Tag: RIAA

Lately, there's been plenty of news about Google and intellectual property. First we heard (or rather, didn't hear) videos go silent on YouTube. Now we've learned that they're also targeting bloggers who post mp3 files on Blogger.com. The problem is, some of the people sharing songs are doing so at the request of artists and their promoters. That's the case with Ryan's Smashing Life, whose story ...

For the last few years the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has taken a rather aggressive stance on copyright protection by suing individuals who shared songs over the internet using file sharing software. The Wall Street Journal reports that's all about to change. Well, somewhat anyway. After filing suits against 35,000 individuals the RIAA plans to give up on mass lawsuits. That ...

Torrent Freak reported yesterday that the SPFF -- think of it as the French RIAA -- filed lawsuits against the developers of P2P clients Vuze, Limewire, and Morpheus. There is also a fourth target, and I'll get to that particular bit of insanity later. The SPFF's beef is with the fact that these programs don't provide a system to block copyright protected materials from being shared. Because the ...

Back in October of 2007, a federal jury ruled in favor of the RIAA and fined the defendant, Jammie Thomas, an outrageous $220,000.00 US for sharing 24 songs on a P2P network. Not surprisingly, Ms. Thomas filed an appeal. Her case was indirectly strengthened when a New York federal judge ruled that the RIAA could not strictly sue individuals under the "making available" claim -- the argument that ...

In the spirit of Download Like a Pirate Day, If you want to take to the airwaves and be your own radio broadcaster, Pirate Radio, a PC based internet broadcasting app can help you get your own radio station launched with minimum equipment and no technical skills required. All you need is a PC with a sound card, some audio and a constant connection to the internet. You can broadcast live with a ...

The age-old battle of copyright and artist freedom keeps clanging away in the distance, and are we any better off than we were when DAT machines were castrated in the 80's? I read a report this morning about a UK band called "Show of Hands" who claims they are dependent upon so-called pirates who download their music and share it with friends. This isn't much different than Trent Reznor making his ...

A few years ago you could purchase practically any song you wanted from the Russian music site AllofMP3. And the songs were dirt cheap. While you had to pay Apple roughly a buck for every song you purchased legally in the US, AllofMP3 charged just a few cents per song. If that all sounds too good to be true, the RIAA thought so too. The US recording industry trade group took legal action against ...

Several companies that broadcast internet radio streams, including RealNetworks, Yahoo!, and this blog's parent company, AOL owe ASCAP millions of dollars. That's according to a federal court in New York. While the court did not determine the exact amount of money owed, ASCAP estimates that the fees could climb as high as $100 million. ASCAP stands for the American Society of Composers, ...

A federal judge in New york has ruled that the RIAA cannot sue people for simply making copyrighted music available for download. Rather, the recording industry needs to demonstrate that someone has actually downloaded the file. Otherwise, it's not clear that a crime actually took place. It's much trickier to demonstrate that someone actually downloaded the files you made available. And when we ...

In its ever-continuing quest to prevent piracy, the RIAA announced in a State of the Net conference on January 30th, that it likes the idea of filters on the end user's platform that will detect if a user is doing anything illegal with copyrighted material. Why would anyone want to install such a filter? In a video excerpt from the conference over at Public Knowledge, an RIAA representative points ...

Yesterday a Reddit user posted a link that supposedly runs a time-consuming SQL query on the RIAA'a website. Of course the Reddit community began trying to stick it to the RIAA, and eventually someone may have deleted all of the site's content by exploiting a poorly configured web/database server with an SQL injection attack. The site appears to be operating fine now, but we noticed it ...

Attention UK Pandora users: as of January 15, 2008, Pandora will stop streaming its Internet radio content. This comes more than six months after Pandora was forced to shut-down service to most non-US users and is the latest in the continually messy battle over licensing Internet radio. A reader just forwarded us an e-mail from Pandora, explaining the situation. Here are the pertinent bits: ...As ...

Three little letters, about a year ago, had a death-grip on the music industry: DRM. Seriously, who thought this was a good idea? DRM limits the unauthorized copying and sharing of music. We can see that argument. It also limits what music can be played on certain devices. Should you get a new computer or device and need to transfer your licenses, all we can say is -- good luck with that. We speak ...

This week, as we do every week, we spent most of our waking moments following all those tiny hamsters which keep the Internet humming along. Here's the best of what we saw this week. Twine: a social network built on the semantic web The semantic web is one way we might give search engines a little more intelligence about the things for which we're searching. Our own Brad Linder caught up with ...

The RIAA certainly knows how to keep on top of the latest trends in piracy. Wired is reporting that the Recording Industry Association of America is suing Usenet.com, claiming that the internet platform that predates the web is the next big thing in illegal file sharing. Never mind the fact that people have been sharing files on Usenet for decades. And never mind the fact that Usenet.com is ...