It has come to my attention that the music industry now wants royalties for those 30-second clips of music you hear in iTunes. That, I think you’ll agree, is bullshit. Seeing as how we’re a solution-oriented blog here at CrunchGear, I want to offer a completely fool-proof way to save the music industry and put an end to the years and years of nonsense we’ve seen since Napster was first released: let’s ban music. That’s right, let’s pass a law that says “the creation or performance of music, in any form, is hereby banned. Any violation of this law will be punishable by death.” Problem solved, let’s all play Hungry Hungry Hippos.

It’s clear that there’s at least two sides to this argument: one, people who think music should be free, and that includes bands that give their music away or sell it for mad cheap, and kids who have grown up with Kazaa and BitTorrent; and two, people who demand to be paid for their work, which includes organizations like the RIAA and musicians like Lily Allen.

I say screw all of them. You like being paid for music? Too bad, it’s banned. Go work at the post office. You think you’re being altruistic by releasing a few songs for free? Too bad, it’s banned. Since both you guys can’t agree on whether or not you think it’s a good idea to sue a single mother for more money than she’ll ever see in her life let’s shut the whole damn industry down.

All music radio stations will be scuttled, and we’ll mine the Sirius XM satellites for the useful metals they contain. Instrument stores will be transformed into Chuck E. Cheese’s or Discovery Zones. All music gadgets—iPod, Zune, you name it—will be placed on a boat and sunken halfway into the ocean.

Anyone caught humming a tune or whistling melodically will be thrown into the nearest state prison. (That’s right, state prison, not the country clubs known as federal prison.)

This is the punishment for 10 years of the RIAA, its dunderhead henchmen and mollycoddled musicians. It pains me to do this, but it really does seem like these stupid issues will never go away. So it’s gone. Music is gone. Now nobody has to worry about “piracy” or “marketing” or any of that garbage. We’ll be a society completely devoid of music. No more lawsuits, no more rootkits, no more nothing.

It’s a perfect world. There’s no piracy, there’s no sons-of-bitches illegally listening to unauthorized 30-second sound clips—think of the lost revenue!—and no reason to sue single mothers because their dumb kids downloaded three Britney Spears songs in 2001.

You will all receive letters in the mail detailing our plans to ban music forever. I look forward to your cooperation, and I look forward to huge consultancy check from the RIAA. I literally just solved all its problems; pay me.

And now, the 900th note on Internet piracy written in the past week. It would appear that the UK is inching closer to a law that would require ISPs to disconnect people who download music, movies, etc. illegally. The proposal, currently making its way through the back rooms of the British Government, could well be placed before the Parliament during its next session.

An MP there, Tom Watson, has written on his blog (apparently he was the first MP to have a blog) that people do have the opportunity to affect any such legislation. For one, people who’d be affected by the legislation—British CrunchGear readers; we’re huge in Sunderland for some reason—should contact the Department of Business Innovation and Skills.

Tell it this: how will it benefit the UK to target 6 million citizens and throw them off the Internet? Who’s to say how many of these people don’t improve British society on a daily basis? Doctors, teachers and professors, you name it. And for what, to appease the record labels, which are most concerned with improving their own bottom line? It’s just something to consider.

(In fact, in the book that I mentioned the other day, Ripped, the author estimated that if the RIAA truly wanted to “go after” everyone who’s ever downloaded a song, it would have to sue nearly 50 percent of the U.S. population. And if we’re treating copyright infringement as a criminal matter, then you’d have to build an awful lot of prisons to accommodate all those people.)

Maybe if the music labels had spent more time figuring this Internet thing out than it did suing single mothers? Because things like that wacky file format we mentioned last week are far too little, far too late.

There’s not else much to say. The big labels brainstormed (for several years, apparently), and eventually decided that they would sell a single file, which included tracks, lyrics, album art, and music videos. What a great idea that would have been in 2003! But it is 2009, and the labels have been abusing consumers for so long that any format solely originating in them will be distrusted and ridiculed. They’re not even putting a lot of weight behind it!

We are not going out in force. What you are going to see is a couple of releases thrown out there to see what people like.

Sorry, people like what they’ve got, which was the technology that arose in the vacuum you guys created by not addressing this years ago.

While I respect the initiative being shown by our friends in the music industry (a few years late, but still), I have a question: how exactly do you see this little foray succeeding without that music device which has risen in prominence since the day of the compact disc — I think it’s called an i-Something?

Another day, another RIAA trial victory. Joel Tenenbaum was ordered to cough up $675,000 to the record labels. It works out to $22,500 per song he downloaded off Kazaa years ago.

And while it’s so, so easy to say, “Boo, RIAA,” Tenenbaum sees the verdict as a sort of admission by the jury that his defense worked. (He was facing up to $4.5 million in damages.) He told Ars that he was “disappointed, but not surprised,” with verdict, recognizing that, yeah, things could have been much worse.

His lawyer, Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson, wasn’t happy with it, noting that it’s a “bankrupting award,” because Tenenbaum doesn’t have a cool $675,000 to pay for a couple of songs.

I never did understand how you could walk into a Best Buy, physically steal a CD, get caught, and still not have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. My guess is that RIAA lawyers have convinced juries and judges that for every song you put in your shared folder, and for every person that downloads, that represents lost sales. Still, it seems excessive.

Tenenbaum will appeal, of course, so there’s no point in freaking out just yet.

And, frankly, RIAA stories have lost all heat.

Remember yesterday when I noted, by way of TorrentFreak, that the RIAA had all but considered DRM to be dead? Not true! Not true at all.

Long story short, and in the interest of protecting sources and so forth, the RIAA rep who supposedly went on record saying “DRM is dead, isn’t it?” didn’t actually say that. The rep, one Jonathan Lamy, had actually alluded to the fact that, yes, the big music download services (like iTunes) no longer have DRM. That doesn’t mean DRM is “dead” or anything—try watching a movie you buy in iTunes on Linux! (Not that the RIAA has anything to do with movies, mind.)

That is all.

The chief spokesman for the RIAA, one Jonathan Lamy, has gone on record to say what any normal, not-on-the-RIAA-payroll person has been saying for some time now: “DRM is dead, isn’t it?” Yes. Yes it it.

This phrase—“DRM is dead”—appears in an upcoming SC Magazine article. Mr. Lamy references things like the now DRM-free iTunes which, at least in the U.S., “is” downloadable music.

There’s really not too much to add here: DRM is great at getting in the way of legitimate users; pirates will always find a way around it. And not just music, either. In fact, in my opinion, it’s been the video game industry which has been most egregious with DRM. Games are DRM’d to no end, then legitimate users can’t get the thing to work. Meanwhile, someone like RELOADED will have cracked the game two days before its official release date.

I don’t know, good riddance, DRM.

It’s safe to say that I shed no tears yesterday when, for all intents and purposes, The Pirate Bay ceased to be. Suffice it to say that if Usenet comes under attack next I will not be a happy camper. (I know, I know: The first rule of Usenet is not to talk about Usenet, but bear with the story for a minute.) The RIAA just won a lawsuit against usenet.com, which, as you might guess, is a premium Usenet provider.

The court case, in the Southern District of New York, found usenet.com guilty of “direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement.” And perhaps more worrying is that usenet.com cannot defend itself using the ol’ Sony Betamax decision. In a nutshell that says that so long as there is a significant, non-infringing use of a device/service you can’t sue it into oblivion.

For those not in the know, Usenet, which is as old as the dinosaurs, can be described, in a very dumbed-down way, as a big, decentralized message board, but one where you can attach files. I’ll leave it at that.

Of course, this is “only” a district court’s opinion, so make of it what you will. And it’s worth stressing, of course, that usenet.com != Usenet. (For the record, I use newsdemon.com, and my brother uses giganews.com. They’re pretty comparable based on our unscientific “let’s see how long it takes to download SomeFile” tests.)

The second rule of Usenet…

via Slashdot

Stan Lee couldn’t have created a more hated super-villain than the Recording Industry Association of America. It’s the ultimate heel stable. Get this: a woman in Minneapolis, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, has been ordered to pay $1.92 million in damages for downloading and sharing 24 songs. That works out to about $80,000 per song. Clearly the RIAA deserves props. Mad props.

To the woman’s credit, she’s reacting much the way I would, if faced with such a bill: good luck getting that kind of money because I patently don’t have it. Says Ms. Thomas-Rasset:

I have no means of paying the fine. There’s no way they’re ever going to get that. I’m a mom, limited means, so I’m not going to worry about it now. The only thing I can say is good luck trying to get it, because you can’t get blood out of a turnip.

Let’s play a game. Let’s say you wind up in the same situation as this woman, faced with an enormous bill for downloading a bunch of piece-of-garbage songs. Now, I don’t have that kind of money, obviously. Nor would I really be inclined to pay a lesser fine, somewhere in the low thousands of dollars. To paraphrase Sir Alex Ferguson, I wouldn’t give that mob [the RIAA] a virus, let alone a single dollar. Where does that leave me, jail? What is the ultimate punishment a court could hand out here? (You’d think I’d contact the EFF or something to ask this question.)

And another thing!

Let’s talk hypothetically for a moment. Let’s say you’re the average American (or wherever you’re from), going to school or working for The Man. Let’s say that you occasionally download an MP3 or FLAC from wherever you get such things. Now, do you have $150,000 to give to the RIAA for every song you’ve downloaded? I sure as heck don’t! (I’d need a government bailout, lol!) More importantly, why is $150,000 an appropriate amount to ask for, as Sony seems to suggest? If I can buy a song off iTunes for $1.30, how is it that “finding” that same song could cost me $150,000?

There’s another one of the RIAA vs. Some Guy court cases going on right now, and the defense attorney asked Sony’s lawyers to put a number on per-infringement damages. Sony wouldn’t, instead saying that, under the law, damages can range from $750-$150,000.

Now, I’m not a doctor, not even in the Dr. Nick sense, but on what planet does Some Guy downloading a song, or an album, or 100 albums, equate to $150,000 in damages? It just seems so ridiculous to me.

Even more to the point, is anyone else a little tired of the RIAA? Like, even reading about it, and its wacky exploits, its insane monetary demands, just doesn’t have the same punch as it did in 2004. The Internet could use a new boogeyman.

The RIAA received some rare “good press” a few months ago when it announced that it would no longer go after individual file sharers. But then, approximately 27 seconds later, we began hating it again when it emerged that, instead of going after individual file shares, it would work with ISPs to weed out file sharers. A distinction without meaning, I say. Anyhow, AT&T is the first big ISP to announce that it’s working with the organization, so now we transfer our angst that-a-way.

AT&T admitted as much at some meeting of the minds, as it were, in Nashville. The ISP has been telling some of its subscribers that, hey, the RIAA has you on its radar, so knock it off, or else! The “or else” could be any number of things, including the threat of legal action.

Anyway, it’s not exactly worth getting freaked out over just yet, since AT&T says its current cooperation with the RIAA is just a trial run. (And I’m the King of Spain!)

CNET makes a good point when it brings up the fact that ISPs have usually shied away from doing the RIAA’s dirty work, as it could be seen as forfeiting their common carrier status. That is, if anything illegal happens over AT&T’s lines it’s not AT&T’s fault, since all it is is a dumb pipe; what people choose to do with that pipe is their own business.

And in the interest of keeping this honest, I type this as I’m seeding hundreds of torrents. What are you gonna do?

Ars Technica is usually one of the better sites to read if you’re looking for a “serious” take on technology, but its profile of the Harvard Law students working on the RIAA v. Joel Tenenbaum case is in a league of its own. It’s a little on the long side, in this age of Twitter, but well worth the time invested if you’re interested in any of the following topics: the RIAA; music piracy; justice; or a good, old fashioned David v. Goliath story.

If you’re not aware, the RIAA is suing Joel Tenenbaum because, the cartel claims, he illegally downloaded a bunch of songs some time ago. Fair enough. What makes his case different from all the others is that his defense is the subject of a for-credit class at Harvard Law School, overseen by one Prof. Charles Nesson. The students in the class, the ones profiled by Ars Technica today, draw up legal arguments as to why the RIAA has gone overboard in its pursuit of damages, that the RIAA is clearly not acting here to “educate” would-be music pirates, and so on. The students are trying to clear Tenebaum’s good name, while drawing attention to the RIAA’s heavy handed tactics. To that end, the students are trying to convince the presiding judge to allow them to broadcast the trial online; the RIAA object to this.

(If there’s one thing in the profile that annoyed me, it’s this line: “While arguments may be the key issue in court, the students haven’t been content to make their case only to the judge. Harvard Law student Debbie Rosenbaum is heading up media relations, and she’s doing a shockingly effective job.” Then it goes on to describe how she’s set up a Twitter feed and a blog. My concern: what is so shocking about a Twitter feed and a blog? The Blitz, now that was shocking.)

You’ll note that the law students aren’t trying fight “The Man” or anything, but rather are trying to seek justice, which is sort of novel.

So, again, if you’ve got a few minutes today you’d do well to read the whole profile. It’s a better use of your time than, say, playing one of those silly Flash games that are so popular.

Not too long ago it looked like British music pirates—a fine name for a band—were facing expulsion from the Internet. Not anymore. Despite “serious legislative intent,” the British Government will not pursue the plan. Hooray, I guess.

The idea behind the proposed legislation was to scare the British public into kicking their piracy habit. “Downloading music illegally? Cool, have fun not being able to use the Internet ever again.” Apparently this scenario—banning folks—isn’t exactly legal, or, at least, isn’t clearly legally. Rights and the like, I suspect. Besides, the legislation certainly sounded as if it were written, from top to bottom, by the BPI.

In any event, the Government will release a report on Thursday re: piracy and the like.

Anyone else tired of RIAA/BPI/OMGPIRACY stories? It’s like, we get it already. Let’s talk about ponies and happy things instead.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, sort of an international version of the beloved RIAA, has released its 2008 annual report. As you might guess, one of the main themes of the report (you can download the 30-page PDF here; a smaller 6-page summary is here) is piracy. How to combat it, how to educate the public that it’s ruining the business, etc. Let’s look at some of the claims, shall we?

The key bullet point that a number of news organizations have singled out is this:

The music industry’s challenge is to generate commercial value in an environment dominated by the availability of unlicensed, free music. IFPI estimates over 40 billion files were illegally file-shared in 2008, giving a piracy rate of around 95%.

So if we’re to take this at face value, then piracy accounts for 95 percent of all music downloads. (Music downloads, the report also notes, now account for 20 percent of all music sales, to the tune of $3.7 billion.) I’m of the opinion that there’s no way to accurately track the amount illegal downloads. How do they track things like IRC, Usenet, the random MP3-sharing blog, etc. It seems impossible.

I won’t condemn the entire report; that would be daft. There’s a lot of talk about how the music business is trying to figure out this technology thing, and that’s a good thing. Nokia’s Comes With Music scheme is singled out as an example of the music industry trying to get with the times. MySpace Music also gets a shout out in the report.

One thing that I will complain about:

Single track downloads, up 24% in 2008 to 1.4 billion units globally, continue to
drive the online market, but digital albums are also growing steadily (up 36%). The top selling single of 2008 was Lil Wayne’s Lollipop.

Really, “Lollipop”? I can’t stand Lil Wayne’s style and his stupid high-pitched voice. So that’s disappointing. That’s Lil Wayne up there, in case you’re wondering.

via The Beeb

We applauded, in a non-literaly sense, the RIAA’s decision to stop with its willy nilly John Doe lawsuits. We applaud today, also in a non-literal sense, the RIAA’s decision to drop MediaSentry, the busybody firm that caught music pirates “red handed.”

The drop actually happened several months ago, which shows how secretive and sinister the RIAA truly is. ::cough::

With MediaSentry, which was a business built around—and here’s the genius part—downloading songs from your share folder, then using that transaction as evidence of your malfeasance, now out of the picture, the RIAA has turned to DtecNet Software, which is based in Denmark.

Curiously, the RIAA hasn’t said why it dropped MediaDefender. Let’s speculate recklessly, then!

The RIAA’s new scheme to fight music piracy doesn’t sit well with small ISPs. Under the plan, rather than file lawsuit after lawsuit against John and Jane Doe, who may not even exist, the RIAA wants ISPs to cooperate with it by, ultimately, cutting people off from the Internet. That’s not going to happen easily.

Take Bayou Internet and Communications, a small, Louisiana-based ISP. Let’s say one of its users download/upload an RIAA-protected song from Gnutella or BitTorrent. The RIAA will send it a letter, with scant evidence—do you know how easy it is to spoof an IP address?—demanding that the user be warned. There’s a few problems with this scenario. One, again, what actual proof does the RIAA (and those it contracts to find alleged offenders) that this guy downloaded anything? Maybe he downloaded a plain text file called “Beyonce – Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).mp3” just to be a nuisance. Now you want the small ISP to track this guy down, for free? Matching an IP address to a person takes time, which, if cartoons have taught us anything, equals money.

It’s like, why should the (small) ISP be the RIAA’s secret police force? Let the RIAA do its own dirty work (if it must). And the RIAA wants, as an ultimate punishment, for the ISP to kick the offending customers off the Internet? Ha! That’s money out of the ISP’s pocket, money it cannot afford to lose. Since the ISP is merely a road—what travels down its path is none of its business—why should it be penalized for the alleged misdeeds of its customers?

And then we’re back to square one: how do you effectively combat music piracy?

The RIAA has decided to stop filing pointless lawsuits against John and Jane Doe for alleged copyright infringement. Rather, the bullying cartel will work with ISPs to get you kids to stop downloading Fallout Boy, the All American Rejects and other self-described popular music.

From now on it’ll work like this. The RIAA sees that you’re uploading (“seeding” in BitTorrent parlance) 808s and Heartbreak and will send a letter to your ISP. Your ISP, then, will notify you that you’re on the RIAA’s radar, and that you’re to knock it off, or else. Depending on the ISP, you’ll be given a number of warnings, which could be accompanied by bandwidth throttling, before having your connection terminated.

The RIAA won’t say which ISPs have agreed to its new scheme.

Meanwhile, decent, hard-working people are losing their jobs left and right as a result of Wall Street’s unfettered money orgy; good luck getting sympathy from these people. But go ahead, RIAA, keep pretending that some 9th grade girl seeding Brittney Spears’ Circus is putting the your industry in the pour house.

Go ahead and read this court transcript. It’s a 35-page PDF of the London-Sire Records. Does 1-4 copyright infringement case. It’s the same song and dance you’re all familiar with: RIAA catches someone downloading a song, which entitles it to thousands upon thousands of dollars in remuneration. Only this time, the presiding judge, Nancy Gertner of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, actually recognizes the complete absurdity of suing these people so much money for downloading music. Some highlights:

• “There’s a huge imbalance in these cases. The record companies are represented by large law firms with substantial resources. The law is also overwhelmingly on their side.”

• “I can’t say this is a situation that is a goof situation or a fair situation, it is , however, the situation.”

• “You know, it seems to me that counsel representing the record companies have an ethical obligation to fully understand that are fighting people without lawyers, to fully understand that, more than just how do we serve them, but just to understand that the formalities of this are basically bankrupting people, and that it’s terribly critical that you stop it…”

• “…that it was his son who did the downloading and his son has no assets, you’re getting water from a stone. What are you pursuing here?”

The whole thing is pretty tremendous.

Here’s what I don’t understand about all of this. Let’s say the RIAA catches me downloading a song. All of a sudden I owe them several thousand dollars for copyright infringement, right? Now, let’s say I walk into Best Buy and physically steal a copy of an album. Do I owe the RIAA thousands of dollars in that scenario? Because if copyright infringement=theft and theft=small fine, why is the RIAA suing these people for thousands of dollars? How does that make sense?

via Slashdot

How much does it cost to monitor college students’ anti-American P2P activities? A whole lot, and that’s money colleges could be spending on, I don’t know, education.

This chart breaks down the cost of complying with, specifically, the new provisions of the Higher Education Act of 2008. That law, which the RIAA and MPAA were able to lobby their way into, requires colleges try to stem the spread of illegal P2P downloads on campus. The tools to police what students are up to exist—ipaudit is one that comes to mind—but is it really the business of colleges, realm of higher learning, to snoop on what their students are up to? Why not live and let live, punishing violations as they occur rather than spending all day playing cyber nanny?

One comment at Inside Higher Ed goes into the issue of government-sponsored censorship and prior restraint (in a sense), since the law applies to state schools as while as private schools. That’s an issue for another day, I think.

But no, they’ve waited until the month before the man is out of office to create yet another executive position to mandate policy, probably with the advisement of a battalion of industry lawyers. Not only that, but they’ve stiffened penalties for piracy — home-grown piracy by ones and twos, not the organized piracy of Asia where factories pump out knockoffs by the million. “Counterfeiting and piracy costs the United States nearly $250 billion annually,” says the Chamber of Commerce. As if the album-rippers of the United Mom’s Basements of America have that kind of pull!
[image from an old Fark Photoshop contest]

Most people who get threatened by the RIAA with a lawsuit opt to settle out of court. Maybe they should go to trial instead. Jammie Thomas of Minnesota did just that. She was found guilty of sharing 24 music files over the Kazaa network and ordered to pay $222,000 – that’s $9,250 per track. The decision came from a federal jury last year and marked the one and only trial win for the RIAA.

Well, yesterday the case was declared a mistrial as federal judge Michael Davis (Duluth, MN) admitted “that he may have committed a ‘manifest error of the law’,” according to Wired. The case will eventually be retried using different rules for what’s acceptable as evidence of copyright infringement.

In the initial trial, the fact that Thomas simply had music files inside of her Kazaa shared folder constituted evidence of copyright violation. Under the new trial, it must be proved that people actually downloaded those tracks. Unfortunately for Thomas, some of the RIAA’s detectives actually downloaded some of the songs out of her shared music folder.

Now the question becomes; if the RIAA itself downloads people’s shared music, does that count as unauthorized distribution? Only one other federal judge has ever ruled that yes, it does. The RIAA’s position is “that it shouldn’t have to provide proof of an actual transfer – because it’s impossible,” according to Wired. So the detectives take screenshots of the person’s folder and download the tracks themselves in order to prove that a transfer has indeed taken place.