RIAA to stop suing individual file traders

Julian, wrote:
I would think its up to the entity whose had their rights infringed upon to determine necessity, not Joe Q. Public.

And I would argue, as I have from the beginning, that they had all the power 9 years ago despite Joe Q Public's representative providing a viable alternative, chose this route instead, have been slowly back-tracking to the posititon that was offered to them 9 years ago and it's time they finally end this non-sense of randomly selecting a handful of infringers to make examples of.  9 years of a failed strategy where everyone is losing is long enough…

vansmack wrote:

So yes, record stores were suffering - but they were already suffering with a different new business model supplied by Amazon and other online retailers.  Even with the Industry's defense of their old model - where are record stores now?  They weren't savable because people were switching to digital music anyway.  Tangible media is a dying breed no matter how you look at it since the birth of the internet. 

i just want to say that i agree with vansmack on this topic. . .i'd also add that the quality in music being sold by the large record companies has declined, which also hurts the market model the record companies have been trying to salvage.  that, i would argue, has also driven people online where they are able to listen and download/purchase music that the large record companies wouldn't produce.

i'm with julian here. clearly murder

vansmack wrote:
This is a clever move….

Defendants in Music-Industry Lawsuit Ask for Trial to Be Broadcast Online

And surprisingly successful.  I wonder if a settlement is coming…

Court Hearing in Music-Industry Lawsuit Can Be Broadcast Online

A federal judge ruled today that Harvard University?s Berkman Center for Internet & Society can broadcast online a hearing in a recording-industry lawsuit scheduled for January 22.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment is suing Joel Tenenbaum, a graduate student at Boston University, for alleged copyright infringement. Charles R. Nesson, a Harvard law professor representing Mr. Tenenbaum, had filed a motion last month to ?admit the Internet into the courtroom.?

Today?s ruling goes beyond simply approving that request.

?The public benefit of offering a more complete view of these proceedings is plain, especially via a medium so carefully attuned to the Internet Generation captivated by these file-sharing lawsuits,? Judge Nancy Gertner wrote. ??Public? today has a new resonance, especially in this case.?

Sony had opposed the Internet broadcast, arguing in court documents that the goal of the request was ?to influence the proceedings themselves and to increase the defendant?s and his counsel?s notoriety,? The Boston Globe reported.

Judge Gertner called Sony?s objections ?curious.? Recording companies? mass-lawsuit campaign, she said, ?effectively relies on the publicity resulting from this litigation.? (In a footnote, however, she acknowledged the recording industry?s move away from mass lawsuits, saying, ?It is possible the plaintiffs have now changed their minds about the virtues of this strategy.?)

A spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America declined to comment on the ruling. Mr. Tenenbaum?s Web site, Joel Fights Back, announced the decision on its Twitter feed.

Proceedings in an RIAA case have never before been televised, according to the blog Recording Industry vs. the People. But next Thursday the Courtroom View Network will narrowcast the hearing ? an oral argument ? to the Berkman Center?s site. Whether that arrangement will continue for further hearings and a trial remains to be seen. ? Sara Lipka

Tracy Mitrano: Why the Recording Industry Stopped Suing Students

When the Recording Industry Association of America decided in December to stop filing bulk lawsuits against college students, several students in my ?Culture, Law, and Politics of the Internet? course asked me to comment on the strategy. Here is what I said:

Over all, the [recording industry?s] approach was increasingly losing steam, both as a public-relations tactic and financially. More important, if the RIAA had any hope of creating tension between students and administrators, it ultimately backfired. Although when the first wave of letters went out there were upset students and parents who expressed themselves openly, the more that everyone involved came to understand the issues of who was threatening to sue whom, the more solidarity it created among those of us [at colleges]: students and their families, staff and faculty members. Legal costs and complications also boomeranged.

Be that as it may, the end of suing students does not signal the end of the RIAA?s efforts. The RIAA has shifted its immediate focus to Internet-service providers. As a rule, ISP?s enjoy ?passive conduit status??that is, immunity from legal action because the alleged infringement is neither uploaded nor downloaded by a server of the ISP. But under the same safe-harbor provision (512(a) of the DMCA), an ISP also has an obligation to ?terminate? the accounts of ?repeat offenders.?

Stay tuned. No definitions or case law exist to determine what those terms mean. So while it is smart on the part of a content user to probe this potential liability, doing so could also result in extensive litigation. That the RIAA is motivated to find a deep pocket is not a new observation; whether the organization?backed by the labels and their stake holders?has money enough to last through extended litigation is where the real question lies, especially since entrepreneurs are offering new business models every day.

Out of this creative class, I expect legal scholars and activists, entrepreneurs, keen social observers, and great technologists to emerge! For it is this generation that has the challenge of balancing intellectual-property laws with market models, appropriate social norms, and emerging technologies. In my rocking chair, if not before, I look forward to watching this new generation of talent remake the world! ?Tracy Mitrano

Tracy Mitrano, our January guest blogger, is director of information-technology policy in Cornell University?s Office of Information Technologies, where she also directs the computer policy and law program.

Sources: AT&T, Comcast may help RIAA foil piracy

January 28, 2009 4:00 AM PST
Posted by Greg Sandoval
CNET staff writer Marguerite Reardon co-authored this report.

AT&T and Comcast, two of the nation's largest Internet service providers, are expected to be among a group of ISPs that will cooperate with the music industry in battling illegal file sharing, three sources close to the companies told CNET News.

The Recording Industry Association of America, the lobbying group representing the four largest recording companies, said last month that it had enlisted the help of ISPs as part of a new antipiracy campaign. The RIAA has declined to identify which ISPs or how many.

It's important to note that none of the half dozen or so ISPs involved has signed agreements. The companies are "skittish" about negative press and could still back out, said the sources. But as it stands, AT&T and Comcast are among the companies that have indicated they wish to participate in what the RIAA calls a "graduated response program."

There's more...

  This sounds like it will be much ado about nothing.  especially blackballing users who have been kicked off other accounts!  These ISP's must be getting paid handily to be on board with this. 

Well, I suspect it's not blocking individual IPs as much as it's filtering file types, but we shall see.  Of course, the general public is always ahead of the companies when it comes to using technology for their own purposes. 

I would support this type of remedy that the RIAA is trying but only if it doesn't interfere with legitimate uses of Bit Torrent (I use Bit Torrent all the time for Beta software) and legitimate MP3 downloads (from retailers, for example).

i thought most people just zip up albums and put them on mediafire

vansmack wrote:
Sources: AT&T, Comcast may help RIAA foil piracy

interesting.  as discussed in this month's Wired mag, Comcast has a history of suppressing torrents.  their argument was that they are "engaging in network management":

Every company "manages" its network by restricting and opening access to maintain speeds. Providers have little choice, especially when it comes to P2P, the kudzu of cable. File-sharing eats up a half to two-thirds of his upstream capacity in some places. And because cable is a shared network?with some 300 homes downloading from any one pipe?a few BitTorrent devotees could make everyone's surfing experience feel more like swimming against a riptide. "We manage our network so 99 percent of the people have a great high-speed experience," he says. "You've always had Ma Bell managing its network for things like how you handle voice traffic on Mother's Day. You get a busy signal occasionally."

this turned in to a public relations fiasco for them - people accused Comcast of censorship, preferential treatment, attacking net neutrality, etc.  they had backed off from filtering out torrents and moved to capping the total bandwidth that one can use per month.  BUT NOW they have a reason to start filtering torrents again - "it's not our decision, we're doing it for the record labels!  we're enforcing their copyrights!".  i don't know if ISPs care about copyright protection and/or being sued by the RIAA, but what is certain is that they're always looking for ways to restrict those who take more than their share of bandwidth.

convenient how ISPs pick and choose when they are & aren't responsible for what flows through their pipes. 

vansmack wrote:
Well, I suspect it's not blocking individual IPs as much as it's filtering file types, but we shall see.  Of course, the general public is always ahead of the companies when it comes to using technology for their own purposes.  

truer words have never been spoken.

picking up on my point about "network management" in my previous post:  google to the rescue!

New Google Tools Determine if Your ISP Is Blocking BitTorrent

Next time you're dealing with a dreadfully slow internet connection, you can ask Google what's causing the trouble.

The company announced a new open platform Wednesday called Measurement Lab, or M-Lab for short. As part of the initial launch, M-Lab includes three publicly accessible tools, including a tool called Glasnost that tests whether BitTorrent traffic is being blocked, throttled or otherwise impeded on your broadband connection.

Also part of M-Lab's launch are a tool to test your connection's overall speed and a diagnostic tool that will tell you if you're suffering from speed barriers common to last-mile broadband-network infrastructures.

In a post on Google's official blog, the company's chief internet evangelist Vint Cerf says M-Lab was launched to help the academic community. Researchers at institutions like Georgia Tech and Germany's Max Planck Institute have been working on these projects, but they've been hampered by infrastructure problems.

"Unfortunately, researchers lack widely distributed servers with ample connectivity," he writes. "This poses a barrier to the accuracy and scalability of these tools. Researchers also have trouble sharing data with one another."

Artistsc01_logoTo provide a suitable testing environment, Google will roll out 36 servers over the course of 2009. Also, all data collected by the project will be made publicly available for anyone to cite or reuse.

In addition to the three tools launching Wednesday, there are two more currently listed as "coming soon" on M-Lab's site. The first is called DiffProbe, and it's described as network probe that will determine if your ISP is shuffling certain kinds of traffic onto a slower pipe. The other tool still in development is Nano, which will tell you if your ISP is purposely throttling traffic from a particular group of customers, traffic from specific applications or traffic bound for specific destinations.

It's interesting to see Google stepping up into the role of a proactive net-neutrality watchdog. As a company that's banking on the internet eventually being put to use by all of us for everything above the operating system level ? applications, data storage and communications ? the move makes sense. But rather than push for open, reliable connections in the courts or through legislation, Google is taking the fight to the streets.

For years, ISPs have been notoriously shady about what they're throttling or blocking. The industry needs a healthy dose of transparency. Right now, we're just a bunch of pissed-off users complaining about our Skype calls getting dropped and our YouTube videos sputtering to a halt. But when it comes to placing blame, most of us are in the dark.

Google and the academic institutions its partnered with are empowering users to find out for themselves who's to blame when their service turns lousy, and helping them figure out where to direct their anger. And not just the command line jockeys, but everyone ? tools like Glasnost are aimed at novices, the only requirement being a current version of Java.

With access to the data that tools like this can provide, we'll be able to suss out the culprits and force them to own up to the true nature of their traffic-shaping policies.

Ouch.  Google is not going to make any friends with that.

They must be thinking of entering the ISP business with the soon to freed up TV airwaves.  I can't think of a better sales pitch - unfettered internet access and we'll provide you the tools to prove it.  All the power to them (and I hope to be on their beta test….I gave the finger to Cable and DSL sometime ago, we don't have fiber and WiMAX has taken forever to roll out in SF).

Dropping lawsuits?  They really have quit (for now)….

RIAA Drops Lawsuits but Keeps the 'Takedown' Notices Coming

The Recording Industry Association of America announced in December that it was shifting gears and would stop suing groups of students for alleged illegal file sharing. So what is it doing now?

For starters, the industry group is pulling back from pending cases. In many lawsuits that recording companies filed against anonymous students ? ?John Does? ? legal hurdles and universities? challenges inhibited identification of those defendants.

?We are by and large dismissing all John Doe cases where we have not received a discovery order or a subpoena response,? Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the RIAA, said in an e-mail interview. ?Of course, there are some exceptions,? she said, without naming which ones.

Venerable wrote:

num wrote:
RIAA is NOT the government.

not yet

More RIAA lawyers off to the department of justice. .

maybe that's why they are slowing down lawsuits- all their lawyers are joining the administration.

I found this interesting….

Why Microsoft, labels cling to music subscriptions

David Ring, executive vice president of business development for Universal Music Group's digital arm, said at the EconMusic Conference that the recording industry simply can't sustain itself from download sales alone.

"If what we're trying to do is one-by-one downloads…that's not a business that can grow," Ring told conference attendees during panel discussion he participated in. "It won't be healthy for the industry."

somehow, somwhere i feel that vansmack is really



or

back wrote:
the RIAA is NOT the government.

Obama names 5th RIAA lawyer to department of justice