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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...

(Cannot be excerpted because of copyright restrictions at Wired. PLease follow link.) http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/05/the-huffington.html

Well, well, well. The RIAA is not having a particularly good week. In the Tanya Andersen case (where the RIAA sued an innocent person), the court has awarded Andersen $108,000 in legal fees from the RIAA. You may recall that the RIAA had protested having to pay legal fees, which the judge smacked down. Note that this is entirely separate from Andersen's racketeering case against the RIAA. However, the much bigger news concerns the infamous Jammie Thomas case. As you'll recall, the RIAA won that case, even though it now admits that it said false things under oath. Much of...

When Jammie Thomas was found guilty of infringing the copyrights of 24 songs during a trial in Minnesota last year, a jury fined her $222,000 in statutory damages. Given that the record labels arguably lost about 70¢ per song from her (the amount paid by digital download stores like iTunes), this means that Thomas' fine was 13,214 times the actual loss. So when Ray Beckerman of Recording Industry vs. The People recently unearthed a case from last year in which Universal complained about having to pay a mere 10 times the actual damages in a court case of its own,...

House passes bill that will let the RIAA take away your home for downloading music Posted by Cory Doctorow, May 9, 2008 3:15 AM | permalink Glenn sez, I was just alerted that the House of Reps has passed HR 4279, with the lovely name, PRO-IP (Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008). Like the doublespeak PATRIOT Act and Peacekeeper missiles, PRO-IP puts local law enforcement in a position to demand the forfeiture in criminal proceedings of stuff used to violate copyright. Which means that instead of the RIAA simply trying to collect fines, they can also...

The Recording Industry Association of America suffered a legal setback this week in a music piracy case where a judge ruled that the sole act of making a music file available in a "shared folder" does not violate copyright laws. In Atlantic v. Howell, the RIAA made the legal assertion that a "sound recording" that is ripped to a computer and stored in any kind of a shared folder is unauthorized. This was an interesting statement because a shared folder can be a very broad category that wasn't entirely made clear by the RIAA.

An Arizona judge has struck down the Recording Industry Association of America's claim that making music files available constitutes distribution of those files. U.S. District Court Judge Neil V. Wake denied the RIAA's request for a summary judgment against a couple who had copied music files from their CDs onto their computer and downloaded file-sharing programs. The defendants said they never placed the music in a shared folder. The judge concluded that even if defendant Jeffrey Howell had placed the items in a shared folder, a third party would have to dip into his hard drive to retrieve a copy....

 A Boston judge has just followed up on the previous NY judge ruling that just making files available isn't enough to constitute copyright infringement. According to the EFF, it's the most "extensive analysis yet of the recording industry's 'making available' argument", but doesn't actually make things better for people who are being sued by the RIAA. The same judge ruled that even though the "offer to distribute" won't be enough to decide a case, it is enough to permit a lawsuit to move forward.   On the other hand, another NY judge has ruled in the opposite manner, that making an "offer...

Last week, Stanford University reported thousands of students for illegally downloading music, many of whom will now have to pay thousands of dollars for violating copyright laws. OK, so actually the university did no such thing - but thousands of students panicked nonetheless. On Monday, the Stanford Chaparral, the university's humor magazine, published in its annual "Fake Daily" an article warning students about a new campus policy on copyright infringements. The accompanying Web site received nearly 24,000 hits from students checking to see if they were in imminent danger of being sued, said co-editor and Stanford senior Anthony Scodary. "Under...

The MP3 player is ten years old this month. The first commercially released personal music player capable of handling MP3 files was the MPMan F10, manufactured by Korea's Saehan Information Systems and launched in March 1998. The F10 contained 32MB of Flash storage, enough for a handful of songs encoded at 128Kb/s. It measured 91 x 70 x 165.5mm. It connected to an old-style parallel port on the host PC from which songs could be copied to the player. There was a tiny LCD on the front to give an indication as to what you were listening to. Saehan's MPMan...

Music industry blog Coolfer has an interesting post this week about online tools for do-it-yourself musicians in which he points to a relatively new service called Speakerheart. I checked out the service, and while I agree with his assessment of the interface--it's based on Adobe's Flex (an offshoot of Flash) and is very slick and easy to use--I think that Speakerheart, like most other digital distribution start-ups, is going to have a very hard time. The process is pretty straightforward: Artists sign up with Speakerheart to sell their songs through a digital storefront on the site. Artists have complete pricing...

When is a virus not a virus? When it's sending your personal data to the Recording Industry Association of America, silly. Internet advocacy website Public Knowledge has posted a highlight reel from the State of the Net Conference, where RIAA boss Cary Sherman suggests that internet filtering sorely lacks the personal touch of spyware. While ISP-level filtering dragnets such as those proposed by AT&T have their way of catching the sloppier digital music thieves out there, the technology is more-or-less bypassed by basic file encryption. That's why Sherman recommends finding a way to install filtering software directly onto people's home...

An Urgent Message From Marilyn Bergman Copyright Royalty Board Begins Critical Mechanical Rates Hearing January 28, 2008 To All ASCAP Members, Over the years, ASCAP has worked tirelessly to convince Congress and the courts that all songwriters, composers and music publishers are entitled to fair compensation for their copyrighted musical works. As you know, ASCAP represents the performing right, a large and growing part of your compensation. But mechanical and synchronization rights are also a critical element of your livelihood. Today, the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) begins a hearing that will determine mechanical rates for every songwriter and music publisher...

Not content with the current (and already massive) statutory damages allowed under copyright law, the RIAA is pushing to expand the provision. The issue is compilations, which now are treated as a single work. In the RIAA's perfect world, each copied track would count as a separate act of infringement, meaning that a copying a ten-song CD even one time could end up costing a defendant $1.5 million if done willfully. Sound fair? Proportional? Necessary? Not really, but that doesn't mean it won't become law. The change to statutory damages is contained in the PRO-IP Act that is currently up...

A judge has accused Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA of using “gamesmanship” tactics in joinder cases where defendants are linked together. One such is Arista v Does 1-27 in which two of the victims are being officially represented by two University of Maine School of Law’s Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic students. These kinds of cases allow the corporate enforcer to efficiently terrorise a number of people simultaneously, in effect. It also means they’re spared the time and expense of going after their victims one by one and, “it is difficult to ignore the kind of gamesmanship...

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...

Last night we told you about Qtrax, a new P2P service aimed at combating illicit P2P by offering a legit service that compensates artists and labels via enforced advertising. In that story we briefly noted that Qtrax didn't appear to have all of its ducks in a row: the company was saying that it had signed all four major music labels, when it appeared that they hadn't. At the time it was rather unclear, however, because Qtrax told both Reuters and Wired that it had the necessary signatures. When midnight came and went last night without an official launch, it...

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...

Excerpt... 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 with no limit on the number of tracks....