STOCKHOLM, Sweden – According to a published report on TorrentFreak.com, prosecutor Hakan Roswal announced this week that he plans to file copyright-infringement charges against five people associated with The Pirate cialis in usa Bay before Jan. 31, 2008.

Officials from The Pirate Bay, which bills itself as "the world's largest torrent tracker," said they are confident that Roswal's plans will not be successful. However, they said, they are ready to move to another country if necessary.

The report states that only two people associated with The Pirate Bay have been identified: co-founder Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrom, former CEO of Rix Telecom, which at one time provided bandwidth to the site.

According to TorrentFreak.com, The Pirate Bay officials contend that they run a search engine and do not store any copyrighted material on their servers. The site has come under fire from law-enforcement agencies seeking to shut down its trading of copyrighted material, which is illegal in several countries.

Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay's offices in May 2006, taking the site offline for three days. The site returned after relocating to the Netherlands. The offices since have moved back to Sweden.

Earlier this week, The Pirate Bay announced plans to develop its own software after BitTorrent Inc., whose technology the site currently uses, announced that it was making deals with mainstream content providers.

The site typically has more than 1.5 million daily visitors.

Publish Date: November 11, 2007

• It can’t identify 16 of the 17 students without conducting interviews or doing forensic investigations, according to Dale Smith, director of network services. Nine of the students accessed a P2P net from the school’s wireless network. Smith testified that he can’t determine “whether the content was accessed by the individual assigned that user name or by someone else using the computer associated with the user name.”
• More importantly, the AG’s office says the RIAA is engaging in unethical behavior towards the court. Despite the fact that deputy AG Randolph Geller told RIAA counsel Katheryn Coggon that the school would preserve all the relevant data, the RIAA said in its subpoena request that:

there was a “very real danger the ISP will not long preserve” the data it wanted.

Having just taken the California Bar’s professional responsibility exam I can tell you such a misrepresentation could result in disciplinary action, IMO.

Since it would take so much effort to ID the students, the RIAA is essentially shifting its own investigatory burden onto the state.

“In short, the subpoena requires the University to create discoverable material to assist Plaintiffs in their litigation rather than merely disclose existing documents,” argues the school, citing case law that indicates that non-parties “are not required to create documents that do not exist, simply for the purposes of discovery.”

Critically, says the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the school argues that the DMCA is the appropriate procedure for the RIAA to identify John Does.

The last argument, if accepted by the court, could radically change the nature of the RIAA’s 4-year litigation campaign against music fans. Currently, the recording industry’s strategy relies on pressuring universities into handing over student targets, either by having the university deliver “pre-litigation settlement letters” to students or, failing that, forcing universities to respond to subpoenas obtained after filing a “John Doe” lawsuit. If these avenues are blocked, the recording industry would have to undertake its own investigatory efforts to determine who to sue.

Whether the university wins or loses its effort, it’s nice to see it standing up on behalf of its students, rather than simply giving in to recording industry demands.

Posted by Ed Bott @ 4:43 pm

October 12th, 2007

The response so far to my digital media ethics poll has been overwhelming. More than 7,500 votes have been cast so far, with nearly 500 comments posted in the Talkback sections for the introductory post and the poll itself. I plan to keep the voting open at least through the end of the weekend. So if you haven’t voted yet, do it soon.

Here’s a summary of the results so far, followed by some preliminary analysis:

• The overwhelming majority (96%) think that buying a CD and making a copy for personal use is OK. But 40% think that some types of copies are more acceptable than others. I’m sifting through the comments to see if I can refine that conclusion. Vote or see detailed results here.
• More than four out of five respondents so far think it’s wrong to rip a CD to your hard drive and then sell the original CD. More people approve of simple CD sharing among friends. I’m struck, though, by a significant gap in perceptions: A total of 32% of respondents think it’s always or sometimes OK to buy a CD and make a copy to give to a friend. But 41% think it’s OK to borrow a friend’s CD and rip it to your hard drive. I’m not sure I see the distinction. Do you? Vote or see detailed cheapest price for cialis font-family: Verdana”>results here. Then add your comment in the Talkback section.
• A large majority (82%) believe that stripping copy protection (DRM) from purchased music files is perfectly OK. On the other hand, three out of four readers think it’s wrong to copy a rented DVD. Vote or see detailed results here.
• And finally, 75% of you think it’s just fine to download a torrent of a recorded TV show from a broadcast network, but a significant percentage (34-42%) think the rules should be different for premium services like HBO or for programs that are available through authorized channels. Vote or see detailed results here.

The entertainment industry wants you to believe that making a copy of a music CD or a DVD for a friend is digital shoplifting (or, in their cringe-worthy neologism, “songlifting”). Based on the preliminary results of this poll, with more than 40% of respondents giving a thumbs-up to some forms of casual copying among friends, the RIAA is clearly losing that battle of ideas. And the technically savvy ZDNet readership might be more sympathetic to the RIAA’s position than the rest of the market; a 2006 Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg News survey found that 69% of the teenagers they polled think it’s not just right but it’s legal to copy a CD from a friend.

I’ll have some more thoughts on why the entertainment industry has done such a crappy job of coping with the analog-to-digital conversion next week, with a much more detailed look at this poll’s final results and your comments.

Pasted from <http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=317&tag=nl.e539>

September 22, 2007

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For years now, EFF has been arguing against the strongarm tactics of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and its vain attempt to stop filesharing by dragging music fans into court. At the same time, we’ve also been tirelessly promoting the idea of Voluntary Collective Licensing (VCL) as a solution that could give fans what they want, while ensuring that musicians get paid. Lately, these formerly fringe ideas are garnering broader respect after a few mainstream stories about the RIAA lawsuits and VCL.

Take the excellent series on the RIAA lawsuits from American Public Media's Marketplace (heard on NPR stations around the country). While responsibly airing perspectives from several major players, the show nevertheless presents an unflattering portrait of the music industry’s tactics. RIAA lawsuit victim Tanya Anderson, EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred Von Lohmann and RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol are each featured in extensive interviews, and the simple facts of the story are allowed to speak for themselves. The RIAA’s effort to intimidate fans by randomly targeting a few individuals is clearly futile, and unnecessarily punitive.

Have a listen to all three shows: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3.

Meanwhile, VCL schemes are beginning to attract interest from some influential music industry players. The new co-chief executive of Columbia Records, Rick Rubin, has been talking about subscription-based music services. “You would subscribe to music," Rubin told the New York Times Magazine. "You'd pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you'd like. In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone, from your computer, from your television. Anywhere.” And Rubin isn’t the only one. Music industry insider and gadfly Bob Lefsetz has recently been talking up VCLs as well.

In addition, Universal Music Group has reportedly been circulating a proposal for a subscription service under the name "TotalMusic." Details are vague, but would likely include an agreement between Universal and ISPs that would require all of the ISP’s subscribers to opt in, in which case subscribers’ service rates would increase whether they downloaded Universal’s music or not. An improvement to this plan would be to allow people to opt in on an individual basis — this would generate immediate cash flow, and demonstrate the public interest in this sort of service.

Clearly, the music industry is awakening to reasonable, immediate solutions that can bring us all more music, at better quality, while generating more money for artists and their labels. The only question is how long the music industry will delay the inevitable.

Pasted from <http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005456.php>