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Pirate Bay lawyer demands retrial, saying judge was biased in file-sharing case STOCKHOLM (AP) -- A defense lawyer in the Pirate Bay file-sharing case said Thursday he will demand a retrial after the judge admitted he was a member of copyright protection organizations. A Stockholm court last week convicted four men behind the notorious Web site of helping others commit copyright violations and gave them one-year prison sentences. They also were ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to entertainment companies, including Warner Bros., Sony Music Entertainment, EMI and Columbia Pictures. Peter Althin, who represented Pirate Bay...

The founders of file-sharing website The Pirate Bay have been sentenced to a year in jail in Sweden for breaking copyright laws by helping millions of users download music, movies and computer games for free. The four were also ordered to pay $3.6 m (£2.4m) in damages to copyright holders, including Warner Brothers, MGM, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox Films, Sony and Universal, according to Swedish media reports. In a Twitter posting before sentencing, Mr Sunde said: "Nothing will happen to TPB [the Pirate Bay], this is just theatre for the media." The Pirate Bay provides a forum for its...

The Obama Administration this week tapped a fifth RIAA attorney to serve in the Justice Department. Collectively, they've argued for the entertainment industry on a myriad of issues, including the argument that ISPs should be forced to hand over personal information on P2P users without a subpoena. Assuming he adheres to them, Obama's own rules would prohibit these gentlemen from working on issues where they've represented the entertainment industry. Still, the collective thinking that permeates the new Department of RIAA Justice worries those who were hoping for more progressive leadership on issues of copyright.

If you were online and couldn't access some websites today, we might know the reason why. The FBI raided a Dallas building that houses servers for several different websites. CBS 11 News has learned that the raid is part of a general criminal investigation. Because of the confiscation of computers at Core IP Networks, a number of legitimate businesses have been affected. From the downtown office building in the 2300 block of Bryan Street, FBI agents seized what one source described as millions of dollars in computer equipment. Matthew Simpson, the owner of Core IP Networks, said in a letter...

According to some people who are paid lots of money to think about these sorts of things, the legal, ethical and economic questions facing the music business aren’t just about preserving the livelihoods of people who work in that industry. No, the very future of democracy is at stake.... At the heart of the debate is how to license peer-to-peer sharing of music files, widely blamed for the huge drop in sales of recorded music this decade. Sandy Pearlman, a veteran producer and McGill University professor, and entertainment lawyer Dina LaPolt raised the specter of a “darknet,” in which information...

Under pressure from the big record labels, several countries around the world are cracking down hard on illegal file-sharers with a "three strikes, you're out" policy — and the United States may be next. The basics are simple: Get caught three times sharing files illegally, and your Internet access gets cut off. But in a day and age when Internet access is almost as essential as a cell phone or electricity, should the music industry or Internet service providers [ISPs] have the power to determine who can and can't get online, particularly without criminal charges being filed? And what if...

The Obama administration has sided with the recording industry in a copyright lawsuit against an alleged peer-to-peer pirate, a move that echoes arguments previously made by the Bush administration. A legal brief filed Sunday in a case that the Recording Industry Association of America is pursuing in Massachusetts argues that federal copyright law is not so overly broad and its penalties not so unduly severe that they count as "punitive." Current law allows a copyright holder to receive up to $150,000 in damages per violation. The brief says "the harms caused by copyright infringement" on the Internet include limiting "a...

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes"The Obama Administration's Department of Justice, with former RIAA lawyers occupying the 2nd and 3rd highest positions in the department, has shown its colors, intervening on behalf of the RIAA in the case against a Boston University graduate student, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, accused of file sharing when he was 17 years old. Its oversized, 39-page brief (PDF) relies upon a United States Supreme Court decision from 1919 which upheld a statutory damages award, in a case involving overpriced railway tickets, equal to 116 times the actual damages sustained, and a 2007 Circuit Court decision which held...

A court case in British Columbia has the potential to drastically change the Canadian Internet landscape by making search engines such as Google and Yahoo illegal. A case brought against the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) by a small search engine for BitTorrent files, called ISOHunt Web Technologies Inc., is raising questions about whether search engines are liable for the sharing of copyright-protected content online. The question before the British Columbia Supreme Court is, if a site like ISOHunt allows people to find a pirated copy of Watchmen or The Dark Knight, is it breaching Canadian copyright law? “It’s a...

Last September, the Bush administration defended the unusual secrecy over an anti-counterfeiting treaty being negotiated by the U.S. government, which some liberal groups worry could criminalize some peer-to-peer file sharing that infringes copyrights. Now President Obama's White House has tightened the cloak of government secrecy still further, saying in a letter this week that a discussion draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and related materials are "classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958." The 1995 Executive Order 12958 allows material to be classified only if disclosure would do "damage to the national security and the...

As expected, the Recording Industry Association of America, the lobbying group of the four largest music labels, has laid off between 20 and 25 workers, or about 20 percent of the RIAA's workforce, according to music industry sources. In addition to the layoffs, the RIAA eliminated some positions through attrition, the sources said. In all, 31 of the company's 104 employees, or just under 30 percent, were either laid off or quit recently and will not be replaced. The RIAA leadership remains unchanged. My sources say CEO Mitch Bainwol and President Cary Sherman have contracts extending through the end of...

Asks for time to make up its mind in SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Cloud In SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Cloud, a Pennsylvania case in which the RIAA's statutory damages theory -- seeking from 2200 to 450,000 times the amount of actual damages -- is being tested, the United States Department of Justice has filed papers indicating that it is considering intervening in the case to defend the constitutionality of such awards, and requesting an extension of time in which to make the decision. United States Motion for Extension of Time in Which to Determine if Intervention is Appropriate...

RIAA-fan Biden's influence in the Obama administration may be larger than anticipated, at least when it comes to file sharing: His good pals with RIAA and BSA connections keep getting Department of Justice's seats. According to CNET, "President Obama is continuing to fill the senior ranks of the U.S. Department of Justice with the copyright industry's favorite lawyers" with the selection of Donald Verrilli, from the Verrilli Family, el Señor Presidente's latest acquisition.

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.

Will Obama's copyright czar help save the music? From Bruce Springsteen to Stevie Wonder, plenty of musicians supported President-elect Barack Obama. Now music executives are wondering what kind of support they'll see from the Obama administration. Soon after an inauguration that Washington, D.C., insiders are speculating could be one of the musical events of the year, Obama will officially name a copyright czar -- one of the most important decisions he'll make, as far as the music business is concerned.

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...

A Harvard law professor has opened a new front in the battle between the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and alleged music pirates by challenging the constitutionality of a statute being used by the industry group to bring lawsuits against alleged copyright violators. The case involves an individual named Joel Tenenbaum who was sued by the RIAA for allegedly illegally copying and distributing copyrighted songs belonging to several music labels. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Boston in August 2007 after what the music labels claimed was more than two years of effort trying to get...

"In the past, it's been noted that the RIAA has curiously avoided suing any Harvard students, with one of the theories being that Harvard had made it quite clear to the RIAA that it would fight back hard. And, with Harvard law school at its disposal, and various professors there indicating that they had serious legal problems with the RIAA's strategy, the RIAA simply decided to ignore any file sharing going on at that prestigious university. However, for RIAA critic and well known law professor, Charles Nesson, waiting around for the RIAA to sue someone at Harvard was getting boring,...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush signed into law on Monday a controversial bill that would stiffen penalties for movie and music piracy at the federal level. The law creates an intellectual property czar who will report directly to the president on how to better protect copyrights both domestically and internationally. The Justice Department had argued that the creation of this position would undermine its authority. The law also toughens criminal laws against piracy and counterfeiting. The Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America backed the bill, as did the U.S. Chamber of Commerce....