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The U.S. music industry’s leading trade organizations collectively slammed Twitter and its CEO Jack Dorsey for not taking down copyrighted material fast enough in a letter to Congress ahead of Thursday’s (Mar 25) hearing on disinformation on social media platforms. Dorsey, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke during the hearing.The letter called out Twitter’s “failure to meet the most basic standards of responsible moderation with respect to other illegal activity — specifically, the rampant theft of creative works on its platform,” as the groups asked the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology and the Subcommittee on Consumer...

Fueled by tremendous creative output by groundbreaking artists and now more than 50 million paid subscriptions, the U.S. music industry experienced its third year of consecutive growth in 2018 with retail revenues up 12% to $9.8 billion. Streaming now comprises 75% of total industry revenues. Vinyl continues to be a bright spot for the physical market, up 8% to $419 million, the highest revenue level since 1988.

For the first time since 1986, CD sales brought in less than a billion dollars. For the third straight year in a row, the music industry in the US has posted double-digit growth. That’s according to a new report from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).Breaking down key findings in the Year-End 2018 Report, the influential trade organization found recorded music revenue reached $9.8 billion. That’s up 12% year-over-year. Revenue from streaming music services increased 30%, reaching $7.4 billion. Streaming alone contributed 75% of total revenue in 2018. According to the RIAA, the medium accounted “for virtually all the...

Former Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde has always been very outspoken about people's inherent drive to copy things. Last year he paid the ultimate price of sacrificing his freedom for his involvement in TPB, but that hasn't changed his core 'kopimi' values. One of Peter's major frustrations is how the entertainment industries handles the idea of copying. When calculating the losses piracy costs, they often put too much value on pirated copies. This is something Peter knows all too well, as he still owes various movie and music companies millions in damages. However, this hasn't stopped him from continuing to...

ROME (RNS) Computer users in the Vatican apparently have an illegal taste for the German heavy metal band Scorpions, the coming-of-age dance film “Billy Elliot,” the television comedy series “Camp” — as well as more, ahem, adult content — according to information from Netherlands-based company TorrentFreak.TorrentFreak is a news site that focuses on file sharing and intellectual property issues, but may be best known for its occasional reports on the illegal peer-to-peer downloading of files.Video courtesy of thecultbox . via YouTube The Vatican is not the only place guilty of illegal downloads, based on data gathered by the company: the...

North Korea publicly executed around 80 people earlier this month, many for watching smuggled South Korean TV shows, a South Korean newspaper reported Monday. -excerpt- In the eastern port of Wonsan, the authorities gathered 10,000 people in a sports stadium to watch the execution of eight people by firing squad, the source quoted one eyewitness as saying.

The rollout of the Copyright Alert System will be delayed until early 2013, according to the Center for Copyright Information (CCI). The system, also referred to as the “Six Strikes” program, is intended to deter copyright infringement committed through illegal file sharing. CCI indicates that the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy is largely to blame for the delays. "Due to unexpected factors largely stemming from Hurricane Sandy which have seriously affected our final testing schedules, CCI anticipates that the participating ISPs will begin sending alerts under the Copyright Alert System in the early part of 2013, rather than by the...

Illegally downloading a couple dozen songs can earn you a million-dollar fine. Setting some Robert Frost verses to music can make you a criminal. Software or hardware that could possibly be used to copy DVDs -- illegal. And thanks to congressional action every couple of decades, Disney still holds a copyright over Mickey Mouse, whom Walt first created nearly a century ago. The law and law enforcement around copyright has moved far beyond its purpose of promoting arts and sciences and has become a textbook case of collusion between big business and big government. If Republicans took on this issue,...

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) estimates that filesharing website LimeWire owes it over $72 trillion dollars (£46 trillion) in damages. In October 2010, Limewire was forced to shut down after a judge in the Federal District Court ruled that its main filesharing functions be disabled, but the RIAA is still actively pursuing its owners for damages. Given that the combined wealth of the entire planet is around $60 trillion (£38 trillion), the RIAA likely has no hope of securing this in damages, but believe this is what it is owed, reports Computerworld.com.

BOSTON (AP) — A former Boston University student who was ordered to pay $675,000 for illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs on the Internet says he will continue fighting the penalty, despite the Supreme Court's refusal to hear his appeal. Joel Tenenbaum, of Providence, R.I., said Monday he's hoping a federal judge will reduce the amount, which he called "ludicrous." A jury in 2009 ordered Tenenbaum to pay after the Recording Industry Association of America sued him. A federal judge called the penalty constitutionally excessive, but the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated it.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has refused to take up a Boston University student's constitutional challenge to a $675,000 penalty for illegally downloading 30 songs and sharing them on the Internet. The high court on Monday refused to hear an appeal from Joel Tenenbaum, of Providence, R.I., who was successfully sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for illegally sharing music on peer-to-peer networks. In 2009, a jury ordered Tenenbaum to pay $675,000, or $22,500 for each song he illegally downloaded and shared.

The RIAA and MPAA would have you believe that piracy is responsible for their decline in sales. This is all of course blame to be laid at the feet of computers, the internet and the generic "digital boogyman." Even without getting deep into the flawed math in play, there are other reasons for the middling returns on investment Big Content is seeing. Cord-cutting is a big factor. Personal taste naturally varies, but in my view the advance of technology democratised content creation and enabled a generation of talented creators to capitalise on a resistance to innovation by established media. Reality...

Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and other Internet service providers (ISPs) in the United States will soon launch new programs to police their networks in an effort to catch digital pirates and stop illegal file-sharing. Major ISPs announced last summer that they had agreed to take new measures in an effort to prevent subscribers from illegally downloading copyrighted material, but the specifics surrounding the imminent antipiracy measures were not made available. Now, RIAA chief executive Cary Sherman has said that ISPs are ready to begin their efforts to curtail illegal movie, music and software downloads on July 12.

BTJunkie, the file sharing and torrents index voluntarily decided to shut down after being in existence for 7 years. As a final closing message, they wrote on their site, btjunkie.org, " This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!" According to Torrent Freak, the shutdown has to do with the Megaupload and Pirate Bay cases. The legal...

I already wrote a big post about yesterday's SOPA markup day one. While we're moving forward on day two, I wanted to call out one key point that was really made clear by an amendment offered by Rep. Jared Polis late in the day yesterday, which hasn't received nearly enough attention. As you may recall, with the "manager's amendment" version of SOPA (i.e., SOPA 2.0), the "notice-and-shut off funding" section of the private right of action in Section 103 was removed. This was good, because we've seen how the notice-and-takedown provision of the DMCA has been widely abused. However, what...

December 5, 2011 | By Kurt Opsahl RIAA and AAP File Amicus Brief in Righthaven Appeal The Association of American Publishers and the Recording Industry Association of America have decided to cozy up to a copyright troll, filing an amicus brief in the Ninth Circuit appeal of Righthaven v. Hoehn.  The Hoehn case is one of many decisions where a district court dismissed the case brought by copyright troll Righthaven. Indeed, Righthaven has lost on the merits every single time a court has considered its arguments (before six judges and counting). In Hoehn, the court correctly found both that Righthaven did not...

Oh let the laughter ensue raucously on this one folks. Seriously how ridiculously stupid do you have to be to not only steal music from the very people you are suppose to be representing, and protecting, but then to get caught doing it. It all started back in 2006 when Dutch performer Melchior Rietveldt was approached by the anti-piracy group BREIN to write a score for an anti-piracy video which he was led to believe would only be shown a a local arts festival. Well it turns out that his music found its way on a large number of retail...

A pending bill aimed at curbing online piracy would "put American innovators and investors at a clear disadvantage in the global economy," a coalition of venture capitalists and Internet experts warned this week. The Protect IP Act (S. 968) "is ripe for abuse," they say in a letter to Congress. "It allows rights-holders to require third-parties to block access to and take away revenues sources for online services, with limited oversight and due process." The letter was signed by more than 50 executives, including Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, Esther Dyson of EDventure Holdings and Fred Wilson of Union Square...

When federal authorities shut down five Web sites last month on suspicion of copyright infringement, they gave no warning and offered no details of their investigation, and they have not filed any criminal charges since But after the seizure warrant used in the operation was released last week, the operators of several of the sites said in interviews that they were innocent of infringement, and criticized the investigation for misrepresenting how their sites worked.

We keep hearing about it—the “all-digital future”: easier, more convenient, no need to drive to the store. Download all the content you want instantly. Thus, iTunes, OnLive, Steam, and various other services were born. But this convenience bears a steep price. In our rush to embrace the all-digital future, we’ve sacrificed fundamental property rights. Time and again, record labels, software developers, and movie studios have expressed their displeasure with physical media. The overhead is too steep. There’s too much piracy. The second-hand market is immoral and equivalent to piracy. Technophiles love to debate the merits of streaming media, but it’s...