$1.92 Million Fine For Illegal File Sharing

Robalini's Note: In case anyone forgot how creepy the recording industry is, here's a reminder...

http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/06/19/minnesota-mom-hit-with-192-million-fine-for-illegal-file-sharing/

Minnesota Mom Hit With $1.92 Million Fine For Illegal File Sharing
6/19/09

In the second file-sharing copyright-infringement trial against Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a Minnesota jury ruled that the 32-year-old mother of four owes $1.92 million to the four major labels after downloading and sharing 24 songs, Billboard.biz reports. The staggering ruling comes out to a cost of $80,000 per track illegally shared, a massive amount that the RIAA hopes will finally convince people to stop downloading music illegally.

“We are pleased that the jury agreed with the evidence and found the defendant liable,” RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth said in a statement. Thomas-Rasset was previously found guilty in 2007 for similar charges and was hit with $222,000 in damages, a figure that seemed astronomical at the time. In what turned out to be an unfortunate turn of events for Thomas-Rasset, the verdict in the 2007 trial was thrown out because of an error in jury instructions, paving the way for a retrial and yesterday’s ruling.

As Rock Daily reported in 2007, Thomas used peer-to-peer network Kazaa to download the files in question. Despite housing roughly 1,702 songs in her folder, Thomas’ trial only focused on 24 of them, including tracks by Green Day, Janet Jackson, Godsmack and Richard Marx. Following yesterday’s ruling, Thomas will essentially have to pay $80,000 for illegally downloading a Richard Marx song. That is, if the RIAA chooses to collect the $1.92 million Thomas doesn’t have.

“Since day one, we have been willing to settle this case and we remain willing to do so,” RIAA’s Duckworth said, while Thomas’ lawyer Kiwi Camara indicated she hopes to find a settlement. For the RIAA, the ruling sends a firm message to illegal downloaders, which may be enough of a reward.

Obama filling administration with RIAA insiders

http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/20875/

Copyright Alliance urges Obama to continue filling administration with RIAA insiders
Wednesday, April 22, 2009

"The content industry, including the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, are applauding President Barack Obama's appointments of at least five RIAA lawyers to the Justice Department," David Kravets reports for Wired.

"They urged him to continue the trend... [via a] letter [which] comes as the United States negotiates a global intellectual property treaty and as the president mulls whom to choose as the nation's first copyright czar," Kravets reports.

"The communication was also in response to a letter the copyleft, represented by about two dozen public interest groups, sent Obama three weeks ago. That missive urged the president to stop tapping RIAA insiders to his administration," Kravets reports.

"That letter by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and others fell on deaf ears. Last week, Obama tapped his fifth RIAA lawyer to the Justice Department. The department just wrote in a peer-to-peer music file sharing case that the administration supports monetary damages of up to $150,000 per copyright infringement," Kravets reports.

Declan McCullagh reports for CNET, "Vice President Joe Biden lauded Hollywood at a gala dinner in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday evening, assailed movie piracy, and promised film executives that the Obama administration would pick 'the right person' as its copyright czar."

"An unspoken reason for the MPAA event--which included a symposium earlier in the day with remarks from top House Democrats and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke--was the loss of $246 million in tax breaks when the Senate revised the economic stimulus bill earlier this year. An MPAA report released Tuesday appears designed to avoid a repeat of that setback, listing the number of movies being filmed in each state," McCullagh reports.

"On copyright, President Obama has signaled a more pro-industry approach than his predecessor, which has alarmed advocates of less restrictive laws," McCullagh reports.

"The president chose as top Justice Department officials the music industry attorney who pulled the plug on Grokster and another longtime Recording Industry Association of America ligitator. The Obama administration recently sided with the RIAA in a file-sharing suit, and Biden was a staunch RIAA and MPAA ally as a U.S. senator," McCullagh reports.

How The Pirate Bay sailed into infamy

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7893223.stm

How The Pirate Bay sailed into infamy
By Flora Graham
BBC News
Monday, 16 February 2009

The Pirate Bay was launched in 2003 and has established itself as the world's most high-profile file-sharing site. But its founders are now on trial for copyright violation and face imprisonment, if found guilty.

The Pirate Bay team aren't shy about what they are doing - they are pirates, and proud of it. Their logo shows a galleon under full sail, with a cassette tape topping a skull and crossbones in a nod to the Jolly Roger.

It is an accurate characterisation, according to Swedish prosecutors, who have put three of the website's creators and one of its sponsors on trial on charges of contributing to copyright infringement.

But the defendants claim to be more Robin Hood than Blackbeard, freeing creative content from the shackles of copyright.

"There is not a cause closer to my heart," one of the founders told Wired. "This is my crusade."

The Pirate Bay website hosts BitTorrent tracker files, and claims to be the world's largest: in February 2009, it reported 22 million simultaneous users.

BitTorrent connects people so that they can share files over the internet. But users need a "tracker" link to find what they're looking for - like the index card in a library catalogue. The Pirate Bay provides a directory of these trackers, essentially becoming a library of catalogues.

It doesn't store the books, or files, itself, just the information on where to find them.

This distinction is what Pirate Bay claims will protect them under Swedish law.

"The tracker provides the user only with .torrent files which contain no copyrighted data. The actual copyrighted material is to be found on the individual machines of our users, not on our servers," says the site.

The Pirate Bay's enormous success has enraged copyright protection groups like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). And the site's cheeky bravado rubs salt in the wounds. For example, it posts all of the cease-and-desist letters that it receives, including its sarcastic replies.

"Please don't sue us right now, our lawyer is passed out in an alley," says a reply to videogame giant Electronic Arts.

History

The site was founded by the Swedish file-sharing advocacy group Piratbyran ("The Piracy Bureau") in 2003, but has been run independently since 2004.

As other file-sharing websites were felled by threats and lawsuits from industry heavyweights like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Pirate Bay held its ground.

Confident that Sweden's lax copyright laws meant that they were on the right side of the rules, the site continued to defy legal threats that caused other torrent sites, such as Isohunt, to remove links to infringing torrents upon request.

As one of the few high-profile survivors, its piece of the file trading pie grew. The site's antagonistic attitude and tangles with copyright holders and rights organisations increased its profile, and the site now claims to be among the top 100 websites in the world.

The Pirate Bay's fame became too much for Swedish authorities, and in March 2006 the site's offices were raided by police investigating allegations of copyright violations.

Truckloads of file server computers were seized, the site was closed, and three people were held for questioning, including two of the defendants in the court case, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Fredrik Neij.

Authorities denied that the raid was prompted by urging from the MPA, the international arm of the MPAA, but the Swedish media revealed that the MPA had met with the justice ministry in the months before the raid.

The Pirate Bay offers links to TV, films and music

The Pirate Bay's site administrators scrambled to get the site back up and running, and with help from volunteers around the world, it was restored within three days.

Since the raid, the Pirate Bay has set up a network of servers so that shutting down any one site will only cause the site to go down for minutes. Since then, site administrators have challenged all comers to try to shut them down.

"I really want the pleasure of it being down three minutes, then up again," Frederik Neij told Wired.

With Sweden's waters becoming less pirate-friendly, the Pirate Bay looked for warmer climes. In January 2007, it reportedly tried to buy Sealand, a platform in the North Sea off the Suffolk coast, which claims national sovereignty. After that fell through, the Bay raised money to buy an island, but the plan was never realised.

Some media companies have apparently decided to take matters into their own hands rather than wait for the slow pace of the Swedish courts.

In September 2007, hackers leaked six months of internal e-mails from anti-piracy company Media Defender, which revealed that the company was discussing hiring hackers to attack the Pirate Bay's servers.

It was the Pirate Bay's turn to go to the courts, and it filed charges against the Swedish arms of Media Defender clients such as Twentieth Century Fox, EMI and Paramount. The charges were not pursued, which also led to protests after the police investigator, Jim Keyzer, took a job for Warner Brothers, a member of the MPAA. Mr Keyzer is scheduled to be a witness in the Pirate Bay trial.

But the Pirate Bay's Robin Hood reputation was sullied in July 2007 when a reporter, posing as a potential advertiser on the site, estimated that the site was earning up to £55,000 per month that was being channelled into a front company in Switzerland.

Mr Neij has denied that his team was getting rich from operating the Pirate Bay. "I wish I earned that," he told Vanity Fair. "Do I look like I have, like, $2m?"

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, another defendant, pointed out that they lost $60,000 worth of equipment in the raids. "It's not free to operate a website on this scale," he said.

Strongest challenge

With the Pirate Bay facing its strongest challenge yet, its administrators have not stopped rattling their cutlasses.

Mr Warg, in a webcast on Sunday, said: "What are they going to do about it? They have already failed to take down the site once. Let them fail again.

"It has a life without us."

Mark Mulligan, a digital media analyst at Forrester Research, agreed that even if the Pirate Bay was brought down by the case, the file-sharing genie could not be put back in the bottle.

"The industry knows this. But they also know that they need to go through the motions, particularly with the big players. If they don't, that essentially green lights file sharing."

He points to previous industry victories against companies like Napster, which shut down the network but didn't reduce the market.

"After every victory, file-sharing has got bigger. I see no reason why the same won't happen this time."

One ISP says RIAA must pay for piracy protection

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10127841-93.html

December 22, 2008
One ISP says RIAA must pay for piracy protection
Greg Sandoval

Jerry Scroggin, owner-operator of Bayou Internet and Communications, wants the music and film industries to know that he's not a cop and he doesn't work for free.

Scroggin, who sells Internet access to between 10,000 and 12,000 customers in Louisiana, heard the news on Friday that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has opted out of suing individuals for pirating music. Instead, the group representing the four largest music labels is forging partnerships with Internet service providers and asking them to crack down on suspected file sharers.

According to Scroggin, if RIAA representatives ask the help of his ISP, they had better bring their checkbook--and leave the legal threats at home. (CNET News obtained a copy of the RIAA's new notice to ISPs here). Scroggin said that he receives several notices each month with requests that he remove suspected file sharers from his network. Each time, he gets such a notice from an entertainment company, he sends the same reply.

"I ask for their billing address," Scroggin said. "Usually, I never hear back."

Scroggin's case underscores a potential obstacle for the RIAA's plan to enlist the help of ISPs. Small companies like his are innocent bystanders in the music industry's war on copyright infringement. Nonetheless, they are asked to help enforce copyright law free of charge. Many of them can't afford it, he said. Significant resources must be devoted to chasing down suspected file sharers and there's a real cost to that. After talking to Scroggin, it sounds as if the entertainment sector might also have taken a heavy-handed approach to dealing with ISPs in the past and there might be some bad blood built up.

"They have the right to protect their songs or music or pictures," Scroggin said. "But they don't have the right to tell me I have to be the one protecting it. I don't want anyone doing anything illegal on my network, but we don't work for free."

Reached late Sunday night, an RIAA spokesman declined to comment.

Scroggin wants to be reasonable. He tells me he doesn't want to come across as a "hard ass." He just wants someone in big media to understand his position as the operator of a small business.

Incorporated in 1995, Bayou Internet and Communications, based in Monroe, La., typically sells Internet access to small businesses, residences, and municipal services. His customers include parish court houses, homeowners, district attorneys, and rural hospitals. The company is probably similar to lots of small ISPs around the country that operate on tight budgets and must compete against much larger players, such as Comcast or AT&T.

Scroggin is no radical. He respects the law and said he has a long history of cooperating with authorities to protect people from harm.

"If it was life threatening, I'm the first to jump," he said. "We've been contacted by police over Denial of Service and bot attacks. We'll have Secret Service and FBI conversations. We help if police are on perv watch."

But protecting against copyright violations just doesn't have the same urgency, not enough that that ISPs should be asked to work without compensation, Scroggin said. Here are the realities of being "HBO's free police," he said.

First, when a media company demands he kick a customer off the network, there is very little in the way of proof offered that the person in question has committed a crime, according to Scroggin. Yet, entertainment companies want Scroggin to simply wave goodbye to a customer who might have signed up for a three-year plan. At $40 per month, that customer is potentially worth $1,440 to Scroggin over the life of the plan. That, says the ISP owner, is unreasonable.

Next, it's expensive and time consuming to ask highly paid technicians to chase down IP logs and customer IDs, Scroggin said, noting that it's especially difficult nowadays because it's extremely easy to spoof IP addresses.

And then there are the letters Scroggin receives from Hollywood that demand he act or else.

"I'm not doing anything to damage their business," Scroggin said. "But somehow this 99-cent song is my fault."

Scroggin warns that the film and music industries must try a new tack if they want cooperation from ISPs. They can start by helping to cover some of the costs for helping to enforce copyright.

"There's got to be a better way than HBO sending me threatening e-mail," he said. "What I'm saying is, let's sit at the table and come up with a way that works for everyone, including the customers."

Greg Sandoval covers media and digital entertainment for CNET News. He is a former reporter for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

Recording Industry: MP3s Are a Crime

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/12/recording-indus.html

Recording Industry Tells Court (Again) That MP3s Are a Crime
By Ryan Singel December 11, 2007
Categories: Copyrights and Patents

Does the Recording Industry Association of America think that you have the legal right to rip MP3s off CDs that you own? The evidence says the RIAA thinks you are a criminal if you make MP3s out of your late 80's hair metal CD collection, but probably won't sue you unless you send that MP3 to a friend or share it on the internet.

In a court filing that's being much discussed on the internet today, the RIAA appears to say no when asked that question by a judge in an Arizona suit against Jeffrey Howell for sharing songs on the Kazaa file sharing network.

The RIAA doesn't quite say MP3s ripped from one's own music collection are illegal, but instead refers to them as "unauthorized copies."

But the judge's question was plain:

Does the record in this case show that Defendant Howell possessed an "unlawful copy" of the Plaintiff's copyrighted material, and that he actually disseminated that copy to the public?

The answer was convoluted. The RIAA said the copies were unauthorized and that by putting the unauthorized copies in the Kazaa share folder, Howell was guilty of distributing copyrighted works.

The RIAA's website clarifies what it means when it says unauthorized copies.

If you make unauthorized copies of copyrighted music recordings, you’re stealing. You’re breaking the law, and you could be held legally liable for thousands of dollars in damages.

What does the site say specifically about ripping your CD or making a backup copy?

There's no legal "right" to copy the copyrighted music on a CD onto a CD-R. However, burning a copy of CD onto a CD-R, or transferring a copy onto your computer hard drive or your portable music player, won’t usually raise concerns so long as:

The copy is made from an authorized original CD that you legitimately own

The copy is just for your personal use. It's not a personal use – in fact, it's illegal – to give away the copy or lend it to others for copying.
That's reassuring. The millions of Americans who ripped their music collections to listen to on their home media centers and portable digital audio players are considered thieves by the Record Industry, but you can rely on the goodness of their hearts not to sue you.

Also remember that in the case against Jammie Thomas, the record industry was much clearer on how much they hate their customers.

Sony's BMG's anti-piracy officer Jennifer Pariser was asked by record industry attorney Richard Gabriel if ripping songs from a CD was legal. She said no -- that's "a nice way of saying, 'steals just one copy.'"

I originally thought after reading the filing, that Ray Beckerman at Recording Industry vs The People and Boing Boing were overplaying this (as Mike Masnick at TechDirt thinks), but on a closer read, Beckerman was absolutely right when he broke this story.

I tried to call the RIAA for clarification, but their phone system, like the record label's business model, is stuck in the early 80s. There's no voicemail -- not even an answering machine -- for their press contacts. The phone just rings out.