RIAA

[Vacant Horizon]

maybe album sales are decreasing because most music sucks. it never ceases to amaze me how 'smart business men' are so damn stupid. the industry is gonna have to shrink and respond to demand. obviously, trying to create the market (by spending millions on trying to convince people to get into the shit they peddle) is backfiring on them.

[explodo]

Doesn't this kind of violate net neutrality? Slowing down internet access to some users who are suspected of sharing music?

[Analogman]

I wonder what this new plan is going to do to live show trading via Bit Torrent.

[Rusty Shackleford]

I guess I'm not sure where RIAA gets its information on who's uploading copyrighted music. I share plenty of stuff on BitTorrent, but it's all live stuff I've pulled from DIME, etc., which should be off-limits to RIAA.

 

I would think that they're going after LimeWire users and people who put copyrighted stuff up on Pirate Bay, etc. One hopes that this particular effort will not affect legitimate trading of live shows on BitTorrent at all.

[Analogman]

I think I have asked that question before - how do they tell the difference? Unless - as you say, they are going by the website where the files come from. I suppose for that to be true, the RIAA would have to understand what Dime A Dozen is, and other such places.

 

Another article:

 

No more lawsuits: ISPs to work with RIAA, cut off P2P users

 

In a stunning turn of events, the US music industry has ceased its long-time litigation strategy of suing individual P2P file-swappers. Instead, with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo acting as a broker, the RIAA has signed voluntary "graduated response" agreements with major Internet service providers. Those currently on the receiving end of an RIAA lawsuit, though, will have to see it through to the (very) bitter end.

 

The Wall Street Journal (subscription) broke the story, and Ars has confirmed all details given in the piece.

Europe-style graduated responses

 

While the agreement itself comes as a surprise after years of lawsuits that have numbered in the tens of thousands, the contours of the deal remain comfortably familiar. Europe is leading the way in hashing out graduated response programs, and the RIAA plan sounds like a mix of the current British and French approaches to the issues.

 

As in Britain, the deal is voluntary, has no official government enforcement, and will not have ISPs passing user information on to the RIAA. Instead, the RIAA notifies ISPs about suspected infringement using IP addresses; the ISP then privately looks up its subscriber information and forwards a notice telling the person to stop.

 

But, as in France, penalties are coming (the voluntary UK scheme is currently "notification only"). They remain undefined at the moment, though the RIAA confirms to Ars that they will include account suspension for users who continue to share files illegally.

 

The key difference between Europe and the US is the lack of government pressure. New York Attorney General Cuomo did make it clear to the music industry that the lawsuits have been unhelpful and that he hoped to see a different approach, but nothing like the government pressure to cut a deal that we have seen in the UK or France has been mooted here.

 

Which leads to the obvious question: what do ISPs get out of the deal? They aren't under any serious pressure to act on this if they don't believe it to be in the interests of their companies or subscribers, but the RIAA makes clear that several leading ISPs are already on board. But they do get a tremendous goodie bag under the Christmas tree: congestion relief.

 

ISPs have been worried about P2P traffic, especially on access networks (and especially on upstream access networks in cable systems), but the "net neutrality" debate and the Comcast P2P case at the FCC have limited the options that American ISPs can take. The solution many appeared to settle on was nondiscriminatory bandwidth capping; that is, do whatever you want with your connection, use any protocol or application, but you only get a certain amount of monthly capacity.

 

Suddenly, ISPs gain a tremendous new tool. One study in the UK showed that most people sharing music would stop when made aware that their activity was being tracked and that they were not, in fact, anonymous. Should that hold true in the US, ISPs would presumably see massive decreases in P2P traffic. The customer notifications can be blasted out by e-mail, making the whole process quick and easy for ISPs. As is usual for these sorts of schemes, questions still remain about what sorts of judicial processes will be in place to contest notifications and penalties, and what happens to a household Internet connection when Dad finds his access canceled even though he's never shared a file in his life?

The end of lawsuits

 

For now, though, the graduated response program will have one immediate effect. The file-sharing lawsuits will largely come to a halt, though the RIAA tells us it reserves the right to go after people who continue to ignore the notifications. That means colleges and universities no longer have to worry about "pre-litigation notices" and a stream of subpoenas seeking student info, dead grandmothers and kids in housing projects won't be hit up for $4,000 settlements, and an unbelievably brutal public relations disaster will basically come to an end.

 

As for current cases, tough luck; the RIAA intends to see them through. But what about Jammie Thomas, the single mother in Minnesota who found herself the most public face of the RIAA litigation campaign after the first full trial for illicit file-swapping? Thomas' trial is actually over, and the judge has vacated the original decision. The RIAA is seeking to have that original verdict restored, but if that fails, the RIAA will have to prosecute Thomas all over again in order to squeeze any cash out of the handful of songs she was accused of sharing.

 

Would they do it? An RIAA spokesperson tells us, "If the appeal is granted and an appeals court agrees with the jury in the original trial, she'll continue to be held liable." Reading between the lines, we might expect the case to go away if that original verdict is not reinstated.

A step in a better direction

 

News about the entire program will be controversial, but we think it's a big step in a better direction. The lawsuit campaign largely ends. Initial notifications about file-swapping will be purely informative, not punitive. The move does not introduce ISP filtering (notifications are generated by the RIAA), and neither does it pass user information from ISPs back to the music industry. It should eventually remove most of the reasons ISPs have trotted out to defend discriminatory traffic shaping. The Interwebs may get a bit faster. Interesting new music services that the RIAA has recently allowed, like Last.fm and the Amazon DRM-free music store, mean that more legal choices are available as a "carrot" to complement the new "stick."

 

The real question here is twofold. First, how will file-swappers respond? No doubt plenty will dig in, encrypt everything, switch to obscure protocols, or start using direct download services. A pretty tremendous percentage of casual users, though, will curtail their activity after receiving their first notice, especially once the ISP sanctions are finalized.

 

Second, how will other industries respond? Music is traded freely on the Internet, but in terms of volume, video content is the real target. The movie business will want in on the arrangement. After that, e-book vendors might demand ISP assistance, and so will the makers of crochet patterns (which turn out to be traded surprisingly often online without permission).

 

So long as two conditions are met, though

[Analogman]

Google Launches ISP Throttling Detector

 

 

and

 

Comcast Labels Innocent Customer a Movie Pirate

Written by Ernesto on January 30, 2009

 

Comcast doesn

[mjpuczko]

riaa laying off 100+ people

 

http://i.gizmodo.com/5162747/riaa-layoffs-...il-organization

[cryptique]

riaa laying off 100+ people

 

http://i.gizmodo.com/5162747/riaa-layoffs-...il-organization

For everyone except those being laid off, this is good news.

[Spawn's dad]

(CNN) -- A federal jury Thursday found a 32-year-old Minnesota woman guilty of illegally downloading music from the Internet and fined her $80,000 each -- a total of $1.9 million -- for 24 songs.

 

Illegal downloads of musical files will cost a Minnesota woman $1.9 million, a jury has decided.

 

Jammie Thomas-Rasset's case was the first such copyright infringement case to go to trial in the United States, her attorney said.

 

Attorney Joe Sibley said that his client was shocked at fine, noting that the price tag on the songs she downloaded was 99 cents.

 

She plans to appeal, he said.

 

Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America, said the RIIA was "pleased that the jury agreed with the evidence and found the defendant liable."

 

"We appreciate the jury's service and that they take this as seriously as we do," she said.

 

Thomas-Rasset downloaded work by artists such as No Doubt, Linkin Park, Gloria Estefan and Sheryl Crow.

 

The fines jumped considerably from the first trial, which granted just $220,000 to the recording companies.

 

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/06/18/minnesota.music.download.fine/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

[uncool2pillow]

I'm really surprised a jury would fine $80,000 per song. I wonder what the demographic make up of that jury was. My guess is avg. age is at least 60.