Free Republic

Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Center (IICC) January 26, 2009 The Internet and terrorism: Hamas has recently launched PaluTube, its new file sharing website. AqsaTube, the previous file sharing website, has changed its name and appearance and is now known as TubeZik. Those changes resulted from the refusal of French and Russian Internet service providers to continue hosting AqsaTube.

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama won applause from legal adversaries of the recording industry. Stanford law professor Larry Lessig, the doyen of the "free culture" movement, endorsed the Illinois senator, as did Google CEO Eric Schmidt and even the Pirate Party. That was then. As president-elect, one of Obama's first tech-related decisions has been to select the Recording Industry Association of America's favorite lawyer to be the third in command at the Justice Department. And Obama's pick as deputy attorney general, the second most senior position, is the lawyer who oversaw the defense of the Copyright Term Extension Act--the...

After years of suing thousands of people for allegedly stealing music via the Internet, the recording industry is set to drop its legal assault as it searches for more effective ways to combat online music piracy.(edit)Instead, the Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers(edit)If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.

There was fear and trembling on the Internets earlier this month when the word went out that storied Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson - "Billion Dollar Charlie" - had decided to go mano a mano with the most-hated institution in America. The Bush White House? No, the Recording Industry Association of America. (snip) Now 69, Nesson has become something of a legend, not necessarily for the right reasons. A few years ago he spoke openly about his occasional marijuana use, and of late he has been haunting the onanistic underworld of Second Life, a computer-generated, "virtual reality" universe. But...

It has been something of a David and Goliath battle, but the first skirmishes in the war on file sharing are over. While the RIAA jubilantly claimed success last year, it is another case that has has now silenced the RIAA, as it avoids drawing attention to the case it never had. If you read a mainstream media news report about file sharing or talk to a reporter about (illicit) filesharing, you would think that the only case involving the RIAA was Capitol V Thomas, a case that made news nationwide for the size of the fines. However, there are...

Kid Rock is part of an exclusive club whose only other members are The Beatles, Garth Brooks, and AC/DC. What do thse artists have in common? They're major artists whose music isn't sold oniTunes. In Kid Rock's case there is actually one album being sold by the online music giant, but that's just because he doesn't own the rights to it. So why doesn't he want to sell his music on iTunes? It's simple really. He sees it as simply a continuation of the way labels have treated artists for decades. In his words, "iTunes takes the money, the record...

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...

Paul McGuinness, long-time manager of rock band U2, on Monday launched a verbal attack against illegal music downloaders, as well as internet service providers, device makers, Silicon Valley and even hippies in a speech at a conference in France. McGuinness blamed these forces for "destroying the recorded music industry," with illegal downloading through peer-to-peer file-sharing networks the single biggest reason for why the business is in decline. ISPs have for years profited from that illegal downloading, which occurs on their networks, and their arguments that it isn't their job to police the internet are no longer valid, he said. The...

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...

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...

FCC questions Comcast on interference with file-sharing trafficJan 14, 2008 6:23 PM (4 hrs ago) AP NEW YORK - Comcast Corp. Monday said it has received letters of inquiry from the Federal Communications Commission regarding complaints that the company actively interferes with its subscribers' Internet traffic. A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars asked the agency in November to stop Comcast from discriminating against the sharing of certain types of Internet data among subscribers. Two groups also asked the FCC to fine the nation's No. 2 Internet provider $195,000 for every affected subscriber.And Vuze Inc., a company that...

Things are looking up for the World's Dumbest File Sharer, Jammie Thomas, who became the first American to go to court in a P2P case in October A jury of her peers found Thomas guilty of copyright infringement and set a fine of $222,000 - but now she's been dumped by the person most responsible for leaving her in this predicament (apart from Jammie herself) - her attorney Brian Toder. It was Toder who foolishly advised her to make a principled fight of the matter in court - thereby turning what would have been a $2,000 tax into a candidate...

A San Francisco Bay area subscriber to Comcast Corp.'s high-speed Internet service has sued the company, alleging it engages in unfair business practices by interfering with subscribers' file sharing. Subscriber Jon Hart based his claims on the results of an investigation by the Associated Press published last month that showed Philadelphia-based Comcast actively interferes with attempts some high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online.

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....

A week after signaling her intention to appeal the $222,000 copyright infringement verdict handed down by a federal jury, Jammie Thomas has filed her notice of appeal with the US District Court for the District of Minnesota. Somewhat surprisingly, Thomas is citing the amount of the award as her grounds for the appeal, rather than the jury instructions. According to a copy of Thomas' motion seen by Ars, Thomas wants a retrial on the actual damages allegedly suffered by the record labels as the result of the sharing of the 24 recordings she was found to have distributed via KaZaA....

Internet RIAA Case Juror Speaks: 2 Jurors Wanted $3.6M Fine Jason Mick (Blog) - October 10, 2007 2:14 PM     It turns out that Jammie Thomas could have been worse off The tech news industry has been buzzing with news of the $222,000 verdict in the precedent setting civil case Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas, the first instance of an RIAA complaint going to a trial by jury. Now a juror from the case has opened up and discussed their feelings about the case and what went on inside the courtroom. While some may feel the $9,250 per...

San Francisco (IDGNS) - The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) won the first of many digital music file sharing cases Thursday against a single mother, with a U.S. jury finding her guilty of copyright infringement and fining her a total of $222,000. The U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota could have fined Jammie Thomas as much as $3.6 million, but opted not to. She was found guilty of stealing and giving away via Internet peer-to-peer Internet file sharing Kazaa a total of 24 songs from companies including Capitol Records, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and Warner Bros. Records....

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is making waves with a planned amendment to the Higher Education Reauthorization Act being introduced in time for the next school year. Reid's amendment holds select educational funds hostage for US colleges and universities that do not meet a set of criteria meant to bolster the war on file-sharing on college campuses. This is the legislative carrot-and-stick move that many colleges have feared would arise. The amendment would essentially put US colleges in the business of aggressively policing copyright on their network in order to stay off of a "blacklist" that would be comprised...

“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the Beatles album often cited as the greatest pop recording in music history, received a thoroughly modern 40th-anniversary salute last week... But off stage, in a sign of the recording industry’s declining fortunes, shareholders of EMI, the music conglomerate that markets “Sgt. Pepper” and a vast trove of other recordings, were weighing a plan to sell the company as its financial performance was weakening. ... Despite costly efforts to build buzz around new talent and thwart piracy, CD sales have plunged more than 20 percent this year, far outweighing any gains made by digital...