Well, that’s one way to make fines for file-sharing look even more arbitrary, astronomical and totally imaginary.

The RIAA battled single mom Jammie Thomas-Rasset in court over 24 tracks the woman illegally shared over Kazaa. Despite Thomas-Rasset’s protests that she hadn’t downloaded the tracks and that other people had access to her computer, she was found guilty and fined $80,000 per song shared over the P2P network. Thomas-Rasset, a woman of fairly modest means, was slapped with a $1.92m fine for her crimes.

Of course, the RIAA did offer to settle before the trial, for the sum of $200,000- more than houses cost in many parts of the US. And the fine ultimately decided upon was nowhere near the fiscal severity of penalties levied typically if Thomas-Rasset had stolen hundreds of CDs each of the entire albums bearing the tracks she’d stolen. But the judicial system had spoken, and the single tracks had a determined value of $80K.

Now Thomas-Rasset has been offered, and will likely decline, a final settlement from the RIAA for the amount of $25,000. Even though it’s far from $1.92M, $25,000 is still a lot of money for such a petty crime. (See Steven’s post on much more serious crimes and comparable fiscal penalties.) And the wild fluctuation in offers only seems to indicate that the damage done to record companies by file-sharing is not very quantifiable. So the case is far from over, and Thomas-Rasset is likely headed to court to further tie up judicial proceedings over the theft of 24 really awful songs.

But what I’d really like to know is whether the record companies were damaged to the tune of $200,000? $25,000? $1,920,000? Maybe a dollar? Maybe a billion? Which is it, RIAA?

[Ars Technica]

It’s a noble plan.

A dozen nations meeting in Geneva on Monday to consider adopting the WIPO Treaty for Sharing Accessible Formats of Copyrighted Works for Persons Who are Blind or Have other Reading Disabilities. The proposal that is currently before a 180 WIPO members would see the ability to allow t he cross-border sharing of DRM-protected digitized books that literally tens of thousands of blind and visually disabled people read with specialized devices.

As Manon Ress, policy analyst at Knowledge Ecology International, says “This treaty would be the first one that is not done for the copyright owner, but for the user of the works – for the blind to make a copyrighted work accessible”

Well that should tell you right there who would be fighting the adoption of the treaty. We would of course have the usual suspects of software companies and entertainment trade groups but along with them is the good old U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

But that prospect doesn’t sit well with American business. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s largest lobby representing 3 million businesses, argues that the plan being proposed by Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay, “raises a number of serious concerns,” (.pdf) chief among them the specter that the treaty would spawn a rash of internet book piracy.

The treaty also creates a bad precedent by loosening copyright restrictions, instead of tightening them as every previous copyright treaty has done, said Brad Huther, a chamber director. Huther concluded in a Dec. 2 letter to the U.S. Copyright office that the international community “should not engage in pursuing a copyright-exemption based paradigm.”

Echoing that concern, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry of America told the Copyright Office last month that such a treaty would “begin to dismantle the existing global treaty structure of copyright law, through the adoption of an international instrument at odds with existing, longstanding and well-settled norms.”

Source: Wired – Threat Level Blog

So thanks to the greed, protectionism and inability to realize the future we have major national and multi-national corporations along with their lap dogs like the Chamber of Commerce trying to deny what is already allowed in many countries – copyright exemptions for non-profit companies to digitized books for the blind.

Many WIPO nations, most in the industrialized world including England, the United States and Canada, have copyright exemptions that usually allow non-profit companies to market copyrighted works without permission. They scan and digitize books into the so-called universal Daisy format, which includes features like narration and digitized Braille.

The Daisy Corp. Consortium, a Swiss-based international agency, controls formatting worldwide and has some 100 companies under its direction across the globe. The largest catalog rests in the United States, in which three non-profits, including the Library of Congress, host some half million digital titles produced by federal grants and donations.

As it now stands, none of the nations may allow persons outside their borders to access these works, which are usually doled out for little or no charge. The treaty seeks to free up the cross-border sharing of the books for the blind.

“People who oppose copyright exemptions oppose exemptions on principle that there should be no exemptions of copyright law,” says George Kerscher, Daisy’s general secretary. “They should have sole right and discretion to do what they want with their intellectual property. To a great extent, the opposition to the treaty is based on that principle.”

To receive any reading materials, the blind and disabled must prove their condition, he said. In the United States, Knowledge Ecology International estimates about 5 percent of published books have been transformed to the Daisy format.

Source: Wired – Threat Level Blog

Chief amongst the opponents of course is The Association of American Publishers who is arguing basically that what is in place right now is good enough and that really the blind should be paying for their materials.

It’s so nice to see capitalism at work isn’t it…….

Technology didn’t kill radio.

Satellite radio didn’t kill terrestrial radio.

But as of today radio stands a very good chance of becoming an ever increasing wasteland to the point that we will see a massive shift away from radio stations playing music. If you think that talk radio is big now you ain’t seen nothing yet.

This is going to happen all because the very basis of how music radio works has shifted. Instead of record companies using radio stations as a way to promote new artists and new releases from established musicians the passing (with a heap of lobbying entertainment backed groups like the RIAA and musicFirst Coalition) of the Performance Rights Act radio stations will now have to pay to play that same music.

The argument put forth by the lobbyists is that this is a revenue stream that the artists are not seeing and therefor not getting paid for their work. Radio has been getting a free ride forever – getting rich off of the backs of musicians by not having to pay royalties for the music they play.

It’s a nice argument and would make sense if the musicians were actually going to see any of that royalty money. As it is they already don’t see a large chunk of what is suppose to be their money that is collected supposedly on their behalf by SoundExchange. The excuse used of course by the organization is that they can’t find the artists in order to give them the money.

So what happens with all that money?

Well the SoundEchange gets to keep it which ends up making this suppose to be non-profit very wealthy - to the tune of over $100 million as of 2007.

Now this is the group that is going to be able to collect some pretty hefty royalty money from radio stations all on the basis that it is for the musicians. The problem is that by changing the economic landscape by which radio works they are removing the incentive for any stations, other than the big conglomerates, to play new music from anyone other than the really big established musicians or bands.

Radio play has always been considered to be the biggest promotional play a musician could hope for. Even though the power of the hit lists may have lessened in our Internet world they still hold considerable power. It was advertising at it best (or worst during the payola years). That power is now gone.

As Michael Masnick at Techdirt notes

Besides, all this will do is harm up-and-coming musicians. Because radio stations will now need to pay more for playing music, they’ll play less music, and if they’re playing less music, they’ll focus just on the big name acts. Smaller up-and-coming artists should be furious with the RIAA for giving radio stations less incentive to play their works. Remember, this is the opposite of payola. While payola got new records on the air, this will make sure fewer get on the air. But it will sure put a bunch more money in the pockets of the major record labels.

This new tax revenue stream for the entertainment industry through its watchdog groups might not truly kill off radio but is sure is going to lengthen its time on life-support.

Word is beginning to trickle out of Japan that the country’s government and music companies are trying to get a pioneering system in place that is designed to stop unauthorized copying of music on mobile phones. As well repeat offenders could find their phone’s music playing capabilities disabled.

The system would be dependant on a centralized database containing information about music that is authorized to be downloaded as well as verifying that cellphone users weren’t downloading illegal copies of music files.

According to the folks over at FreakBits the system is planned to be in service by April 2010. I bet the RIAA is getting the biggest woodie possible at the thought of being able to do the same thing here.

Not satisfied with just screwing people through pointless idiotic lawsuits the music industry has been trying to get ISPs around the world to block torrent sites – with The Pirate Bay being their principal target. the thinking being if they can con the ISPs into blocking them it will be a short step to getting them to block other sites the music industry has a hard-on for.

In Ireland several of the ISPs were sent letters requesting the blockage of The Pirate Bay an while UPC and BT Ireland refused lily-livered Eircom, the country’s largest ISP, bowed down to the industry lapdogs and began – as of today – to block the site.

According the the gang over at TorrentFreak people trying to access the site will see the following message, which I have copied from TorrentFreak’s post on the story (hope they don’t mind)

TorrentFreak can confirm that Eircom customers can no longer access The Pirate Bay and instead, are faced with this message when trying to access the site (body in plain text for clarity);

On the 24 July 2009, an Order was made by the High Court requiring eircom to block or otherwise disable access by its subscribers to the website ThePirateBay.org, its related domain names, IP addresses and URLs. The Court was satisfied that on the basis of the evidence presented by the record companies that the PirateBay website is a website that facilitates the exchange of copyrighted sound recordings without the consent of the copyright owners.

eircom recognises the legitimate rights of the owners of copyrighted material and believes that individuals who share or download copyrighted material without the authorisation or the permission of the copyright owner are acting illegally.

The Order further provides that should the PirateBay website content be legitimatised in the future then eircom has liberty to apply to the Court to have the Order vacated and access to the PirateBay website enabled.

eircom in compliance with the Order has agreed that access to the website the PirateBay.org, its related domain names, IP addresses and URLs from the eircom network will be blocked indefinitely from the 1st September 2009.

eircom would like to reassure customers that:

* eircom will not monitor customer’s activities at any stage, nor will it place any monitoring equipment or software on its network in order to facilitate this block.
* eircom will not provide personal details or any information relating to customers to any third party, including the record companies.

Way to Eircom.

note: the picture has absolutely nothing to do with the story other than to show that Ireland has some really beautiful women.

There is no doubt that the RIAA deserves all the bad press and flack it gets but on a scale of utter doucebaggery they pale in comparison to a company called Digiprotect.

This company exists only to trap and sue people who download possible illegal files, music and video, from the Internet. It’s one thing to try and protect your copyrights and sue people you legitimately believe have stolen your music or movies but it is another thing to purposely set up a company that does nothing but place copyrighted material in order to encourage people to download and then sue them.

And that is Digiprotect’s business model folks.

They get the legal rights from companies to distribute these media files and because they have those rights they can sue illegal downloaders – regardless of country. As Ernesto from TorrentFreak writes in his post on the company

So Digiprotect acquires the right to distribute movies, music or games from the rights holders, which they then share on various P2P networks. All they have to do is wait for people to take the bait. If someone tries to download the file they collect the IP-address and initiate legal action through one of their befriended law firms.

That is, if it’s profitable, otherwise Digiprotect can’t afford to protect the copyright holder’s rights, as Hein explains.

“No one working for DigiProtect has a fixed salary. If we make money, everybody makes money. If we don’t, nobody does. This means the lawyers, sales people and customers. It’s all about how much money can be recouped and then sharing it.”

So in other words this amounts to nothing more than legalized entrapment meant to do nothing more than make them, and probably the original rights holders, a lot of money.

Talk about scummy.

Remember the case of Jammie Thomas and the RIAA where Jammie got slapped with a $1.92 million dollar jury judgment against her?

Well Jesus Diaz over at Gizmodo did some calculations and found that you would be better off to be a murderer, thief, or child abductor. According to Diaz the money involved breaks down like this:

• Child abduction: Fine of $25,000 and up to three years in prison, which can be accounted as $50,233 per year (that was the median household income in 2007, probably down because of the economic crisis). Total: $175,699.

• Steal the CDs: A total of $275,000, $52,500 fine for the CDs.

• Steal a lawnmower from your neighbour: A total of $375,000.

• Burn someone’s house while playing The Doors: Another $375,000.

• Stalk a Gizmodo editor (yes, you know who you are): A Class 4 felony that will result in just $175,000.

• Start a dogfighting ring: $50,000.

• Murder someone on the second degree, a Class 1 felony: $778,495, which accounts for a $25,000 fine and four to 15 years in prison.

Ms. Thomas’ crime? She supposedly downloaded 1,700 songs.

Some-one please explain to me how in our society that this is anywhere near considered to be just.

Name any trade group that claims to represent songwriters and/or musicians and they well all tell you how they are all about making sure that the musicians are getting their fair share of money earned by their music. It’s a nice fallacy which I am sure helps record executives and trade group thugs sleep easy at night  but the truth of the matter is that money collected on their behalf very rarely makes it to them.

Lately a lot of noise has been made of a music service called Spotify and how it will let people listen to music for free as long as they don’t mind advertising mixed it; or they could pay for the service and not have to put up with the ads. The publicity around the service was that this was a legitimate that would make sure that the artist got their fair share unlike the thieves running sites like Pirate Bay.

The thing is this isn’t the case, or at least as far as Swedish artist and composer Magnus Uggla it isn’t. When he first came across Spotify he thought is was great, a free service that offers just about everything and because of the involvement of all the music labels – including his own, Sony BMG, there was a feeling that finally artists would start seeing reasonable payments for their music.

Experience has proved otherwise as Magnus says that his first earnings statement from Spotify made it quite apparent that a Busker (street musician) could earn more in one day than what Spotify and his label wanted to pay him for six months.

… Uggla was as surprised as most people when he learned last week that the major labels, including Sony, all have a stake in Spotify. A mere 30,000 kroner ($4,000) investment bought the company 5.8% of the service now valued at around 1.8 billion kroner ($251m).

Referring to the valuation, Uggla questions how this company can do so well – and comes to the conclusion that it’s at the artist’s expense. He says that Sony Music, after “suing the shit out of The Pirate Bay” is acting just like them by not paying the artists.

“I would rather be raped by Pirate Bay than by Hasse Breitholtz and Sony Music and will remove all of my songs from Spotify pending an honest service,” he says.

Source: TorrentFreak :: I’d Rather Be Raped By Pirate Bay Than Go With Spotify

The Internet might be a hard place for musicians to earn a living but at some point it has to be better than signing everything over to record companies who do nothing more than pimp out musicians and then pocket most of the money.

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has bankrupted PhD student Joel Tenenbaum after a Jury found him guilty of copyright infringement for downloading and sharing 30 songs over the KaZaA peer-to-peer network. The Judge then ordered Tenenbaum to pay $675,000 in damages to the RIAA, or $22,500 per song.

From Ars Technica, who have been covering the Tenenbaum vs. RIAA case for months:

When asked about the size verdict, Tenenbaum’s attorney and Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson told Ars that “it’s a bankrupting award.” He also felt things might have been different had they been allowed to argue Fair Use. “We were not allowed to speak to fairness,” he told Ars. “I thought we had pretty damn good arguments on Fair Use.”

“I’m disappointed, but not surprised, but I’m thankful that it wasn’t much bigger, that it wasn’t millions,” Tenenbaum told Ars after the verdict was announced. We asked him if he regrets not settling earlier on in the process. “Ask me in a couple of months,” Tenenbaum replied. He also told Ars that he doesn’t have the ability to pay the judgment and said that he’d be filing for bankruptcy if the award stands. Although the jury found that he willfully infringed on the copyrights in question, Tenenbaum said he was “not displeased with the jury considering how the trial went.”

There were a lot of damning circumstances in Tenenbaum’s trial, not the leas of which was the fact that he admitted to deliberately downloading and distributing the music. He also admitted to lying in court documents – not something you want to be doing when dealing with a jury who can ruin your life – as Tenenbaum found out late Friday afternoon when the verdict came down after just 3 hours of deliberation.

At any rate, the RIAA has ruined Tenenbaum’s life in their bid to replace lost revenue with litigation as the music industry crumbles around them, and they just added another feather to their hat.

Let me ask you, Inquisitr readers: Do you have music on your computers or devices right now, or are you sharing songs via P2P?

If so, delete it. Now. And don’t replace it by buying the songs from an industry or artists who can and will cut your throat for being a fan.

In some ways you have to admire the audacity and amount of hot air that lawyers for the entertainment industry can expel. Nowhere though is this type of verbal buffoonery more apparent than the defense they use to prop up the concept of DRM’ing our music and movies.

A good example of this attitude can bee seen in the submissions made to the Copyright Office during its triennial DMCA review by Steven Metalitz, a Washington lawyer who represents the MPAA, RIAA and other rights holders. This is his response to the Copyright Office over the possible exceptions that would allow users to legally strip DRM from content if a store closes and takes down the authentication servers.

"We reject the view," he writes in a letter to the top legal advisor at the Copyright Office, "that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works. No other product or service providers are held to such lofty standards. No one expects computers or other electronics devices to work properly in perpetuity, and there is no reason that any particular mode of distributing copyrighted works should be required to do so."

Source: Ars Technica :: Big Content: ludicrous to expect DRMed music to work forever

Talk about priceless but it doesn’t stop there. He continues on with this

"To recognize the proposed exemption would surely discourage any content provider from entering the marketplace for online distribution… unless it was committed to do so… forever. This would not be good for consumers, who would find a marketplace with less innovation and fewer choices and options."

Even as Amazon and iTunes make music available without any form of DRM we still get this lawyer blow hot air up everyone’s butt. It’s no wonder that people are getting fed up with the whole entertainment industry.

Chief spokesdude for the RIAA Jonathan Lamesauce Lamy has stated DRM is dead, but not before pissing off all the people who have legitimately downloaded music since you could legally do so.

Way way back two years ago, the RIAA was defending the practice as serving all sorts of unnamed consumer benefits. They couldn’t tell us any, but I’m sure they were there. Like the benefit of not being able to easily move your bought and paid for music from device to device or being treated like a thief when you get a new computer. That was pretty awesome, I’ll miss it.

Despite all the imaginary pros of someone placing artificial restrictions on content owned by consumers, shockingly, big players like Amazon and iTunes began to reject and/or discontinue the practice. DRM effectively worked against legal music sales and created piracy where none may have existed.

It seems that even the most vocal proponents of the practice are finally accepting what is rather than what they’d like there to be and realizing that DRM in the end impacted what they hold most dear: sales. But the fact that the music industry is so slow to accept the changing relationship of their product to technology at the pace at which technology develops doesn’t bode well for players like the RIAA. Until they realize they have to keep up with the changing market landscape and create distribution channels that offer real incentive to win consumer dollars, rather than just trying to thwart fans trying to listen to music because they don’t want to accept their revenue model has changed forever and it’s not coming back, steps like this will continue to be a drop in the bucket.

[Source: TorrentFreak]

Usenet.com is preparing for what may amount to “hundreds of millions of dollars” in damages after losing a case brought by the RIAA in New York against the internet dinosaur.

Ars Technica detailed the laundry list of grievances of which Usenet.com was found guilty:

“A federal judge yesterday found Usenet.com liable for just about every copyright infringement claim on the books: direct infringement, inducement of infringement, contributory infringement, and (just for good measure) vicarious infringement. Not content to be loud and proud about its pro-pirate agenda, Usenet.com also resorted to stonewalling legal questionnaires, sending employees to Europe to avoid depositions, wiping hard drives, and failing to turn over e-mail after being sued in 2007 by the music labels.”

Aside from the potential for ridiculous and imaginative fiscal penalties, the case is significant for many reasons. Usenet.com was denied use of the “Betamax” defense by U.S. District Judge Harold Baer, with which they could assert that their service had reasonable applications for use other than facilitating infringement. Baer also sanctioned Usenet from invoking protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s ”safe harbor” provision- a clause which protects internet service providers from prosecution due to unlawful acts committed by users.

CNet quoted Usenet.com attorney Charles Baker on another significant issue possibly defined by this case:

Another precedent set by Baer, according to Baker, is that distributing material within a closed network was a violation.

“This is something new the judge bought off on their argument,” Baker said. “The way Usenet.com works is there is copying going on in the servers, there’s multiple copies being made. When a user uploads a file it goes into a server and subsequently those binary files move from server to server as they go through the Usenet network. The court has held that was a violation of the right of distribution and no court has gone there before.”

RIAA lawyers successfully contended that Usenet.com engaged in several below board practices to circumvent their judicial efforts, including hiding witnesses in Europe and destroying data. Baer was not pleased with Usenet’s actions, clearly reflected in his findings. Without the “safe harbor” defense available to Usenet, their case was tanked and Baer issued a summary judgment to the RIAA. Damages will be determined in the coming weeks, and penalties could range as high as $30,000 per infringement.

RIAA General Counsel Stephen M. Marks gloated about the verdict in a statement:

“This decision is another example of courts recognizing the value of copyrighted music and taking action against companies and individuals who are engaging in wide scale infringement. We hope that other bad actors who are engaging in similar activity will take note of this decisive opinion.”

It is re-assuring in a point in time where entertainment industry trade groups, like the RIAA, are pressuring governments and ISP by either suing them or helping them write legislation that there are some countries – well one anyway – that isn’t buckling under. At the forefront of putting its citizen’s rights and privacy ahead of those of groups like the RIAA is Norway.

Back on June 10, 2009 the Norwegian agency in charge of data protection instructed two ISP – Tele2 and Lyse Tele – to delete all IP related personal information in their logs that is older than 3 weeks. In addition this instruction will also be applied against the rest of the ISPs in the country.

The fact that data can only be held for just 21 days will see the immediate deletion of IP information held on around 1.6 million subscribers by these Norwegian ISPs. However, the decision flies in the face of European Union rules which say that this type of data must be held for at least 6 months – right now in Norway, data retention can be anything from a few days to five months.

The process of monitoring file-sharers, gathering evidence and then collating it all into an acceptable format can be time consuming. Add this to the time taken to get into the system to obtain a court order from a judge to force the ISPs to hand over data on their customers, and you end up with a period longer than 21 days. By which time the data has gone and the evidence becomes useless, since it’s impossible to identity the alleged infringer.

Source: TorrentFreak

Now add to this the news out today that the law firm who had been granted a temporary license to monitor the countries ISPs in order to track down alleged pirates and collect their IPs won’t have that license renewed. The law firm of Simonsen used that data collected to gather the IP addresses of alleged pirates and then sue them.

Simonsen lawyer Espen Tøndel told Dagbladet that he was very unhappy with developments. “We believe that the decision is politically justified,” he said, noting that there should be no reason why the license shouldn’t be extended.

Tøndel further said that his law firm will object against the non-renewal of their license but if they fail, he fears that copyright holders will be completely powerless to stop illegal file-sharing.

Source: TorrentFreak

It’s good to see a country that actually really cares about its citizens rights in this stupid power play. I wonder if they would have room for a cranky old fart of a blogger?

When one things of the Recording Industry Association of America, otherwise known among other names as the RIAA, is well known for questionable legal actions and suing old women and single mothers. The last thing that most of us would think when it comes  to the organization is that they would take up blogging.

Well they have and you can find their blog called Music Notes here.

This appears to be a fairly new blog as there are only eight posts but you can already see that this is just going to be another avenue for them to spin their crap. Here’s samples of the content that you will expect to find on the blog.

Here We Are

Jammie Thomas-Rasset Part Deux, Day 1. An encouraging first day. After a morning of jury selection, the jury was seated by lunch (five men, seven women) and opening arguments kicked off the afternoon. We’re very pleased with the jury. My favorite highlight of the day was the juror who, during jury selection process, noted that he used LimeWire once to get music illegally – but stopped immediately because he “didn’t want to get caught and be here.” How’s THAT for deterrence value of our lawsuit program?? Doesn’t get much better than that folks…

Posted: June 15, 2009

1700 songs later: The Thomas-Rasset II Verdict

By now everyone knows what the verdict was. It’s fair to say that the damages were unexpected given the size of the award in the previous trial. But when it comes down to it, the jury heard a case about Ms. Thomas-Rasset distributing more than 1700 songs to potentially millions of people – not merely downloading 24 songs. We will settle this case if she allows it. We’ve always wanted to settle this case. But she has consistently refused, which has led us to today’s verdict.

Posted: June 18, 2009

Sample Sizes (and Minnesota Juries)

Last week we got a chance to listen to one of these groups outside the usual circumstances.  It wasn’t a research project, and it wasn’t by sitting behind a two-way mirror.  This group of 12 industry outsiders likely hadn’t engaged in debates about long-tail sales theories, the effectiveness of DRM schemes, or consumption patterns of digital media when marginal costs approach zero.  Which isn’t to say they were disengaged – most of them had mp3 players, and at least some knew what peer-to-peer software was.  But overall, they were probably a good cross section of ‘real world’ music listeners.

Posted: June 23, 2009

Anyone surprised?

The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) is pushing to receive royalties for ringtones played in public.

ASCAP claims that ringtones that sounds in public constitutes a public performance, a categorization that is beyond the purchased rights of those who have legitimately purchased a ringtone. If ASCAP wins, you, or your telco would have to pay a royalty every time your phone rang using a musical ringtone outside your own home. Did I mention we’re not making this up.

The EFF is dutifully on the case, and is arguing that if the incidental mobile phone playback of a short snippet in a public place were viewed as a “public performance” the Copyright Act has a specific exception, 17 U.S.C. 110(4), that covers performances made “without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage.” The EFF also notes (and again, we’re not making this up) that if ASCAP were to win, playing your car radio with the window down could also constitute a public performance as well.

The greed of the music industry continues to have no bounds. The EFF has more details here, and a copy of ASCAP’s brief as follows:

Recently, the RIAA won a court case that saw a suburban mother fined for $2,000,000 for downloading a handful of songs off the internet and listening to them.

There has been a lot of outrage over the case and others like it in the past, but this time a prominent artist speaks out about it.

In a blog post in reaction to hearing about the afforementioned case, Moby says:

“argh. what utter nonsense. this is how the record companies want to protect themselves? suing suburban moms for listening to music? charging $80,000 per song?

punishing people for listening to music is exactly the wrong way to protect the music business. maybe the record companies have adopted the ‘it’s better to be feared than respected’ approach to dealing with music fans. i don’t know, but ‘it’s better to be feared than respected’ doesn’t seem like such a sustainable business model when it comes to consumer choice. how about a new model of ‘it’s better to be loved for helping artists make good records and giving consumers great records at reasonable prices’?”

Amen.

[Props: Moby’s Blog

A Minnesota mother of two has been fined $1.92m for “willful copyright infringement” in the illegal sharing of 22 songs.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset (pronounced “Jamie”- can they tack on a fine for that?) was found to be responsible for the illegal downloads and ordered to pay $80,000 per track for her crimes.

Thomas-Rasset’s lawyers contend that it’s impossible to prove that she was the individual who illegally downloaded and shared the files, positing that her children and ex-boyfriend both had free access to her Kazaa account. They also made a point of her willingness to stand up to the RIAA and indicated that if precedent was set, many more people could stand to be tried on flimsy evidence.

This was Thomas-Rasset’s second trial, with a decidedly less favorable outcome for the single mother- however, the idea that most Americans could cough up that kind of cash is pretty silly. Originally, she was fined a total of $222,000 for the downloading spree, but the judge in the first case called a mistrial after acknowledging he may have erred in instructing the jury. Thomas-Rasset chose not to settle as most defendants had, resulting in the astronomical fine.

Via Wired, the two-million dollar playlist:

• Guns N Roses “Welcome to the Jungle”; “November Rain”
• Vanessa Williams “Save the Best for Last”
• Janet Jackson “Let’s What Awhile”
• Gloria Estefan “Here We Are”; “Coming Out of the Heart”; “Rhythm is Gonna Get You”
• Goo Goo Dolls “Iris”
• Journey “Faithfully”; “Don’t Stop Believing”
• Sara McLachlan “Possession”;  “Building a Mystery”
• Aerosmith “Cryin’”
• Linkin Park “One Step Closer”
• Def Leppard “Pour Some Sugar on Me”
• Reba McEntire “One Honest Heart”
• Bryan Adams “Somebody”
• No Doubt “Bathwater”; “Hella Good”; “Different People”
• Sheryl Crow “Run Baby Run”
• Richard Marx “Now and Forever”
• Destiny’s Child “Bills, Bills, Bills”
• Green Day “Basket Case”

Sounding vaguely like a bunch of sleazy boyfriends, Last.fm & CBS want us to know that baby, they really, really didn’t have anything going on with the RIAA. And all that scrobbling, that was ours and it meant something and they would never, ever share it with someone who might sue us or our tweens for many thousands of dollars.

The debacle began when Universal Music Australia accidentally leaked tracks from the then-unreleased U2 album No Line on the Horizon. At the time, rumors flew across the blogosphere that the RIAA was demanding (and receiving) scrobbling data from Last.fm to grass up P2P hooligans (with questionable taste in old-dude rock.)

When allegations of data sharing between Last.fm, parent company CBS and the RIAA were first raised in February, denials were issued all around to anyone who would listen- infused with outrage that we would even suspect such a thing. True or not, it kind of reminded everyone that a lot of what we send out into the internet ether could land up somewhere, stick, and come back to bite us on the ass someday.

The story resurfaced this week after a blog previously accused of fabricating Last.fm stories went for a second round. In response, CBS issued yet another statement to Ars Technica yesterday denying any and all canoodling with the RIAA. And the RIAA backed up their alleged BFF CBS, as rep Cara Duckworth coyly told Ars that  ”we’ve made no such request for this information.” (Hmmm… that’s kind of… vague.)

And charmingly, CBS had this to say to the Wall Street Journal’s Tech Blog:

…those who consult such blogs should be aware of the standard by which such postings are sourced and published.

Because we all know the best way to get bloggers to trust and believe you is to attack their credibility.

There are a lot of different arguments used by people brought to court by the RIAA and other entertainment trade groups in order to come out victorious. In the majority of cases they lose and the RIAA get’s to brag a little longer about how they are out their protecting the rights of musicians.

I’ll wait until you pick yourself up from the floor after the laughing fit that statement prompted.

All better know? good because there is a very interesting defense being put forward in the case of accused file-swapper Joel Tenenbaum. It would seen that well respected Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson will argue that what Tenenbaum did falls squarely within “fair use” and therefore he isn’t liable for any purported damages. Nesson claims that downloading of copyrighted works nor no other purpose than personal enjoyment satisfies the famous “four factor test” for fair use claims.

Those four factors according to Stanford University Library are

1. the purpose and character of your use
2. the nature of the copyrighted work
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market.

While some of Nesson’s equals consider this stretching the fair use clause a bit too far he believes he can convince a jury otherwise

"Defendant Tenenbaum expects and plans to offer the jury evidence relating to each one of these four factors," Nesson wrote in his court filing, "just as they are articulated in the statute, with the jury to decide their meaning as they apply to the facts of his particular case."

Source: Ars Technica

We’ll have to wait until this summer sometime for the case to start in a Massachusetts federal court to see if this rather unique defense will survive.

Not happy with the results from these kind of actions they have decided to target stable owners as evidenced in the case of 62 year old Mrs Greenway who plays a classical radio station in the stables that she has been running for 20 years. According to the PRS though because she employees more than two people she must pay the annual £99 licensing fee regardless of the fact that the music is played for the horses benefit not the staffs. In fact the majority of the staff dislike the choice of music and will turn it off when Mrs. Greenway isn’t around.

She received a telephone call from the Performing Right Society – now officially known as PRS for Music – which was targeting stables as part of a drive to get commercial premises to pay for licences.

Rather than pay the fee, she now leaves the radio off except on Sundays when she is alone at the stable yard.

"I actually use my radio for the benefit of the horses as Classic FM helps them relax," she said.

"The staff are not bothered whether they have the radio on or not, in fact they don’t particularly like my music and turn if off when I’m not around."

Mrs Greenway, who keeps 11 horses at the stables, added: “You would have thought that playing music to your own horses was allowable but apparently not.

Source: Telegraph

Apparently Mrs. Greenway isn’t the only stable owner to be accosted in this fashion as Chris Doran of the British Horse Society says that the organization has been fielding several calls from other stables about this.

[picture courtesy of The Telegraph]