Wednesday, October 27, 2010 7:53AM - By Jeffrey Hyatt
After a long battle with the music industry, LimeWire is finally getting squeezed.
A federal court in New York shut down the file-sharing service Tuesday following a judge’s ruling that found the peer-to-peer file-sharing website liable for a “massive scale of infringement.”
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said LimeWire has cost the music industry hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
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Friday, June 4, 2010 5:02PM - By Seraphina L.
Does the name, Hilary Rosen, ring a bell? If you had any inkling of what the music industry has gone through during the last decade, you would know that her name is regarded as synonymous with evil when it comes to everyone’s precious digital music swapping. Rosen was with the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) from 1987 to 2003 and during her time, she managed to lobby a load of new rights and laws through Capital Hill.
So when we heard BP has hired Rosen to work PR for their severely damaged image, we can’t really say she comes off as popular now either.
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Friday, August 14, 2009 7:21PM - By Jeffrey Hyatt
The Pirate Bay is slowly crawling towards its date with legitimacy, but in the meantime they’ve dipped into their bag of fun and pulled out an exciting, new mixtape. In fact, it’s recently convicted Joel Tenenbaum’s mixtape of the 30 songs that cost the happy (illegal) downloader $675,000 when he lost a court battle with the RIAA.
That’s $22,500 per song.
The Swedish BitTorrent website is giving music lovers everywhere the opportunity to download for themselves the very tracks Tenenbaum was convicted for illegally downloading.
A bit heavy on the Limp Bizkit and Eminem for my taste. We’ve posted Tenenbaum’s complete track-list below.
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Thursday, July 2, 2009 9:45AM - By William Barnes
The fight over music piracy has become increasingly brutal in recent months, with heated debate turning to outright culture-clash. A large segment of the population would readily agree that pirated music is stolen music, because that’s what they’ve read in the newspapers. Arguably, many of these law-abiding citizens don’t own (or often use) a computer, much less a digital copy of a song. Yet they make claims and argue points just as the RIAA’s lawyers do in court, daily. Here are eight rebuttals to such arguments.
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Friday, June 19, 2009 10:17AM - By Morelli
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) successfully sued Jamie Thomas for sharing twenty-four mp3s on p2p network Kazaa. The jury awarded the major labels represented by the RIAA $80,000 per song, totaling 1.92 million dollars.
Thomas is going to continue the fight, and said that this case is “one for the RIAA, not the end of the war.” She also commented on the damages: “Good luck trying to get it from me… it’s like squeezing blood from a turnip.”
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Monday, April 27, 2009 1:30PM - By Morelli
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA pdf) and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI pdf) both released statistics for 2008 sales. As expected, the numbers show that physical sales continued to drop in comparison to 2007, but digital sales grew to nearly 30 percent of the total market, and digital performance rights royalties went up 74 percent.
The poor physical sales don’t apply to the vinyl format, which sold $57 million, its highest mark since 1990. However, consumers are opting to buy digital albums and track downloads, which are cheaper per sale, instead of CDs. So even if the total number of digital sales is greater, the resulting profit for the industry is lower.
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Thursday, April 9, 2009 5:30PM - By Morelli
As we’ve reported, the Recording Industry opposes court webcasts of the file sharing lawsuit against Boston University student, Joel Tenenbaum. However, defense lawyer Charles R. Nesson told the US Court of appeals that an online webcast of the proceedings would be “an opportunity for the world to see what the recording industry is doing to [Joel].”
The trial is being considered a precedent for all piracy lawsuits, and could set the scenario for future prosecution of file sharers. Also, researchers at Northwestern University have found a new threat to privacy in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. To thwart this threat, they have released SwarmScreen, publicly available software that masks a user’s real download activity, to disrupt identification.
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Thursday, March 26, 2009 3:02PM - By Morelli
AT&T confirmed on Tuesday that the company is working with the Recorded Industry Artists Association (RIAA) to combat illegal file sharing. Jim Cicconi, a senior executive for AT&T, said at a digital music conference that they had begun to issue warnings to people accused of pirating music by the RIAA.
Cicconi reassures that AT&T is only forwarding warning notices from copyright holders and they “will never suspend, terminate or sanction any customer without some sort of legal process, like a court order.” If the RIAA asked them to do such a thing they “simply would not do that,” he said.
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Monday, March 23, 2009 4:00PM - By Morelli
The Obama administration has sided with the Recorded Industry Association of America (RIAA) in a lawsuit against an alleged file-sharer for copyright infringement, in the same way the Bush administration intervened in a similar lawsuit last year.
The RIAA’s argument is that a file-sharer limits the copyright owner’s ability to “distribute legal copies of copyrighted works,” which results in “lost jobs and wages, lost tax revenue, and higher prices for honest purchasers of copyrighted works.” Defendant Joel Tenenbaum’s lawyer states that the criminalization of file-sharing is unconstitutional.
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