaching Canadian copyright law? “It’s a...

3 strikes, Canada crackdown The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has supplied its political wish list to the Obama transition team, and thanks to new transition team policies, that means the MPAA has shared its agenda with everyone on the Internet. "Graduated response" rules are praised, anti-camcording rules are paramount, and Canada and Spain are two of the countries that need to be singled out for "priority trade policy attention." The Obama transition team is publicizing its meetings with interest groups and putting any materials provided to the team up on the change.gov web site. The MPAA document is...

In October of this year, Newzbin reported that it was anticipating legal action against its Usenet indexing service by a yet unnamed entity. Over a month later, Newzbin reports that it has been sued by the MPA (Motion Picture Association). The MPA is the international version of its US-based counterpart, the Motion Picture Association of America. According to Newzbin, the indexing service has been suspending some reports due to complaints - something that community members have noticed over the last several months. "You may have noticed that recently we suspended a number of existing reports. This was done after receiving...

Over the last few years, attorney Ray Beckerman has been defending broadband users accused of copyright infringement by the RIAA, and frequently blogs about it. His blog frequently highlights instances where the RIAA has sued individuals in error, often highlighting the tenuous legal ground many RIAA cases rest on. The RIAA is now targeting Beckerman, claiming he's a "vexatious" litigator, and demanding unspecified monetary sanctions to punish him for blogging about his cases.

ASPEN, Colo.--Recording industry and motion picture lobbyists are renewing their push to convince broadband providers to monitor customers and detect copyright infringements, claiming the concept is working abroad and should be adopted in the United States. A representative of the recording industry said on Monday that her companies would prefer to enter into voluntary "partnerships" with Internet service providers, but pointedly noted that some governments are mandating such surveillance "if you don't work something out." "Despite our best efforts, we can't do this alone," said Shira Perlmutter, a vice president for global legal policy at the International Federation of the...

WASHINGTON - A federal jury in Big Stone Gap, Va., convicted Daniel Dove, 26, formerly of Clintwood, Va., on one count each of conspiracy and felony copyright infringement, Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Friedrich announced today. Dove was an administrator for EliteTorrents.org, an Internet piracy site that, until May 25, 2005, was a source of infringing copyrighted works, specifically pre-release movies. Elite Torrents used BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) technology to distribute pirated works to thousands of members around the world. The jury was presented with evidence that Dove was an administrator of a small group of Elite Torrents members known as...

MPAA Defeats TorrentSpy May 7, 2008 Thomas Mennecke A Los Angeles Federal court has rendered a $110 million judgment against Valence Media, the company which operates the now defunct TorrentSpy. This judgment represents the culmination of a lengthy decline for TorrentSpy, which was slowly strangled to death by the movie industry. “This substantial money judgment sends a strong message about the illegality of these sites,” said Dan Glickman, Chairman and CEO of the MPAA. “The demise of TorrentSpy is a clear victory for the studios and demonstrates that such pirate sites will not be allowed to continue to operate...

It goes without saying that climate realists around the world believe Nobel Laureate Al Gore used false information throughout his schlockumentary "An Inconvenient Truth" in order to generate global warming hysteria. On Friday, it was revealed by ABC News that one of the famous shots of supposed Antarctic ice shelves in the film was actually a computer-generated image from the 2004 science fiction blockbuster "The Day After Tomorrow."

Hollywood laid much of the blame for illegal movie downloading on college students. Now, it says its math was wrong. In a 2005 study it commissioned, the Motion Picture Association of America claimed that 44 percent of the industry's domestic losses came from illegal downloading of movies by college students, who often have access to high-bandwidth networks on campus. The MPAA has used the study to pressure colleges to take tougher steps to prevent illegal file-sharing and to back legislation currently before the House of Representatives that would force them to do so. But now the MPAA, which represents the...

The Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has launched the Digital-to-Analog Converter Box Coupon Program (Coupon Program), as authorized in the Digital Television Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005. Starting January 1, 2008, all U.S. households will be eligible to request up to two coupons, worth $40 each, to be used toward the purchase of up to two, digital-to-analog converter boxes. For more details on the federal regulations, including the budget information, please the DTV Converter Box Coupon Program Rules. For a quick overview, see the Associated Press (AP) video about the digital TV converter boxes...

New federal legislation says universities must agree to provide not just deterrents but also "alternatives" to peer-to-peer piracy, such as paying monthly subscription fees to the music industry for their students, on penalty of losing all financial aid for their students. The U.S. House of Representatives bill, which was introduced late Friday by top Democratic politicians, could give the movie and music industries a new revenue stream by pressuring schools into signing up for monthly subscription services such as Ruckus and Napster. Ruckus is advertising-supported, and Napster charges a monthly fee per student. The Motion Picture Association of America applauded...

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) recently released a software toolkit designed to help universities detect instances of potentially illegal file-sharing on school networks. The toolkit is based on the increasingly popular Ubuntu Linux distribution and includes the Apache web server as well as custom traffic monitoring software created by the MPAA. Although the toolkit was previously available from a web site set up by the MPAA, the software was removed last night after the organization's ISP received a DMCA takedown notice from Ubuntu technical board member Matthew Garret. Many of the components in the Ubuntu Linux distribution, including...

A coalition of entertainment and publishing industry heavyweights would like to see the 2008 presidential candidates champion "meaningful copyright protection" in their policy platforms. The requests came Tuesday in the form of a letter (PDF) and a questionnaire (PDF), dispatched by the Washington-based Copyright Alliance to 17 candidates vying for Democratic or Republican nominations next year. The group has requested responses to its questionnaire by early January of next year and plans to make the answers public. In a conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon, Ross said the group also intends to hold briefings with presidential campaigns about its copyright...

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....

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has taken up a new battle against pirates, but this one is different than previous legal pursuits. The UK-based organization acts as the worldwide arm for the music recording industry, but as widely reported, it apparently forgot to renew its .com top-level domain in time before it got snatched up by one of its top targets, The Pirate Bay. While the IFPI still retains control of ifpi.org, ifpi.com now points to a Pirate Bay page that reads: "International Federation of Pirates Interests." The two sides are now preparing for a fight over the...

By Mark Harris Jack Valenti has gone to that great screening room in the sky, but his legacy persists — for better and for worse — in the form of the movie ratings system. Back in 1968, Valenti's ratings replaced a capricious code of self-censorship with labels designed to help parents make choices. That's still a worthy idea — at least, it would be if it were applied with anything resembling sanity. Last weekend, Eli Roth's Hostel: Part II opened. According to the raters, it contains ''sadistic scenes of torture and bloody violence, terror, nudity, sexual content, language, and some...

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is pressing the U.S. Congress to enact a sweeping intellectual-property bill that would increase criminal penalties for copyright infringement, including "attempts" to commit piracy. "To meet the global challenges of IP crime, our criminal laws must be kept updated," Gonzales said during a speech before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington on Monday. The Bush administration is throwing its support behind a proposal called the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007, which is likely to receive the enthusiastic support of the movie and music industries, and would represent the most dramatic rewrite of copyright law...

Excerpt - The folks at Digg.com have let the social news genie out of the bottle, and now they can't control it. Since the HD-DVD encryption code was discovered and published, readers at Digg have been repeatedly submitting stories with the 16 digit hex code in the titles and bodies. Just as quickly as these posts crawl up the Digg charts, admins seem to be deleting them. Just search Google for 09 F9 and you'll find the key. Will AACS send a Cease and Desist to InfoWorld because I posted the text "09 F9"? If so, we might as well...

...In recent letters to state Sen. Ellen Corbett (D-San Leandro), the trade groups said the proposed legislation was written too broadly and could undermine anti-piracy efforts. They said investigators sometimes pose as someone else to obtain bootlegged CDs or movies and to break into online piracy rings... Hollywood succeeded in killing a similar bill last year. Other opponents of the bill included the California Chamber of Commerce and the Direct Marketing Assn.

In its running legal battle against unauthorized downloaders, five recording companies have sued an Augusta man in federal court claiming he illegally pirated and shared copyrighted music. Scott Hinds, 23, is a defendant in one of a number of lawsuits by Recording Industry of America affiliates seeking to halt illegal sharing of copyrighted songs -- a once-widespread practice some maintain was "fair use," encouraged by certain computer software. As artists attempt to regain control of their music -- and reap profits from sales -- recording industry spokeswoman Amanda Hunter said 18,000 individuals have been sued in similar lawsuits since September...

The copy protection technology used by Blu-ray discs has been cracked by the same hacker who broke the DRM technology of rival HD DVD discs last month. The coder known as muslix64 used much the same plain text attack in both cases. By reading a key held in memory by a player playing a HD DVD disc he was able to decrypt the movie been played and render it as an MPEG 2 file. The latest Blu-ray hack was performed by muslix64 using a media file provided by Janvitos, through the video resource site Doom9, and applied to a Blu-ray...

As regular readers know, I've been working through a series of posts on how economics works when scarcity is removed from some areas. I took a bit of a break over the holidays to catch up on some reading, and to do some further thinking on the subject (along with some interesting discussions with people about the topic). One of the books I picked up was one that I haven't read in well over a decade, but often recommend to others to read if they're interested in learning more about economics, but have no training at all in the subject....

Los Angeles , CA - The MPAA is lobbying congress to push through a new bill that would make unauthorized home theaters illegal. The group feels that all theaters should be sanctioned, whether they be commercial settings or at home. MPAA head Dan Glickman says this needs to be regulated before things start getting too far out of control, "We didn't act early enough with the online sharing of our copyrighted content. This time we're not making the same mistake. We have a right to know what's showing in a theater." The bill would require that any hardware manufactured in...

Monday, November 27 12:00 AM ET Los Angeles , CA - The MPAA is lobbying congress to push through a new bill that would make unauthorized home theaters illegal. The group feels that all theaters should be sanctioned, whether they be commercial settings or at home. MPAA head Dan Glickman says this needs to be regulated before things start getting too far out of control, "We didn't act early enough with the online sharing of our copyrighted content. This time we're not making the same mistake. We have a right to know what's showing in a theater." The bill would...

You are not going to believe this article. Since its an AP story I can only point you to it but wow L.A. Scouts loyal, helpful, and they don't steal movies.

Your children and grandchildren are in danger of losing their Christian faith, according to Mission America, the Barna Research Group and the New York Times. Entertainment is a leading influence in the paganization of today's youth. According to the Motion Picture Association and A.C. Nielsen, the average child will spend up to 63,000 hours with the mass media of entertainment by the time he or she is 17 years old, but only 11,000 hours in school (most of which are anti-Christian), 4,000 hours with their parents and 800 hours in church if they never miss a Sunday. The destruction of...

WASHINGTON (Hollywood Reporter) - Federal authorities are seeking information about the effectiveness of entertainment industry efforts to keep adult products out of kids' hands as customers migrate to the Internet and mobile services from brick-and-mortar stores, according to showbiz executives. The data will form part of the Federal Trade Commission's congressionally mandated biennial report on the way the entertainment industry markets adult fare. FTC spokeswoman Jackie Disdul said the commission has yet to set a schedule for the report's release. "The last time they did the report, online content was barely a glimmer in anyone's eye," said one industry executive....