The interesting, the amazing, and some stuff only I would ever care about
RIAA Case Against Mother Dismissed With Prejudice; Court May Award Attorneys Fees Against RIAA
In Capitol Records v. Foster, in federal court in Oklahoma, a case against a mother — whose only connection to the alleged filesharing was that she was the person who paid for the internet access — has been dismissed with prejudice.
W00t!
Technorati Tags: […]
From the EFF. A couple of gems:
The RIAA has sued over 20,000 music fans for file sharing, who have on average paid a $3,750 settlement. That’s over $75,000,000. Has any money collected from your lawsuits gone to pay actual artists? Where’s all that money going?
Major entertainment companies have repeatedly brought lawsuits to block new technologies, […]
We aren’t all pirates
Protecting intellectual property is a legitimate goal for Congress — after all, the Constitution called on Congress to give authors and inventors exclusive rights “to promote the progress of science and useful arts.” The task has grown more urgent with the emergence of an Internet-fueled global information economy. But what the entertainment […]
Free, Legal and Ignored
College students don’t turn down much that’s free. But when it comes to online music, even free hasn’t been enough to persuade many students to use such digital download services as Napster, Rhapsody, Ruckus and Cdigix. As a result, some schools have dropped their services, and others are considering doing so or […]
There’s an awesome point-by-point debunking on IPac of a debate featured in the WSJ about DRM schemes. It’s sad that these arguments actually fly with some people (especially Congress), given how easily they’re shown to be pure BS. What’s even more depressing is that the original arguments were featured in the Wall Street Journal, and […]
A good list detailing all the ways that the studios have already fucked this up and the technology is doomed from the start. The only thing I’d add is the draconian DRM schemes, especially in the case of Blu-ray. Consumers aren’t going to switch to media that actually does less than the media they have […]
I almost missed this trio of articles that appeared in the Washington Post yesterday, commemorating the tenth anniversary of washingtonpost.com.
The first traces the history of the web site from a 1992 memo through the present day:
It was August 1992. There were no wireless laptops, no BlackBerries, no blogs, no rush to flip on cell phones […]
Says illegal song-sharing ‘contained’
“The problem has not been eliminated,” says association CEO Mitch Bainwol. “But we believe digital downloads have emerged into a growing, thriving business, and file-trading is flat.”
And I’m the Easter Bunny.
Technorati Tags: RIAA, P2P, Filesharing
Unfortunately, the US System makes third parties all but irrelevant, so I doubt they’ll see as much success here as they have in Sweden. On the other hand, with a name like The Pirate Party, how can they fail?
In other news, the global temperature inexplicably dropped by one degree today.
Technorati Tags: Pirate Party, Copyright, MPAA, […]
Hollywood and the hackers.
Dan Glickman is the current head of the MPAA. John Perry Barlow is the head of the EFF, and a former lyricist for the Grateful dead. Here’s some highlights:
Dan Glickman: John Perry Barlow is the one who’s doing a disservice to the consumers, because you see if you don’t adequately compensate the […]
The former head of the RIAA considers the possibility that maybe suing your customers and crippling the products you sell them isn’t the best business strategy.
I don’t honestly know what I would have done about the individual lawsuits had I stayed. I certainly participated in multiple planning and debate sessions about them. There were good […]
The RIAA wants you to license incidental copies of songs in your browser’s cache and RAM.
This is dangerous language that creates a dangerous precedent. When courts look at how copyright should apply to new digital technologies, they often have few judicial precedents for guidance and thus they turn to the Copyright Act itself for clues […]
Books will disappear. Print is where words go to die
Yet efforts to update the book are hampered because, culturally, we give extreme reverence to the form for the form’s sake. We hold books holy: children are taught there is no better use of time than reading a book. Academics perish if they do not publish. […]
Spectrum has one of the best articles I’ve ever seen explaining the DMCA.
As the entertainment industry expands copyright law, the rising tide threatens to completely wash away many types of innovative gadgets.
Before the passage of the DMCA, entertainment and technology had, for the most part, peacefully coexisted. Laws addressing the use and misuse of copyrighted […]
Merely days after it was shut down in a police raid, The Pirate Bay is back. My guess is that the site will now be more popular than ever thanks to the attention, and the controversy has only served to make more people aware of the “grey zone” that sites like this exist in. Even […]
ThePirateBay.org Raided - Servers Seized
In their native Sweden, ThePirateBay.org enjoyed a level of immunity from copyright prosecution rarely seen in the file-sharing world. Often defiant in the face of those wishing to enforce their intellectual property rights, ThePirateBay.org would go on to become one of the premier BitTorrent indexing and tracking sites.
As one of the […]
Business week discusses the DRM schemes on the HD-DVD and Bly-Ray disc formats, and how much further Sony’s Blu-Ray format goes towards crippling any content you buy on the discs. This is exactly why I’m boycotting Sony products:
Blu-ray, however, goes beyond the AACS, incorporating two other protection mechanisms: The ROM Mark is a cryptographic element […]
I was going to pad out that title with something like “are fucktards”, but I figured that would be redundant. Take this gem from CNet today:
Q: Do your view your lawsuits, even ones where you sued a 12-year-old girl or a Boston grandmother, as a success overall and do you think the process is working?
Sherman: […]
Donny’s Blog (via Digg):
Lately we’ve been hearing more and more about the RIAA suing people over downloading music. Many people are skeptical of of the figures of lost revenue the RIAA reports, giving arguments like not every song downloaded equals a song that would have been bought. With all of this talk, I decided to […]
Record labels sue XM Satellite over player
The recording industry sued XM Satellite Radio on Tuesday over its new iPod-like device that can store up to 50 hours of music for a monthly fee, sending to the courts a roiling dispute over how consumers can legally record songs using next-generation radio services.
The lawsuit seeks $150,000 in […]
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