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After a frustrating few months of searching for a solution to the audio problems he encountered while ripping on-screen video with his Dell laptop, a ripten editor discovered that others were experiencing the same issue—and that the problem was not confined to Dell laptops. Apparently, the lack of a sound card Stereo Mix recording option is to blame—and numerous forum threads have suggested that the RIAA has put pressure on laptop manufacturers like Dell, Gateway and Pac Bell to remove it.After posting this information on ripten, a Dell representative chimed in to say that the lack of a sound card...

U.S. District Judge F. Bradford Stillman this morning ruled that the College must turn over the names of 20 students suspected of downloading music illegally to the Recording Industry Association of America. The RIAA plans to sue the students for copyright infringement after they allegedly downloaded music on peer-to-peer music sharing programs such as Limewire. 7 students have already settled independently, paying between $3,000 and $5,000 each. The suit had previously been denied by U.S. District Judge Walter D. Kelley Jr. Kelley recently retired, and the RIAA asked Stillman to overturn his ruling. According to RIAA lawyer Katheryn Coggon, the...

Ruling Affirms Right to Resell Promo CDs San Francisco - A federal judge has shot down bogus copyright infringement allegations from Universal Music Group (UMG), affirming an eBay seller's right to resell promotional CDs that he buys from secondhand stores.Troy Augusto, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and law firm Keker & Van Nest, was sued by UMG last year in the United States District Court for the Central District of California for 26 auction listings involving promo CDs. At issue was whether the "promotional use only, not for sale" labels on those CDs could trump Augusto's right to...

As noted yesterday, in Warner v. Cassin, the "making available" case that had been pending in Westchester, the RIAA voluntarily dismissed the case, giving no notice to the defendant's lawyer. Defendant's lawyer learned of it on June 11th, although it had been filed May 27th. Today, June 12th, defendant's lawyer learned that on June 4th the RIAA commenced yet another action against the same family over the same exact allegation of copyright infringement, this time suing "Does 1-4". The name of the new case is Warner v. Does 1-4. The RIAA did not disclose to the Court, in the new...

This is one of the most frightening things I've learned in a long time. Over in the US, a bill has passed the House of Representatives and is heading to Congress – with a huge amount of support. The PRO-IP bill, H.R.4279, significantly increases the state's power to detect and prosecute IP infringement, carrying with it a whole host of new law enforcement positions and capabilities. It establishes an IP Czar, someone with the job of overseeing zealous action on behalf of copyright and trademark owners, and includes such powers as the ability to seize equipment if it contains just...

Jim Louderback, CEO of internet TV network Revision3, is considering legal action against anti-piracy firm MediaDefender after an internal investigation revealed it to be the source of a Memorial Day weekend Denial of Service attack against Revision3’s computer network.

Excerpt - As many of you know, Revision3’s servers were brought down over the Memorial Day weekend by a denial of service attack. It’s an all too common occurrence these days. But this one wasn’t your normal cybercrime – there’s a chilling twist at the end. Here’s what happened, and why we’re even more concerned today, after it’s over, than we were on Saturday when it started. ~ snip ~ That’s what happened to us. Another device on the internet flooded one of our servers with an overdose of SYN packets, and it shut down – bringing the rest of...

By Thomas Claburn InformationWeek Thu May 29, 7:25 PM ET Online media company Revision3 says that it is the victim of a cyberattack launched by MediaDefender, a company that fights illegal peer-to-peer distribution of media on behalf of major entertainment companies. Revision3, the host of Internet shows such as Diggnation, was inaccessible over the weekend. Company CEO Jim Louderback blames the outage on a denial-of-service attack initiated by MediaDefender. In a blog post, Louderback explains that with a bit of network sleuthing, his IT staff discovered the source of the attack. "But instead of some shadowy underground criminal syndicate, the...

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....

Tanya Andersen, a single mother and unlikely file-sharers' champion for hoisting the RIAA with its own petard, has scored another victory. A US District Court judge in Oregon affirmed an earlier decision to award Andersen attorneys' fees for the two-and-a-half year legal pursuit by the Recording Industry Ass. of America, that ultimately ended in dismissal. The latest poop on Andersen was spotted by hawk-like focus of Recording Industry vs The People. The whole mess started when Andersen was sued by the RIAA in February 2005. The label cabal accused the disabled 44-year-old mother of downloading and distributing gangster rap over...

The RIAA has quickly become one of the most disliked organizations in the world. Working ostensibly with the interests of the artists in mind, the organization has single-handedly instituted a policy of lawsuits and education in an attempt to curb the piracy of music. Although this has been going on for quite some time now, I recently read a press release from the organization outlining its successes and what 2008 will look like for its College Deterrence program. The press release tells us that the RIAA (on behalf of the music industry) has sent out "a new wave of 407...

In the latest effort to right EMI Group Ltd., the record company is set to announce tomorrow that it is laying off as much as one-third of its 6,000 employees, slashing marketing expenditures and dropping artists as part of a radical restructuring, according to people familiar with the company's plans. The moves are part of an effort by Terra Firma Capital Partners Ltd., the private-equity group that bought EMI last year for £3.2 billion ($6.26 billion), to make its investment pay off. Most of the job cuts are expected to come from EMI's recorded-music operations, as opposed to its successful...

Last year was terrible for the recorded-music majors. The next few years are likely to be even worse. IN 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,”...

Prepare to peel off your bumper stickers - the Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) may disappear in a merger of trade groups, Variety reports. According to the Hollywood trade paper, EMI has formally filed to leave the global trade body that represents sound recording owners, the IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry), by 31 March. The IFPI has 1,400 members in 75 countries. Reports last November suggested that EMI's new owner, Terra Firma, had balked at the membership fees paid to the IFPI. This has prompted a discussion between the four major labels on how to get the best...

Well, well, well. This morning when we pointed out that the RIAA's responses to the whole Howell affair were rather lacking, we missed an important point. In the NPR debate between the RIAA's Cary Sherman and the Washington Post's Marc Fisher, while Sherman may have had the stronger case (this one time!), he did make one interesting statement that could have much wider implications. When pushed on the Howell case, rather than admitting he was wrong, Fisher moved on to a different situation: the infamously incorrect statements by Sony BMG exec Jennifer Pariser, who said on the stand, in response...

An executive with the music industry's lobbying group engaged in a verbal sparring match on Thursday with the Washington Post columnist who alleges that the organization is trying to outlaw the practice of copying CDs to a computer. Here was a golden opportunity for Cary Sherman to declare once and for all that copying CDs for personal use is lawful. He stopped short of that, saying that copyright law is too complex to make such sweeping statements. National Public Radio hosted in on-air debate between Marc Fisher, the Post columnist, and Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of...

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...

You buy a CD. You rip a digital copy so you can put it on your Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPod or Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Zune. You're not worried; you paid premium price for the CD. You're not some lawless pirate. You wouldn't dream of sharing your music on a P2P network. Well, you may be walking a fine line toward thiefdom in the eyes of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the industry trade association that includes heavyweights like Sony (NYSE: SNE) BMG, Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG), Vivendi Universal, and EMI. Current litigation against Jeffrey Howell of Arizona...

You, too, could be sued for thousands of dollars by the major record companies — even if you've never once illegally downloaded music. That's because at least one lawyer for the Recording Industry Association of America, the Big Four record companies' lobbying arm and primary legal weapon, considers the copying of songs from your own CDs to your own computer, for your own personal use, to be just as illegal as posting them online for all to share, according to a federal lawsuit filed in Arizona. Jeffrey Howell of Scottsdale stands accused of placing 54 music files in a specific...

If there was ever a good time to put away petty, hell, even major differences; that time would be now. If there was ever a time to decide that now is a good time to begin serious proliferation of the Linux Operating System, that time would be now as well.Gotten pretty numb to RIAA tactics? Have their serpentine practices become ho-hum to you?They must have heard about that...your ho-humminess that is.This is their way of shaking you out of ho-hum land.Yep...so you've come to either accept the risk of trading music or you have stopped out of fear of being...

In an unusual case ... the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further ... [the RIAA] maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer ... Whether customers may copy their CDs onto their computers -- an act at the very heart of the digital revolution -- has a murky legal foundation, the RIAA argues.

Despite more than 20,000 lawsuits filed against music fans in the years since they started finding free tunes online rather than buying CDs from record companies, the recording industry has utterly failed to halt the decline of the record album or the rise of digital music sharing.

Converting music CDs to audio files on a computer is unapproved and therefore illegal, the Recording Industry Association of America has said (PDF) in a brief ahead of a crucial Arizona lawsuit. Hoping to support the arguments from group member Atlantic Records in its complaint against the Howell family, the RIAA contends that ripping CDs leads to "viral" copyright infringement; a single disc can result in millions of copies if shared through a peer-to-peer service, the brief claims. The statement partly contradicts the RIAA's previous stance on the subject. Although the group is careful in the current case to make...

In a case against an unrepresented defendant the RIAA has included a statement into the brief for summary judgment Defendant admitted that he converted these sound recordings from their original format to the .mp3 format for his and his wife’s use. (Howell Dep. 107:24 to 110:2; 114:1 to 116:16). The .mp3 format is a "compressed format [that] allows for rapid transmission of digital audio files from one computer to another by electronic mail or any other file transfer protocol." Napster, 239 F.3d at 1011. Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs’ recording into the compressed .mp3 format and they are in his shared...

One of the Big Four labels is apparently unhappy with its return on investment when it comes to funding industry trade groups such as the IFPI and RIAA. British label EMI, which was recently purchased by a private equity fund, is reportedly considering a significant cut to the amount of money it provides the trade groups on an annual basis. According to figures seen by Reuters, each of the Big Four contributes approximately $132.3 million to fund the operations of the IFPI, RIAA, and other national recording industry trade groups. That money is used in part to fund the industry's...

A coalition of entertainment and publishing industry heavyweights would like to see the 2008 presidential candidates champion "meaningful copyright protection" in their policy platforms. The requests came Tuesday in the form of a letter (PDF) and a questionnaire (PDF), dispatched by the Washington-based Copyright Alliance to 17 candidates vying for Democratic or Republican nominations next year. The group has requested responses to its questionnaire by early January of next year and plans to make the answers public. In a conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon, Ross said the group also intends to hold briefings with presidential campaigns about its copyright...

A federal judge in Washington, DC, has handed the RIAA another setback in its campaign against on-campus file-sharing. In Arista v. Does 1-19, a case brought against 19 George Washington University students by the Big Four record labels, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has ordered the RIAA to show cause why the ex parte subpoenas issued to GWU shouldn't be quashed. Judge Kollar-Kotelly's order comes in response to a motion filed by Doe number three last week. In that motion, the unnamed student asked the judge to quash the subpoena, arguing that the RIAA was relying on the wrong law to obtain...

New federal legislation says universities must agree to provide not just deterrents but also "alternatives" to peer-to-peer piracy, such as paying monthly subscription fees to the music industry for their students, on penalty of losing all financial aid for their students. The U.S. House of Representatives bill, which was introduced late Friday by top Democratic politicians, could give the movie and music industries a new revenue stream by pressuring schools into signing up for monthly subscription services such as Ruckus and Napster. Ruckus is advertising-supported, and Napster charges a monthly fee per student. The Motion Picture Association of America applauded...

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....

RIAA aims lawyers at usenet newsgroup service 'Worse than P2P' By Cade Metz in San Francisco → Published Wednesday 17th October 2007 22:42 GMT The Recording Industry Ass. of America has now attacked a company that provides access to internet newsgroups. Last Friday, RIAA lawyers chucked a federal lawsuit at Usenet.com, claiming that the Fargo, North Dakota newsgroup service "enables and encourages" people to swap copyrighted music. The organization that represents the country's big-name record labels is convinced that Usenet.com infringes copyrights in ways that extend well beyond peer-to-peer file-sharing services. "[Usenet.com] provides essentially the same functionality that P2P services...

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has taken up a new battle against pirates, but this one is different than previous legal pursuits. The UK-based organization acts as the worldwide arm for the music recording industry, but as widely reported, it apparently forgot to renew its .com top-level domain in time before it got snatched up by one of its top targets, The Pirate Bay. While the IFPI still retains control of ifpi.org, ifpi.com now points to a Pirate Bay page that reads: "International Federation of Pirates Interests." The two sides are now preparing for a fight over the...