Consumer groups, electronics companies and record labels squared off Wednesday in the first full public airing of proposals for antipiracy protections for digital radio networks.

Digital radio, which transforms traditional over-the-air broadcasts into the same kind of bits and bytes used in Internet transmissions, promises to boost the audio quality of FM signals to that of a CD. But it also holds out the promise of transforming radio listening in the same way that TiVo hard drive-based recorders have changed TV--by providing powerful recording and playback options.

The new medium has attracted the attention of the Federal Communications Commission, which recently began a proceeding that could end up laying out content protection rules and other regulations for it.

On Wednesday, the Recording Industry Association of America asked the FCC for new antipiracy protections that would prevent listeners from archiving songs without paying for them--and from trading recorded songs online. The RIAA and musicians' trade groups are worried that consumers might one day forgo buying albums or songs from iTunes-like services in favor of recording CD-quality songs off digital radio services.

"We know this (technology) will be attractive to consumers," RIAA Chief Executive Officer Mitch Bainwol said. "For us, it's the challenge that peer-to-peer introduces but made more complex by the fact that there are no viruses, there is no spyware or other file-sharing (problems)."

The debate is shaping up to resemble the earlier discussion around digital television technology, which similarly had movie studios worried that their products would be recorded and traded online. Both debates have pitted powerful forces against each other in Washington, D.C., and have given content companies a key role in helping shape the future of a nascent technological medium.

In digital radio, the RIAA would like to see music transmissions encrypted so that only authorized receivers that follow content protection rules could play the songs. It would also like to see a "flag" inserted in a song's data stream to prevent any recordings made from being transmitted online.

The recording industry is testing technology that would prevent consumers from making copies of CD "burns," a piracy defense that could put some significant new restrictions on legally purchased music.

Tools under review by the major labels would limit the number of backups that could be made from ordinary compact discs and prevent copied, or "burned," versions from being used to create further copies, according to Macrovision and SunnComm International, rivals that are developing competing versions of the digital rights management (DRM) software.

SunnComm said a version of its new "secure burning" technology is already being tested by BMG Music Group, the world's fifth-largest record label and the most aggressive to date in pushing CD copy protection schemes in the United States. Macrovision's version is expected to be ready in the next few months.

If implemented widely, the new technology would mark a substantial change in the way ordinary people can use purchased music, possibly alienating some customers, analysts said. Given the costs of piracy, however, the labels are moving ahead cautiously in the hope of striking on a formula that works.

"There is a fine (DRM) balance that nobody has struck, especially with physical CDs," said Mike McGuire, an analyst with the GartnerG2 research group. "If there's somebody who's making 25 copies for the world and finds they can't do that, then few people will probably complain. But if someone finds they can't make a copy for their kid so he can play it in the car, you're going to have a lot of people returning broken CDs."

The trials come as record labels seek to tighten copying restrictions on CDs, a market worth more than $11.2 billion in the United States in 2003. The labels have attributed recent, significant slides in retail CD sales in part to competition from home copying, as well as online file swapping.

Record labels are seeking a way to let consumers make a limited number of copies of their music--enough for a car, a vacation home and a friend, for example--without allowing for uncontrolled duplication. Under the current system, each copied CD can itself lead to an unlimited number of additional copies, cutting substantially into sales, they say.

Consumer advocates, meanwhile, have protested against abridgments of today's unlimited freedom to copy, remix or sample from music CDs.

Record labels in the United States have been sensitive to these consumer concerns, worrying particularly about earlier versions of copy-protection technology that had difficulty playing in nontraditional CD players such as game consoles or car stereos. They've released many protected CDs overseas, but only a small number in the United States and United Kingdom, where perceived opposition has been the highest.

The new plan to lock down burns could reignite a controversy that's smoldered in the United States since the independent release of country artist Charley Pride's album in 2002 incorporated SunnComm's early copyproofing technology, prompting at least one consumer lawsuit.

The major labels are looking at increasing the price of iTunes Music Store downloads to as much as $2.49 – with experts predicting the move could kill the service.

The US record industry believe iTunes song are too cheap, and the five top labels (Universal Music Group, EMI, BMG, Sony and Warner Music) are discussing a price hike ranging from $1.25 to $2.49 per song.

The Washington Square News notes: "At that price, downloading music will become far more expensive than buying CDs, which would practically destroy the online music market.

"This is counter to everything the record companies should be doing. If anything, they should be cutting prices to make it more attractive to download music legally. Instead, this move will push online music junkies back into the world of file sharing. After all, who wants to pay more for less?

"If the price hike happens it would be more logical to buy a CD. You might pay a couple bucks more, but that extra money buys pretty packaging, better sound quality, often some sort of video extra and, significantly, use unrestricted by Digital Rights Management.

"The record industry doesn't understand that the reason people flocked to free downloading services is because music simply costs too much."

Matching their fortitude of January's 500+ lawsuits, the RIAA strikes again with an astounding 532 lawsuits against alledged music pirates. Unlike the initial round of lawsuits launched in mid 2003, these lawsuits are considered "John Doe" lawsuits.

Back in June 2003, the RIAA was able to use the mighty DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) to subpoena an ISP to divulge the personal information of a subscriber. While most ISPs folded like a cheap suitcase under the pressure, a few held on and fought, such as the communications giant Verizon.

Eventually, the RIAA lost the right to force ISPs to divulge personal information when the US Court of Appeals ruled against the RIAA. Since that time the RIAA has been forced to use "John Doe" lawsuits against alleged file-traders.

Basically, this is the way a "John Doe" lawsuit works. The RIAA files the lawsuit, however instead of an actual name, they use an IP address. Through a laborious legal process the RIAA will be able subpoena an ISP to divulge suspected music pirates personal information. According to the RIAA, their "John Doe" campaign is proceeding successfully.

"The first round of ''John Doe'' litigations filed in January is proceeding along. All four courts in that round have granted the record companies’ preliminary request to issue subpoenas to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to learn the identity of illegal file sharers. The record companies plan to send letters to identified individuals offering to settle with them before litigation continues any further. If an illegal file sharer rejects the settlement overture, the record companies will proceed with litigation against that individual."

This time around, the RIAA is concentrating more heavily on college campuses, as 89 individuals are targeted.

"A total of 532 illegal file sharers were included in today’s action, including 89 individuals who were using university networks to illegally distribute copyrighted sound recordings on peer-to-peer services. The university networks used for this illegal activity include schools in Arizona, California, Colorado, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Washington, D.C., and Wisconsin. Lawsuits against 443 illegal file sharers using commercial ISPs were brought in California, Colorado, Missouri, Texas and Virginia. Like the lawsuits filed earlier this year, the RIAA is again utilizing the "John Doe" litigation process - which is used to sue defendants whose names are not known."

It's probably not the first time that record company executives have been likened to Al Capone, but this time a judge might have to agree or disagree.

A New Jersey woman, one of the hundreds of people accused of copyright infringement by the Recording Industry Association of America, has countersued the big record labels, charging them with extortion and violations of the federal antiracketeering act.

"This scare tactic has caused a vast amount of settlements from individuals who feared fighting such a large institution and feel victim to these actions and felt forced to provide funds to settle these actions instead of fighting," Scimeca's attorney, Bart Lombardo, wrote in documents filed with a New Jersey federal court. "These types of scare tactics are not permissible and amount to extortion."

Scimeca is one of a growing number of people fighting the record industry's copyright infringement campaign against file-swappers, although few have used such creative legal strategies.

According to the RIAA, which filed its latest round of lawsuits against 531 as-yet-anonymous individuals on Tuesday, it has settled with 381 people, including some who had not yet actually had suits filed against them yet. A total of nearly 1,500 people have been sued so far.

The industry group says that "a handful" of people have countersued, using a variety of claims.

"If someone prefers not to settle, they of course have the opportunity to raise their objections in court," an RIAA representative said. "We stand by our claims."

Few if any of the cases appear to have progressed far, however. The first RIAA lawsuits against individuals were filed more than five months ago, although the majority of people targeted have been part of the "John Doe" campaigns against anonymous individuals this year.

Several individuals and companies have started by fighting the RIAA attempts to identify music swappers though their Internet service providers (ISPs).

The most prominent, known by the alleged file-swapper's screen name "Nycfashiongirl," resulted in at least a temporary victory for the computer user. A Washington, D.C., court ruled in December that the RIAA's initial legal process for subpoenaing ISP subscriber identities before filing lawsuits was illegal. Because "Nycfashiongirl" had been targeted under this process, the RIAA dropped its request for her identity.

However, that may have provided only a temporary reprieve. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that is closely following the RIAA's campaign, the Internet address used by "Nycfashiongirl" was included in the batch of lawsuits filed on Tuesday against anonymous individuals, raising the likelihood that she will be drawn back into the courts.

Separate attempts to fight subpoenas are ongoing in North Carolina and St. Louis, where the American Civil Liberties Union and ISP Charter Communications are respectively challenging the RIAA's information requests.

In San Francisco, computer user Raymond Maalouf has taken the first steps toward fighting the RIAA's suits. His daughters were the ones that used Kazaa to download music, and one of them even wound up in last month's Super Bowl advertisement for Pepsi's iTunes promotion, which featured a handful of teens caught in the RIAA dragnet.

In documents filed with San Francisco courts, Maalouf's attorneys noted that downloading through Kazaa was openly discussed at Maalouf's daughter's school by teachers, and they downloaded songs used in classes. That should be a protected fair use of the music, the attorneys said.

At a status conference held in San Francisco early in February, Maalouf's case was just one of five RIAA lawsuits moving through the courts together, attorney Ted Parker said. However, several of those others involved defendants who appeared close to settlement, he added.

Even RIAA critics look at Scimeca's racketeering-based countersuit as a long shot. But it's worth trying, they say.

"It is the first I've heard of anyone attempting that," said EFF legal director Cindy Cohn. "I guess that is a silver lining of the fact that the RIAA is suing so many people, that there are a lot of lawyers trying to figure out ways to protect folks."

UPDATE:Music Industry Piracy Investigations this morning raided the offices of P2P companies Sharman Networks and Brilliant Digital Entertainment, along with the homes of key executives and several ISPs.

MIPI obtained an Anton Pilar order - which allows a copyright holder to enter a premises to search for and seize material that breaches copyright without alerting the target through court proceedings – yesterday from Justice Murray Wilcox, and began raiding premises in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria this morning searching for documents and electronic evidence to support its case against the peer-to-peer companies.

In addition to the offices of Sharman Networks and Brilliant Digital Entertainment (BDE), MIPI raided the residences of Sharman Networks’ CEO Nikki Hemming, Brilliant Digital Entertainment Chief Executive Officer and President Kevin Burmeister and Phil Morle, Director of Technology at Sharman Networks. Monash University, the University of Queensland and the University of New South Wales were also raided, as well as four ISPs including Telstra.

"Telstra lawyers are presently working with lawyers from the record labels in order to determine exactly what information is being sought under the terms of the order," Telstra spokesman Warwick Ponder told ZDNet Australia . "We have not been asked for and will not provide any BigPond subscriber information."

"Telstra has made it very clear for a long time now that it does not support copyright infringement or any other illegal activity," said Ponder. "At the same time Telstra clearly respects its obligation to protect customers information and privacy under the Telecommunication Act and Privacy Act under Federal law."

MIPI general manager Michael Speck told ZDNet Australia the order was specifically targeted at the operators of the Kazaa network. "This is not about individuals, this is about the big fish," said Speck. "This is a signal that Internet music piracy is finished in Australia." The ISPs and Universities were raided to gain evidence about the operators of the Kazaa network.

The investigation into the Kazaa network has been ongoing for six months, and was precipitated by a significant change in the physical and technical structure of Sharman Networks, according to Speck. "The Kazaa operation infringes copyright within the terms of the Australian Copyright Act," he said.

"This action appears to be an extraordinary waste of time, money and resources going over legal ground that has been well and truly covered in the US and Dutch Courts over the past 18 months," said Sharman Networks in a statement. "This is a knee-jerk reaction by the recording industry to discredit Sharman Networks and the Kazaa software, following a number of recent court decisions around the world that have ruled against the entertainment industry’s agenda to stamp out peer-to-peer technology."

Sharman Networks became a target for the music industry when it purchased the Kazaa peer-to-peer file-sharing technology from its Dutch creators Kazaa BV in 2002. It has had a long relationship with BDE, and in 2002 had to defend against a backlash when it was revealed spyware had been included with the Kazaa software. BDE subsidiary Altnet was later formed and offered to pay people for hosting content on the Kazaa network.

"Kazaa operators know the difference and make the decision as to whether they facilitate legitimate or illegitimate downloads," said Speck. "It's very clear they are facilitating and authorising global copyright infringement."

Sharman disagreed, claiming it bought the Kazaa software "with the express purpose of building it into a legitimate channel for the distribution of licensed, copyright protected content which in turn financially benefits artists".

"There is no doubt this is a cynical attempt by the industry to disrupt our business, regain lost momentum, and garner publicity," said Sharman. "The assertions by plaintiffs are hackneyed and worn out. It is a gross misrepresentation of Sharman’s business to suggest that the company in any way facilitates or encourages copyright infringement."

Monash University and the University of Queensland have challenged the order, and the arguments will be heard before Justice Wilcox at 3.30 pm today.

Sharman Networks, Australian subsidiary LEF Interactive and BDE will face the record company lawyers before Justice Wilcox on Tuesday.

According to MIPI, there are around three million users simultaneously online and connected to the Kazaa network at any one time sharing around 573 million files. Over 850,000 tracks are made available by over 2,500 Australian users. If each downloaded track was purchased for US$0.99 the total would be over US$2 billion per month globally.

The Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) has launched a new campaign against DJs in an attempt to control copyright infringement.

They have already confiscated $100,000’s worth of mix CDs from independent record stores across the US.

DJ mix CDs, sold in almost every independent record store are on the whole unlicensed and technically illegal to distribute. However, DJs and producers alike often rely upon these illegal mixes in order to gain credibility, and to promote themselves to the general public.

The practice is in fact approved of by most producers who see it as fundamental to the survival of the dance scene - even if it is their tracks that are being copied and played without permission.

This latest attack by the RIAA is therefore hypocritical – they claim that their pursuit of copyright infringement is primarily in the interest of the artist, yet most dance producers actually approve of and rely upon this illegal distribution.

The dance scene relies upon these ‘illegal’ ways to survive, and it seems that the only people who actually care about this particular copyright infringement are not the artists themselves but the record companies – who are only involved in the dance scene for profit.

A U.S. federal court has cleared the way for Kazaa file-sharing software owner Sharman Networks to sue the entertainment industry for copyright infringement, Sharman said on Friday.

Sharman, targeted by studios and record companies because its software is used to trade music and video files, has sought to turn the tables on the industry, accusing it of misusing Kazaa software to invade users' privacy and send corrupt files and threatening messages.

Studios and record companies had asked the court to throw out Sharman's countersuit, but U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson in Los Angeles declined to do so.

Sharman, headquartered on the island nation of Vanuatu in the South Pacific, said it would pursue the case.

A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America said that "the court does not appear to want these claims to proceed at this point. If they ever proceed, Sharman will have a very difficult time providing evidence to support their allegations."

Though it was thought the recent legal victory by Verizon would slow down RIAA lawsuits, apparently that isn't the case. The RIAA today announced they'll be filing 532 new music sharing lawsuits - the largest effort to date. "People should not be confused," says Mitch Glazier, the RIAA's senior vice president for government relations. "Some people think the Verizon case means that you can go ahead and get back on a service and trade files. We're not going to just sit and do no enforcement while the courts are figuring out the Verizon case." Unlike previous suits targeting specific users, the 532 new suits are "John Doe" suits, where IP addresses are cited and the RIAA hopes personal information will be subpoenad later. Check Google News for the latest.

Though no guns were brandished, the bust from a distance looked like classic LAPD, DEA or FBI work, right down to the black "raid" vests the unit members wore. The fact that their yellow stenciled lettering read "RIAA" instead of something from an official law-enforcement agency was lost on 55-year-old parking-lot attendant Ceasar Borrayo.

The Recording Industry Association of America is taking it to the streets.

Even as it suffers setbacks in the courtroom, the RIAA has over the last 18 months built up a national staff of ex-cops to crack down on people making and selling illegal CDs in the hood.

The result has been a growing number of scenes like the one played out in Silver Lake just before Christmas, during an industry blitz to combat music piracy.

Borrayo attends to a parking lot next to the landmark El 7 Mares fish-taco stand on Sunset Boulevard. To supplement his buck-a-car income, he began, in 2003, selling records and videos from a makeshift stand in front of the lot.

In a good week, Borrayo said, he might unload five or 10 albums and a couple DVDs at $5 apiece. Paying a distributor about half that up-front, he thought he’d lucked into a nice side business.

The RIAA saw it differently. Figuring the discs were bootlegs, a four-man RIAA squad descended on his stand a few days before Christmas and persuaded the 4-foot-11 Borrayo to hand over voluntarily a total of 78 discs. It wasn’t a tough sell.

"They said they were police from the recording industry or something, and next time they’d take me away in handcuffs," he said through an interpreter. Borrayo says he has no way of knowing if the records, with titles like Como Te Extraño Vol. IV — Musica de los 70’s y 80’s, are illegal, but he thought better of arguing the point.

The RIAA acknowledges it all — except the notion that its staff presents itself as police. Yes, they may all be ex-P.D. Yes, they wear cop-style clothes and carry official-looking IDs. But if they leave people like Borrayo with the impression that they’re actual law enforcement, that’s a mistake.

"We want to be very clear who we are and what we’re doing," says John Langley, Western regional coordinator for the RIAA Anti-Piracy Unit. "First and foremost, we’re professionals."

Langley, based in Los Alamitos, California, oversees five staff investigators and around 20 contractors who sniff out bootleg discs west of the Rockies. The former Royal Canadian Mountie said his unit’s on-the-streets approach has been a big success, netting more than 100,000 pieces of unauthorized merchandise during the recent Christmas retail blitz.

With all the trappings of a police team, including pink incident reports that, among other things, record a vendor’s height, weight, hair and eye color, the RIAA squad can give those busted the distinct impression they’re tangling with minions of Johnny Law instead of David Geffen. And that raises some potential legal questions.

Contacted for this article, the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union said it needed more information on the practices to know if specific civil liberties were at risk.

But if an anti-piracy team crossed the line between looking like cops and implying or telling vendors that they are cops, the Los Angeles Police Department would take a pretty dim view, said LAPD spokesman Jason Lee.

"I will not say it’s okay to be [selling] illegal stuff," Lee said. "That’s a violation of penal codes.

"But it doesn’t really matter what your status is. If that person feels he was wrongly interrogated or under the false pretense that these people were cops, they should contact their local police station as a victim. We’ll sort it all out."

For its part, the RIAA maintains that the up-close-and-personal techniques are nothing new. RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy says its investigators do not represent themselves as police, and that the incident reports vendors are asked to sign, in which they agree to hand over their discs, explicitly state that the forfeiture is voluntary.

With Verizon's recent success versus the RIAA, other ISP's are returning to court to try their hand. Charter communications is asking a federal appeals court to block the RIAA from requesting file-trader information. According to this Associated Press report, the company also wants the return of private information of some 200 users already turned over to the organization (for whatever use that is). "Just like Verizon, we are a conduit for information," Curt Shaw, Charter's general counsel, said this week. "We don't believe Charter should be subjected to these subpoenas, either."

A federal appeals court on Friday handed a major setback to the record industry's legal strategy of tracking down and suing alleged file swappers.

Reversing a series of decisions in favor of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Washington, D.C., court said copyright law did not allow the group to send out subpoenas asking Internet service providers for the identity of file swappers on their networks. The ruling came in favor of Verizon Communications, the first ISP to challenge the recording industry's actions.

News.context

What's new: A federal appeals court rules against the record industry's use of subpoenas to track down alleged file swappers. Bottom line: The ruling, which focuses narrowly on an unconventional subpoena power, is a blow to the recording industry, but does not address the legality of lawsuits already filed against hundreds of individuals.

More stories on this topic "We are not unsympathetic either to the RIAA's concern regarding the widespread infringement of its members' copyrights, or to the need for legal tools to protect those rights," the court wrote. "It is not the province of the courts, however, to rewrite (copyright law) in order to make it fit a new and unforeseen Internet architecture, no matter how damaging that development has been to the music industry."

While it is a blow to the recording industry, Friday's decision might not derail the RIAA's ongoing lawsuits against hundreds of individual file swappers. The ruling focuses only on the unconventional subpoena power that the trade group had claimed so it could seek the identities of ISP subscribers. It does not deal with the legality of the lawsuits that have already been filed against hundreds of individual computer users.

Even if the court's decision is ultimately upheld against appeals, the RIAA will still have the power to identify and sue file swappers. The process it could use instead, which would involve filing "John Doe" lawsuits against the anonymous individuals, would simply be more labor-intensive and time-consuming.

The RIAA said that replacement process would be more intrusive for individuals, not less, since the group would no longer be able to contact the potential targets of a lawsuit and settle with them before an official filing. For several months, it has been sending letters to suspected file swappers after obtaining their identities from ISPs and offering a settlement instead of going to court.

"This decision is inconsistent with both the views of Congress and the findings of the district court," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement. "It unfortunately means we can no longer notify illegal file sharers before we file lawsuits against them to offer the opportunity to settle outside of litigation. Verizon is solely responsible for a legal process that will now be less sensitive to the interests of its subscribers who engage in illegal activity."

The appeals court's decision comes after the RIAA sued 382 individuals alleged to have offered copyrighted music for download through file-swapping services such as Kazaa, and settled with 220 people for amounts averaging about $3,000 apiece. Many of those settlements had been made before suits were filed, the organization has said.

Most of the legal challenges to the RIAA's strategy have focused on the subpoena process used to obtain identities, rather than on the copyright lawsuits themselves.

With the 'success' had by the RIAA in the United States with lawsuits against file traders, the Canadian Recording Industry Association is getting ready to mirror the tactic in 2004. With the battle shifting toward industry in the U.S., the copyright/p2p/broadband debate has heated up in Canada. Last week regulators in Canada ruled uploading copyrighted files was illegal, but downloading them was not.

The National Post reports on comments made by Brian Robertson of the CRIA in Canada, who indicates they've got no other choice but to begin flinging lawsuits in 2004. "We've gone through a process, and spent $1-million on a value-of-music education campaign," Robertson says. "But the industry continues to be devastated by file sharing. It is regrettable that we'll have to take this action, but we've been forced to."

WASHINGTON — The director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is leaving his post next month to lead the recording industry's efforts to stop music piracy.

Bradley A. Buckles, who served ATF for 30 years and was named director in 1999, will come head of the Anti-Piracy Unit of the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group announced Tuesday.

"Brad's appointment should signal to everyone that we continue to take piracy, here and throughout the world, very seriously," said Mitch Bainwol, RIAA's chairman and chief executive officer.

Over the past six months, RIAA has filed more than 380 copyright lawsuits against computer users its says are illegally distributing songs over the Internet. The RIAA also says music copyrights are increasingly threatened by easy-to-produce counterfeit compact disks.

Attorney General John Ashcroft praised Buckles for "the seamless transfer" of ATF from the Treasury Department to the Justice Department, which was part of the law creating the Homeland Security Department.

Buckles' retirement is effective Jan. 3. No replacement was immediately named.

An article at InfoWorld tells how the RIAA 'is filing 41 new lawsuits and sending 90 lawsuit-notification letters this week, adding to the 341 lawsuits filed and 308 notification letters sent since September. The RIAA has settled with 220 file-sharers as a result of lawsuits, lawsuit-notification letters and subpoenas. In addition, 1,054 users have submitted affidavits as part of the RIAA's amnesty program.' The RIAA also claims that its tactics are actually working -- to increase awareness and reduce online piracy."

The recording industry this week claimed progress in a controversial legal campaign targeting individuals who use peer-to-peer networks, but the group's optimism appeared to clash with at least some of the evidence, which remains murky at best.

By some measures, usage of peer-to-peer software such as Kazaa has been cut in half since the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced in late June that it would begin suing alleged file traders. The campaign to date has yielded 382 lawsuits and 220 settlements averaging close to $3,000 apiece. But by other measures, file swapping is hitting an all-time high.

Given contradictory and inconclusive data, reading the RIAA's progress is little more than a Rorschach test, analysts said.

"(The RIAA) gets to define success," said Eric Garland, chief executive officer of Big Champagne, a research company that tracks aggregate peer-to-peer network usage trends. "It's their campaign. They decide what their goals are, and they get to grade their own paper."

RIAA officials downplayed the significance of file-swapping data in assessing the 5-month-old campaign, relying instead on a poll showing an increase in awareness of the risks involved in the practice. Nevertheless, millions of people still appear to be trading copyrighted files in spite of those risks, suggesting the message is filtering through only slowly, if at all, in many file-swapping circles, particularly outside the United States.

"The good news is that the message is getting out," RIAA President Cary Sherman said. "I am really struck by how much awareness has increased. It has far exceeded our expectations."

Another day with Reuters reporting another round of lawsuits by the RIAA. The music organization claims they're educating consumers about the legality of song-swapping, while setting legit music retailers up for success. "These lawsuits help to foster an environment that provides a level playing field for the growing number of legitimate online music services to thrive," the RIAA said in a statement.

Pardon, but wasn't it very recently that Steve Jobs informed us iTunes makes virtually no money off of their "successful" music service? 99% of every dollar heads back to the big five record labels. "Level playing field"? "Thrive"? The only profits Apple is seeing is from endlessly hawking iPods.

It seems like the RIAA wants us to believe that they're filing lawsuits primarily to "educate" consumers and legitimize on-line music distribution. However the primary motivation remains the transfer of a robber-baron financial model into the new digital age under the cloak of morality.

It's a tactic destined to fail, argues this opinion piece over at Red Herring, because the relationship between consumers and the industry has been forever altered by peer-to-peer trading (and the fact the consumer has seen the short fat man behind the curtain of Oz).

The RIAA has been particularly aggressive against universities in their war against file-sharing. This has caused many schools across the nation to either completely ban or severely restrict file-sharing activity.

Despite this, many feel that college life and file-sharing go hand in hand. When a group of friends get together and do whatever, music is always a welcomed complement. What’s easier than hopping onto one's favorite P2P network and downloading a few tunes to set the mood?

While this is seemingly innocent enough, most have come to learn by now that the RIAA doesn't agree with this philosophy. In the RIAA's quest to banish file-sharing to the bowels of the Internet, this trade organization has been applying an enormous amount of pressure on universities to fall in line. For the most part, they have complied.

Although colleges and universities are not the begging and end all of file-sharing, thwarting its activity there has the potential to make mp3 trading more inconvenient. While this activity may be more difficult in some schools, it never the less still occurs - and the RIAA continues to watch.

A University of North Carolina student has learned this fact all too well, as the RIAA is now scouring every avenue possible looking for his or her identity. The RIAA issued a subpoena in October, insisting that nine (9) songs were made available (obviously had his/her shared directory exposed.)

Hearing that only nine songs were made available certainly raises an eyebrow. Typically, we have been hearing a substantial amount of files are required for a subpoena, i.e., 1,000 files. This is a clear deviation of this standard, as college and university network administrators have told us that students are being accused for having far fewer files.

The RIAA typically cites a number of copyrighted songs as a representative list, so it is possible this individual did have many other files available.

In defense of the student, the ACLU the ACLU filed a motion in "federal district court in Greensboro quash the RIAA’s subpoena.” The ACLU contends that it has chosen to defend the student not because it approves of copyright infringement. Rather, it feels the student’s privacy rights are at stake.

"Our motion is about due process rights. The Constitution and the First Amendment protects the right to engage in anonymous speech and that includes anonymous speech on the Internet."

In any case, this showdown between the two should prove to be quite interesting.

A San Francisco federal judge last week moved the venue for SBC Communications' lawsuit against the recording industry's file-swapping legal strategy, a potentially significant victory for record labels.

The decision, which was released late last Wednesday, takes a closely watched legal battle over the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) dragnet for online music traders and transfers it to courts in the nation's capital, where the industry group has already had success.

"We are pleased with the California court's decision to transfer the suit filed by SBC to the District of Columbia," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement. "Since the DC court has already addressed most of the challenges raised by SBC and resolved them in RIAA's favor, we believe that the decision to transfer the case throws a significant monkey wrench into SBC's case."

SBC sued the RIAA in California courts last July. It contended that the record industry's subpoenas for information on subscribers to Internet service providers were unconstitutional. The RIAA has used the subpoenas issued to most major Net service providers to identify file traders allegedly sharing copyrighted songs online, and has sued more then 300 people for copyright infringement.

The telecommunications company's suit echoes a previous legal tussle between Verizon Communications and the RIAA. Like SBC, Verizon had claimed that the RIAA subpoenas were invalid, since they were not issued in the course of an ongoing lawsuit. In that suit, the Washington, D.C., federal court decided that the RIAA's subpoenas were legal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

SBC says it is considering an appeal of Judge Susan Illston's ruling, but noted that her decision did not affect the merits of their challenge.

"This ruling is procedural in nature and does not address the substantive issues we are raising about the recording industry’s continued misapplication of DMCA subpoena power," the company said in a statement. "SBC companies will continue to stand firm and continue our legal action in order to protect the privacy rights of our customers."

Illston also dismissed SBC's related claims against MediaSentry, a company that scans file-trading networks such as Kazaa for copyright violations and contacts ISPs on behalf of copyright owners, and Titan Media, an adult content provider that also sought identities of SBC Internet subscribers.

Illston said that neither company actually had a legal conflict with SBC based on the subpoenas, and so SBC's lawsuit against them focusing on the issue was not warranted. MediaSentry had never issued a subpoena for the ISP's information, and Titan withdrew the only one it had sought after SBC opposed it.

Representatives for Canadian songwriters attempt to force ISP's to pay them royalties for the millions of songs downloaded by their users. The Supreme Court of Canada's decision could force ISP's to pay a blank yearly royalty rate, regardless of whether or not subscribers even download a single file. CTV.ca explores the complex legal case being made by the Society of Composers, Authors, and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN). If SOCAN gets its way, ISP's would pay a royalty of 25 cents per subscriber per year and ten percent of the gross profit ISPs make through the sale of advertising.

Lawyers for a New York woman accused of unlawfully sharing music over the Internet suggested Tuesday the recording industry acted illegally when it investigated her online activities and that a search of music files on her computer may have been unconstitutional.

The lawyers _ Richard S. Ugelow, Glenn W. Peterson and Daniel N. Ballard _ are asking a federal magistrate to delay at least until Sept. 10 ordering the woman's Internet provider to turn over her name and address to the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group for the largest labels.

In court papers, the lawyers said they may argue that the RIAA violated state and federal laws by intercepting the woman's Internet address as its investigators scoured file-sharing networks looking for songs to download.

The RIAA, MPAA and copyright holders describe P2P users as "pirates" - invoking images of swashbuckling pre-teens hauling up the Jolly Roger and stealing intellectual property in the dead of night. New ads announced by MPAA President Jack Valente impress the idea that "copying is stealing" and that someone who burns MP3s is no different from those who slip a CD under their shirt at the local Tower Records.

But technically, file sharing is not theft.

A number of years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt with a man named Dowling, who sold "pirated" Elvis Presley recordings, and was prosecuted for the Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property. The Supremes did not condone his actions, but did make it clear that it was not "theft" -- but technically "infringement" of the copyright of the Presley estate, and therefore copyright law, and not anti-theft statutes, had to be invoked.

So "copying" is not "stealing" but can be "infringing." That doesn't have the same sound bite quality as Valente's position.

Complicated matters further, copying is not always infringing. If the work is not copyrighted, if you have a license to make the copy, or if the work is in the public domain, you can copy at will. Also, not all "copies" are the same. Say you buy a CD and play it on your computer -- technically, you have already made a "copy" onto the PC in the process of playing it, but that's not an infringement.

Making an archive copy is okay too, as long as your retain the original. What about a transformative copy -- say, making an MP3 out of a CD? You can do that, so long as you retain the original work. If the original CD get scratched, damaged or lost, you can probably burn the MP3 back to a CD (sans the really "sucky" titles), but this is not entirely clear.

So the RIAA and MPAA's claims that all "copying" is "stealing" are much overhyped.

But so too are the claims some swappers make that, simply because I bought a particular CD at some time in the past (or really, really thought about buying it), I now have the inherent right to share it with all my friends (even the ones I have never met in Singapore, Malaysia and Eastern Europe).

Fair and Unfair Use.

The RIAA and MPAA also claim that if I download a song that I don't own, it's an infringement. This too is not always the case. The law recognizes that many uses of copyrighted works - even without the permission of the copyright holder - are not an infringement. While there is no "right" as such to make a fair use, the making of such a use is not an infringement.

Thus, if you make copies for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, it is not an infringement of the copyright, even if the copyright holder does not want you to do so.

This isn't black and white, of course. In deciding whether a use is fair or not, courts will consider a number of factors: Did you make the copies for commercial purposes? Does the copy deprive the copyright holder of revenues? Did you copy all, or substantially all, of the work, or just a small portion? The less of the work copied, the less commercial and the less impact on the copyrighted work, the more likely it is to be considered "fair."

So when you sing "Happy Birthday" to your mom, you don't owe a royalty to Mildred and Patty Smith Hill (they own the copyright), but when it is performed in a movie, you do see a credit roll.

The problem for the RIAA and MPAA is that all they can see is that someone is copying a work -- they cannot tell the purposes for which the work is being copied. Therefore, when they sign an affidavit to get a subpoena alleging a copyright "infringement," all they really know is that a copy has been made, not that an infringement has occurred.

The Recording Industry Association of America leveled a full legal barrage at the sole Kazaa user fighting its attempts to identify file swappers, saying she was indisputably a major copyright infringer.

In papers filed Tuesday with a federal court in Washington, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said it did not oppose the anonymous Kazaa user's request to fight the subpoena seeking her identity but that any such motion should be filed immediately. Previously, "Jane Doe's" attorneys had asked for more time to prepare their case arguing that the RIAA subpoena, filed with Internet service provider Verizon Communications, violated her privacy and other constitutional rights.

"It is now clear that her objections have been either previously rejected by this court or are totally irrelevant to a subpoena enforcement proceeding," the RIAA wrote in its brief. She "will be able to raise whatever arguments she wants in the copyright infringement action that is sure to follow."

The ongoing legal skirmishes will help stabilize the process by which the RIAA seeks the identity of file swappers, and ultimately, files lawsuits against them. But the latest round of briefs also gave new insight into exactly what kind of evidence the group will level against accused file swappers in court.

Technically, neither the RIAA nor "Nycfashiongirl," the Kazaa user's online nickname, are supposed to be fighting over the details of what she may have downloaded or when and where she got the files. The only open proceeding is the subpoena for her identity, which will be approved or blocked on different grounds.

But the filings appear to be aimed as much at the court of opinion as at the real court bench, and both sides seem to be fighting a case that hasn't yet been filed. Last week, Nycfashiongirl's attorney told the court that his client had purchased a computer with music on it, had legally ripped her own CDs to her hard drive, and had used the Kazaa application to listen to that music. She had tried several times to prevent sharing that music with the outside world, her attorneys wrote.

Even while conceding that the information had little to do with the subpoena process itself, the RIAA spent considerable time in its legal filings trying to establish that the anonymous computer user was not an innocent victim. Nycfashiongirl, in fact, shared more than 900 songs online, many of them downloaded from Kazaa or even Napster, the briefs said.

In a preview of what will likely show up in many of the infringement lawsuits next month, the RIAA demonstrated that it not only had found the small number of songs listed in the subpoena request, but had examined the full contents of Nycfashiongirl's shared folder, looking in detail at the "metadata" attached to each file such as song name, artist, notes attached by earlier file swappers, and even at the contents of the file itself.

Some of the files exactly matched the "fingerprints," or specific digital characteristics, of songs earlier identified on the now-defunct Napster service, the RIAA said. All those factors indicated that the anonymous computer user was a "frequent and significant participant in illegal downloading and distribution of music," the group wrote.

Nycfashiongirl attorney Glenn Peterson dismissed those claims as irrelevant to his client's current motion. The Kazaa user is contending that her rights are being violated by the subpoena for her identity through Verizon and is not yet fighting a lawsuit accusing her of infringement, he said.

"The issue of downloading is not part of the proceeding," Peterson said. "Whatever evidence they are trying to use to show downloading seems irrelevant."

Peterson said he and his partner on the case would likely have a legal response ready as soon as Thursday.

A group of small Webcasters on Wednesday filed an antitrust suit against the Recording Industry Association of America, alleging that the trade association tried to push independent music stations offline.

The Webcaster Alliance has been threatening to sue the RIAA for months, after Congress ratified royalty rates for Internet radio stations that many small operators said will drive them out of business. The existing rates were negotiated between a small, unrepresentative group of Webcasters and the RIAA and are aimed at eliminating competition, the alliance members said.

"We have watched the RIAA's actions...(which) have the effect of wiping out an entire industry of independent Webcasters who represent freedom of choice and diversity for Internet radio listeners," Ann Gabriel, president of the Webcaster Alliance, said in a statement. "It is time for the RIAA to be held accountable for years of manipulating an entire industry in order to stifle the growth of independent music and control Internet content and distribution channels."

Webcasting royalty rates have proved to be an enormously contentious topic for years. Congress passed new copyright rules in 1998 that created a new royalty structure, unknown in traditional radio, under which Internet radio stations would pay record labels and artists a fee for playing their music online. Lawmakers didn't specify how much this fee would be, kicking off years of battles.

In June 2002, the Library of Congress finally set the rate at about 0.07 of a cent per song, with the fees retroactive to 1998. Small companies protested, saying that rate would put them out of business. Congress intervened, and after several start-and-stop initiatives, passed a bill that's aimed at protecting small Net stations.

Like the original legislation, no set amount was included in the new bill, but it effectively ratified private negotiations between a small group called the Voice of Webcasters and the RIAA, which set royalty rates at a percentage of revenue instead of a flat fee per song. Larger companies such as America Online would continue paying the fee determined by the Library of Congress.

Some Webcasters found the new model better, but others--particularly those who had been left out of the negotiations--cried foul. They sought a new agreement with the RIAA, but the record label group said it had already settled the issue.

Saying they lacked any other avenue, the alliance members threatened to sue, a promise culminating in Wednesday's lawsuit.

The Webcaster Alliance suit alleges that the big record companies and the RIAA conspired with each other and ultimately with the Voice of Webcasters group to eliminate small Net radio stations that play independent music.

The alliance lists 198 member stations, many of them individuals, on its site.

The RIAA said the lawsuit was groundless without commenting on the details.

"This lawsuit is a publicity stunt that has no merit," an RIAA representative said. "Record companies and artists have worked earnestly to negotiate a variety of agreements with a host of new types of radio services, including commercial and noncommercial Webcasters."

I just moved back on campus for the fall semester and was I dunno if shocked or appalled are the right words, to be handed a sheet of paper with my Residential Life information. I'm suprised but at the same time not really... Just an example of how frivolous lawsuits and big companys filter down to screw even the smallest man. The flyer reads:

Downloading Music, Movies, or Software.... No Big Deal, Right? IT IS NOW.

The downloading or uploading of copyrighted material is in violation of federal, state, & local copyright laws.

UMBC strickly enforces these laws.

The motion picture and record industries are no longer just going after the high-volume file sharers...

You break the law ONCE and you may face still penalties

New federal laws allow individuals to be fined up to $150,000 per copyrighted item!!

UMBC students found to be violating copyright laws will be fined $100 for their 1st infaction

You may also be banned from ResNet for 2 weeks, face community service and other sanctions, or you may be suspended or expelled from UMBC.

Students at Michigan Technological University had a highly educational, "It's an RIAA Day' experience when they turned up for orientation week.

And it was, "the stupidest meeting I had ever been to," a student who had the pleasure of being present told us.

"They had this whole act set, how two kids were downloading the Matrix and all kinds of music, and then their 'RA' walks up and says 'Do you know you can go to jail for that'?"

Right.

"The kid saying this stuff didn't look like he bought it and later bashed the DMCA," our informant continued. "Everyone cheered."

You'll remember that a MTU student was, "sued by the RIAA last December for $98.6 billion", he added.

"Nobody here actually knows what he did, though. People tell all kinds of rumors; stuff like, 'I heard that he uploaded four thousand songs onto a server and offered them for download'."

No doubt that'll stop, following the RIAA orientation skit. We're equally sure the RIAA paid the staff - and performing student - for their time and effort.

Hollywood studios and record labels are getting allies in their quest to overturn a court ruling that said file-swapping software companies aren't responsible for the copyright infringement of their users.

Several groups, including a list of legal scholars, international copyright organizations, legal music services and other copyright holder groups filed "friend of the court" briefs Tuesday, asking that an April ruling upholding the legality of file-swapping services such as Grokster and StreamCast's Morpheus be overturned.

"(T)he district court's misapplication of law, if permitted to stand, will create loopholes in the law...that will frustrate efforts to limit online piracy and serve to encourage and embolden potential infringers of creative works," read the brief submitted by copyright holders ranging from Major League Baseball to the Screen Actors Guild. "If allowed to stand, it would permit companies such as those operated by defendants to misappropriate the royalties meant for copyright holders...to an extent that would be limited only by their technological imagination."

The briefs come as part of a renewed legal battle over the status of file-swapping services such as Morpheus and Kazaa, which were emboldened by federal Judge Stephen Wilson's surprise ruling in April. In that decision, he said file-swapping companies should be compared to VCR makers, which are not responsible for their customers' copyright infringements.

"Grokster and StreamCast are not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders or copy machines, both of which can be and are used to infringe copyrights," Wilson wrote.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America, and the National Music Publishers Association collectively appealed that decision earlier this month.

In the meantime, the recording industry has started to seek lawsuits against individual file swappers alongside file-swapping companies, hoping to drive people off the peer-to-peer networks. For nearly two months, the RIAA has been using subpoenas to obtain the identity of "egregious" file swappers from Internet service providers and will file lawsuits beginning next month.

Included in Tuesday's friend-of-the-court briefs were law professors from Harvard University, New York University and other universities; Pressplay, MusicNet, Full Audio and other music services; and international film, music, video and other copyright organizations.

Jane Doe's legal motion to block an RIAA subpoena demanding that Verizon give up her name says the subpoena violates her rights to due process, privacy and anonymous association, as well as her contract with Verizon.

Her arguments "have already been addressed by a federal judge - and they have been rejected," NewsFactor Network's James Maguire has RIAA senior vp Matt Oppenheim saying here. "Courts have already ruled that you are not anonymous when you publicly distribute music online."

Court records say Jane Doe used Kazaa, but tried to prevent other P2P users from accessing files on her PC, says Maguire, going on, "She used the Kazaa software mostly as a music player to listen to music from her own CDs as well as files that were bundled with her computer, court documents claim.

"The RIAA issued a subpoena to Verizon, her ISP, on July 9th, demanding her contact information. Verizon informed Jane Doe of the subpoena on July 15th. Jane Doe, deciding to fight the subpoena, asked Verizon to withhold her name."

The pressure on subpoenaed individuals is enormous, Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff told NewsFactor.

"An individual who settles with the RIAA is likely to end up paying in the range of $10,000 to $30,000 dollars. An individual who does not settle is liable somewhere in $100,000 per downloaded song range." Fighting and losing a lawsuit against the RIAA "could bankrupt an individual forever," he said.

The RIAA's subpoena skirmishes will continue, and "almost every individual will end up settling," Bernoff said.

But, he added, the RIAA, too, is in danger - of losing a case against file swappers.

An anonymous California computer user went to court Thursday to challenge the recording industry's file-trading subpoenas, charging that they are unconstitutional and violate her right to privacy.

The legal motion, filed in Washington, D.C., federal court by a "Jane Doe" Internet service subscriber, is the first from an individual whose personal information has been subpoenaed by the Recording Industry Association of America in recent months.

The RIAA has used court orders to try to identify more than 1,000 computer users it alleges have been offering copyrighted songs on file-trading networks. It plans to use the information gained to file copyright lawsuits against the individuals.

The motion was filed by a pair of Sacramento, Calif., attorneys who said the RIAA had gone too far in its effort to protect its online copyrights.

"This is more invasive than someone having secret access to the library books you check out or the videos you rent," Glenn Peterson, one of the attorneys, said in a statement. "The recent efforts of the music industry to root out piracy have addressed a uniquely contemporary problem with Draconian methods--good old-fashioned intimidation combined with access to personal information that would make George Orwell blush."

The Jane Doe motion comes as the first individual legal response to the RIAA's effort to sue large numbers of file swappers. It follows similar legal challenges from several Internet service providers (ISPs) and colleges, including Pacific Bell Internet Services, an SBC Communications subsidiary.

A Massachusetts federal court has already ruled that some of the group's subpoenas, submitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston College, had not followed the correct legal process and were therefore invalid. That court left open the possibility that the RIAA could simply refile those subpoenas properly, however.

According to documents filed with the court, Jane Doe used the Kazaa file-swapping software as a music player largely to listen to songs she had ripped from her own CDs and to music that came pre-loaded on her family computer. She also "participated" in the Kazaa file-swapping community but tried to prevent other people from accessing files on her computer, the documents state.

On July 9, the RIAA sent her ISP, Verizon Communications, a subpoena seeking her name, address, phone number and e-mail address. Verizon contacted the anonymous subscriber on July 15, telling her that the group was targeting her. After consulting with attorneys, she asked Verizon to delay providing her information, because she would fight the request.

The action filed Thursday is still a preliminary step before settling down to fight on constitutional or other grounds. Because the RIAA document was seeking information from Verizon, not directly from her, she must first petition the court for the right to challenge the subpoena herself.

In their briefs, her attorneys argued that the RIAA's unconventional subpoena process has violated her rights to due process, privacy and anonymous association, along with her contract with Verizon.

For its part, the RIAA said that Jane Doe's motion to intervene matters little, because a federal court has already upheld the validity of the subpoena process.

"The courts have already ruled that you're not anonymous when you're publicly distributing music online," said Matt Oppenheim, senior vice president at the RIAA. "Her lawyers are trying to obtain a free pass to download or upload music online illegally. Their arguments have already been addressed by federal court and been rejected."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties group, is also working with some individuals who say their screen names have been the subject of RIAA subpoenas, but it has not yet filed any challenges with the court. However, the group said in other kinds of cases such as libel and defamation, the law allows individuals to intervene in ISP subpoenas when their privacy is at stake.

"The most important issue is that if you are innocent, if the RIAA has screwed up, it is critical that individuals have the ability to challenge the subpoenas before their identifies are compromised," said Fred von Lohmann, an EFF attorney.

Several weeks ago, Buy Music launched what it claimed was the ‘windows answer to iTunes’. However, the service has come under severe criticism from some consumers. In response, a series of parody and consumer opinion sites have sprung up.

Chief amongst these sites was dontbuymusic.com. This site rose as a result of seeing serious issues about the BuyMusic service and the music industry in general. The site in recent days reached the attention of lawyers working for buy.com and buymusic.com, who ordered the removal of the site.

Dontbuymusic complied with the request and issued a short statement via their website about the removal and saying "they may have a more interesting use for the site soon".

Other sites commenting on Buymusic have yet to reach the attention of Buymusic's lawyers. They include boycottbuymusic.com who allege that buymusic are misleading customers, distorting facts and compromising privacy via 3rd parties.

Buymusic have championed itself as been the better strategy for the music industry to follow rather then the lawsuit-infested road that the industry is currently going down.

Buymusic have not returned requests from Slyck for comment.

RIAA says it's only after 'substantial' file sharers

In an amazing coincidence, hot on the heels of senator Norm Coleman's near volte face on file sharing and subpoenas, the RIAA has now spun on its heels.

For the past several months, various music industry suitspeople have been losing no opportunity to say they'll nail anyone, big or small, who's file sharing. For example, "We’re going to sue anyone who is infringing our copyrights," said the RIAA's Amy Weiss. "We’re going to sue anybody who is file trading."

Now, in a Reuters story that's doing the rounds, the "RIAA is gathering evidence and preparing lawsuits only against individual computer users who are illegally distributing a substantial amount of copyrighted music," RIAA president Cary-Sue Sherman is quoted as saying in his 11-page 'We're basically nice guys' response to Coleman's demand for more info on the Subpoena War.

And Coleman, in turn, is being unequivocally compromising.

Reuters has the RIAA saying 'its' software locates a user's Internet address and service provider after which an RIAA employee 'manually' reviews and verifies the info before seeking a subpoena.

Unfortunately, the RIAA isn't giving out details of how its 'verification' experts do what they do, or how they do it. Thus, we can only guess at the kind of leading edge technology the RIAA is in all likelihood using.

But whatever it is, we can no doubt rest assured that those performing such sensitive and demanding tasks are highly qualified, responsible individuals.

Record labels and movie studios said Tuesday that they have appealed an April federal court ruling that held for the first time that some file-swapping software was legal.

That ruling, made by a Los Angeles federal court judge, Stephen Wilson, came as a sharp blow to copyright holders' strategy of suing peer-to-peer network operators and software developers in order to curb the explosive growth of file trading. Beginning with a ruling against Napster, all court rulings had been in favor of the record companies and movie studios.

"(Wilson's decision) was wrong," Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) President Cary Sherman said in a statement Tuesday. "These are businesses that were built for the exclusive reason of illegally exchanging copyrighted works, and they make money hand over fist from it. The Court of Appeals should hold them accountable."

The surprise April decision revitalized a peer-to-peer world that had been laboring under the pressure of repeated lawsuits and unfavorable court rulings, resulting in the closure of services such as Napster, Aimster and Scour.

Unlike any other judge before him, Wilson ruled that companies that distributed software were not responsible for the misdeeds of their users, even when it was clear that millions of people were using the software to break copyright laws. He compared the software to the VCR or a Xerox copy machine.

"Grokster and Streamcast are not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders or copy machines, both of which can be and are used to infringe copyrights," Wilson wrote.

The RIAA subsequently turned to its well-publicized campaign of suing individuals for copyright infringement, a strategy it had largely avoided before Wilson's decision. The group has spent the last month and a half sending subpoenas to Internet service providers, seeking the identities of alleged file swappers, and has said it will file what could be hundreds of lawsuits by the end of this month or early September.

The RIAA, which was joined by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) in its appeal, said that Wilson had failed to follow the example of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal's ruling against Napster. In that case, judges laid down a framework under which Napster would likely have been held liable for the copyright infringement of its users, although the issue never came to a full trial.

"The district court incredibly equated (Streamcast) and Grokster to Xerox, rather than the more analogous comparison to the illegitimate Napster service," wrote attorneys for the NMPA in their brief. "Comparing Xerox to (Streamcast) and Grokster is like comparing a farmer who sells chickens to a promoter and organizer of cockfights."

Grokster attorney Michael Page said the copyright holders' trade associations were misreading the April decision.

"The RIAA would like the world to believe that Wilson was a renegade judge who ignored Napster, but he was anything but that," Page said. "He followed Napster carefully and we won."

The April decision granted summary judgment to Grokster and Streamcast Networks, essentially closing the case against them unless the appeals court rules differently. Wilson has not yet ruled the same way for Sharman Networks, which operates the hugely popular Kazaa file-swapping service and is being sued in the same court.

The copyright holders have long said they would appeal, but procedural issues complicating the case had held up the action until now.

A Sacramento attorney plans to file a motion on behalf of a file sharer in Washington US District Court, says an August 13 USA Today story. It will be the first legal action by someone targeted in the RIAA's sue 'em all campaign.

"The argument is a new one in the increasingly contentious battle over the blizzard of subpoenas being served to colleges and Internet service providers," says the piece, by Mike Snider. The new 15GB and 30GB Apple iPod can be ordered from Amazon.

"Just because a user's PC has music files stored within a peer-to-peer file-sharing program doesn't mean the user is illegally distributing copyrighted material, says attorney Daniel Ballard. Distribution implies sending, rather than leaving something where it may be taken, he says."

This brings another dimension to the fight, the story quotes EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) lawyer Fred von Lohmann, as saying. "Actual subscribers have a perspective that has so far been absent."

Ballard will file a "Jane Doe" case for a user whose personal information has been subpoenaed "It is an assumption they (the RIAA) are making," says the piece.

"The RIAA wouldn't comment before the motion is filed but said it asked the court to force ISP Verizon to turn over the user's information, after which it would discuss any issues with the individual," it adds.

The music industry's virulent sue 'em all subpoena campaign is taking on interesting new dimensions.

The RIAA has the US sewn up tight, its Dutch look-alike, BREIN, has announced plans to sue independent file sharers in The Netherlands, and now the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) has jumped on the American bandwagon.

Sadly, however, it isn't able to sue anyone, or swamp the country with subpoenas, unlike its counterpart across the border.

Instead, it's going to 'send warnings' to people engaged in p2p activities.

The CRIA (which no one in Canada has ever heard of) maintains a full time anti-piracy unit which among other things, monitors the Net. "This is a very active section that is currently addressing the challenges of escalating internet piracy," says CRIA president Brian Robertson.

Precisely what its warnings will achieve is anyone's guess. That's because, contrary to RIAA belief, Canada isn't part of America and the DMCA doesn't apply here, a situation the CRIA and its industry supporters in Canada are trying desperately to remedy. Until they do, however, things couldn't be clearer: Canadians can safely copy music, as long as it's for personal use and not for redistribution.

BUT ... the CRIA's outburst gives the appearance that it's in the game and looks good on paper - or, rather, in a paper.

Afraid that the current legal climate will leave them playing the role of internet watchdogs, ISP's have banded together to protest the RIAA's recent attempts to subpoena file trader identities. With Verizon's hopes all but dashed against the legal rocks, and BellSouth the only remaining ISP to dare face the RIAA in court, ISP's are well aware that the legal climate has changed. With the RIAA's use of the DMCA to procure file trader identities, ISP's now face having to not only alienate file traders (a back room bread and butter market), but also now must take on the role and expenses of playing babysitter.

100 Internet service providers, part of the NetCoalition, plan to deliver a letter to the RIAA today, questioning the organization's tactics. "There are understandable fears among many in the Internet community that the real purpose of this legal campaign is to achieve in court what the association has not yet been able to accomplish in Congress — to make Internet companies legally responsible for the conduct of individuals who use their systems," the letter proclaims.

"We're not asking them to police the Internet," retorts RIAA attorney Matt Oppenheim. "We're asking them to comply with the law. If they were policing we wouldn't have this problem."

Boston, MA - A Massachusetts district court today dealt the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) a serious setback by rejecting its Washington, D.C., subpoenas for the identities of Massachusetts students. For the moment, MIT and Boston College need not respond to the RIAA demands.

"Today's ruling requires the recording industry to file subpoenas where it alleges that copyright infringement occurs, rather than blanketing the country from one court in D.C.," said Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Staff Attorney Wendy Seltzer. "The court ruling confirms that due process applies to Internet user privacy nationwide."

Massachusetts District Judge Joseph Tauro granted requests from MIT and Boston College to reject RIAA subpoenas demanding identities of students the RIAA claims are violating copyright. The subpoenas are part of a nationwide effort by the RIAA to identify and crack down on alleged copyright violators using peer-to-peer (P2P) software to share music on the Internet.

"We urge other colleges and Internet service providers to take similar steps to protect their users' privacy," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "ISPs should notify users whose information is sought, and fight against improper subpoenas."

Pacific Bell Internet Services has filed suit in California complaining of the threat to subscribers' privacy and the burden on Internet service providers. The RIAA has reportedly filed more than 2,000 subpoenas through the D.C. court and has announced plans to sue file-sharers later this month.

EFF offers an online database users can check to see whether their identities have been subpoenaed by the RIAA. EFF urges concerned citizens to learn more about ways to make filesharing legal while getting artists paid as part of the Let the Music Play Campaign.

With most ISP's (Pac Bell being the exception) bowing to the RIAA's request for subscriber information, the organization now turns its gaze to Universities. Boston College, MIT, Columbia, and a handful of other universities refused to give in to RIAA demands that the colleges hand over the identity of accused file traders, citing the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act, which bars the schools from handing over student information without first informing the students. The schools apparently are opposing the process less because they want to protect pirates, and more because they want the process to follow proper procedural guidelines. The RIAA is unimpressed, and has requested that a Federal Judge force the schools to violate the FERP act.

The Recording Industry Association of America's efforts to scare peer-to-peer users who violate copyright laws began with a promising start exactly one year ago, says CNET's Declan McCullagh in The future of a scare campaign.

He goes on, "a federal court in Washington, D.C., to force Verizon Communications to divulge the identity of a Kazaa user, kicking off a legal tussle that ended with the RIAA winning a stunning victory".

Further down he says, "But the most daunting obstacle to the recording industry's dogged efforts to rid the Internet of music piracy is a lawsuit that Pacific Bell Internet Services (also known as SBC Communications) filed against the RIAA last week. It is carefully crafted to portray the RIAA and its contractors who scour P2P networks for infringers as out-of-control juggernauts who care precious little about due process, the rules of the federal court system, Americans' privacy rights and the U.S. Constitution."

Promising start? Stunning victory? Dogged efforts? Rid the Internet of music piracy? Carefully crafted?

These phrases and their general context seem to imply the RIAA's ugly Jihad against file sharers is somehow justified, somehow OK.

Perhaps they're an attempt at irony, but that's not how they come across, especially when one considers McCullagh's closing comment: "Sure, it's temping to beat up on the recording industry, but keep in mind that they're not the ones who enacted the DMCA back in 1998. Congress did. Elected representatives chose the interests of well-connected copyright holders over individual rights to privacy. The Senate approved the DMCA unanimously in October 1998, and the U.S. House of Representatives followed suit by a similar margin a few days later."

He adds that if the labels win their "legal skirmish with SBC, and the DMCA remains intact," the fight will return to Capitol Hill and, "Let's hope the outcome will be different this time."

The trouble is, it wasn't elected representatives who "chose the interests of well-connected copyright holders over individual rights to privacy". Hollywood was, and still is, the principal driving force and the "elected representatives" were all too frequently its devoted friends and admirers, for example Hollywood Howard Berman, Billy Tauzin, Fritz Hollings and Howard Coble.

Not that the entertainment industry fails to acknolwedge the help.

"We are grateful to Congress for supporting the DMCA and for recognizing the need to protect copyright," McCullagh quotes MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) boss Jack Valenti as saying in The DMCA Is the Toast of D.C.

He's echoed by Hilary Rosen, at the time the RIAA's chief, who said, "Since 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has given us essential tools to assist us in fighting the growing music piracy problem. We are grateful to Congress for supporting American creators in this critical way."

Which isn't to say that getting congress' help isn't expensive.

Between April 1, 2001 and March 31, 2002, the RIAA spent $1.7 million on 'governmental relations projects,' $1.3 million in 'federal legislative support,' and $480,000 in 'state legislative support'. It also has a separate PAC (political action committee) which dished out more than $630,000 to 'federal candidates' and a further $535,000 of 'soft money' into the coffers of the Republican and Democratic parties, up from $392,000 it gave to both parties in 2001.

And that was for only one financial period. Nor does it take into account similar expenditures on the part of the MPAA.

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation today applauded a lawsuit brought by Pacific Bell Internet Services against three organizations that are manipulating copyright laws to violate the privacy of ISP customers.

The case concerns 97 subpoenas directed to Pacific Bell over the past two weeks. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has issued thousands of subpoenas to various ISPs, seeking the identity of music fans who use peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks.

The lawsuit alleges that the RIAA, along with MediaForce, a company that issues millions of "cease-and-desist" letters to ISPs, and Titan Media, a gay-themed adult entertainment company, have distorted certain provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) in an attempt to force Pacific Bell to breach its customers' privacy.

Pacific Bell seeks a declaration from the court that any further subpoenas and cease-and-desist letters for peer-to-peer file sharing activity must follow some court-established safeguards ensuring that there is some evidence of illegal activity before divulging personal information about ISP customers.

"The misuse of the subpoena process by an adult entertainment company emphasizes the potential for abuse with insufficient privacy protections in the law," explained EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "Without vetting by any court, companies can issue subpoenas that disclose the identities of targeted individuals and link their names to gay-themed adult porn, making it impossible for them to regain their privacy later even if the allegations are patently false."

This case highlights the privacy problems that led over 44 organizations to join with EFF in opposing the subpoena process in a similar case involving Verizon in Washington, DC, currently pending before a federal appeals court.

"The DC Court dismissed our concerns about subpoena process abuse as premature," added EFF Staff Attorney Gwen Hinze. "The California Court will have an opportunity to consider critical privacy concerns in light of the thousands of subpoenas the RIAA has issued as a clear abuse of the subpoena process."

The RIAA's crusade has already drawn the concerned attention of Congress. Senator Coleman (R-MN) today announced an investigation into the issuance of the subpoenas and the threatened lawsuits.

EFF applauds both Pacific Bell and Senator Coleman and urges concerned citizens to learn more about ways to make filesharing legal while getting artists paid at our Let the Music Play Campaign.

Links:

WASHINGTON - The chairman of the Senate's permanent subcommittee on investigations Thursday began an inquiry into the music industry's crackdown against online music swappers, calling the campaign "excessive."

"Theft is theft, but in this country we don't cut off your arm or fingers for stealing," said Sen. Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican who was a rock roadie in the 1960s.

The Recording Industry Association of America announced plans in June to file several hundred lawsuits against people suspected of illegally sharing songs on the Internet. Copyright laws allow for damages of $750 to $150,000 for each song.

In a letter to RIAA President Cary Sherman, Coleman criticized the group for issuing subpoenas to "unsuspecting grandparents whose grandchildren have used their personal computers" and others who may not know their computer is being used to download music.

"The industry seems to have adopted a 'shotgun' approach that could potentially cause injury and harm to innocent people who may simply have been victims of circumstance, or possessed a lack of knowledge of the rules related to digital sharing of files," Coleman wrote.

He asked the RIAA to furnish him with a list of its subpoenas; its safeguards against invading privacy and making erroneous subpoenas; its standards for issuing subpoenas; and a description of how it collects evidence of illegal file sharing.

"I recognize the very legitimate concerns about copyright infringement," Coleman said in a conference call with reporters. "This is theft. But I'm worried that the industry is using a shotgun approach."

The RIAA said it would be "pleased" to provide Coleman the information he requested.

"It will confirm that our actions are entirely consistent with the law as enacted by the U.S. Congress and interpreted by the courts," the RIAA said in a statement issued to The Associated Press.

The RIAA defended its enforcement campaign as "an appropriate and measured response to the very serious problem of blatant copyright infringement confronting the entire music community."

In the conference call, Coleman acknowledged that he used to download music from Napster, the file-sharing service that a federal judge shut down for violating music copyrights.

"I must confess, I downloaded Napster, and then Napster was found to be the wrong thing," he said. "I stopped."

The consumer group Public Knowledge, which has challenged broad crackdowns on file-sharing networks, praised Coleman's effort.

"We're delighted to have a friend in the Senate who thinks the recording industry's actions are a little bit outrageous," said the group's president, Gigi Sohn. "It's about time people on the Hill started asking questions about the recording industry's tactics."

Pacific Bell yesterday filed suit against the recording industry, claiming that subpoenas served by the RIAA were done so improperly. The suit questions the validity of using the DMCA to reveal file trader identities, and suggests the "overly broad" subpoenas should have been issued from a California district court, and not the District of Columbia. Pac Bell/SBC is the only service provider to challenge the subpoenas since Verizon lost their legal battle earlier this year to protect file traders' personal identities.

"The action taken by SBC Internet Services is intended to protect the privacy of our customers," says SBC spokesman Larry Meyer in this Associated Press report.

Now for the quote of the week, coming from a company that's been traveling the country lobbying to eliminate all state level broadband oversight: "Misapplication of DMCA subpoena power raises serious constitutional questions that need to be decided by the courts, not by private companies which operate without duty of due diligence or judicial oversight." An RIAA spokesman called the suit a case of "procedural gamesmanship".

The Recording Industry Association of America has tapped a former Republican Senate staffer to replace Hilary Rosen as chief executive, firming up the group's leadership during one of the most controversial moments in its history.

The big record labels' trade group said Monday that Mitch Bainwol, former chief of staff to U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, will replace Rosen at the RIAA's helm. Rosen left the group several months ago, after announcing her planned departure in January.

Although Bainwol has little experience inside the music industry, he brings deep connections to the Republican Party, something the RIAA has largely lacked under Rosen's leadership.

"Mitch brings to the RIAA the consummate insider's understanding of political nuance in Washington," Roger Ames, CEO of Warner Music Group, said in a statement. "I'm confident he has the ability to clearly communicate the issues and challenges the music industry faces and to partner effectively with the computer, consumer electronics and music publishing businesses to help us address those issues in all appropriate forums."

Bainwol joins the RIAA at a critical moment in the group's history, as it plans to launch what could be thousands of lawsuits against individual music consumers who have allegedly traded large numbers of copyrighted songs online. The controversial drive, already under way, has threatened to further compromise the industry's relationship with online consumers.

The new RIAA head has moved in GOP political circles for most of his professional life. He began his career as a budget analyst in President Reagan's Office of Management and Budget and has variously served as a Senate staffer, as chief of staff for the Republican National Committee and as executive director of the Republican National Senatorial Committee.

"I'm delighted to take on this role," Bainwol said in a statement. "What could be more rewarding than helping to promote two great American traditions: music and property rights?"

Bainwol will begin his duties Sept. 1, the RIAA said.

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today offered important resources to those wondering whether the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed a subpoena seeking their identities in connection with a crackdown on music file-sharing.

EFF is assisting Internet users by offering a mechanism for people to check the username they use on a file sharing service against a database of those usernames specified in hundreds of subpoenas the RIAA issued this month to Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

"The recording industry continues its futile crusade to sue thousands of the over 60 million people who use file sharing software in the U.S.," said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "We hope that EFF's subpoena database will give people some peace of mind and the information they need to challenge these subpoenas and protect their privacy."

"EFF is also documenting the scope of privacy invasions committed by the RIAA," explained EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz. "EFF's subpoena database will help document the damage done to innocent people misidentified as copyright infringers in the RIAA's overzealous campaign."

A username appearing in the database does not confirm absolutely that the RIAA has issued a subpoena seeking the name of a particular person, since file sharing services support duplicate usernames as well as allow multiple people to use the same account or same computer. Nor do the records in database reflect all subpoenas issued, due to lags between issuance and entry into the court's electronic record system by court employees. The EFF subpoena database also permits people to check if the recording industry named their Internet address, known as an IP address, in a subpoena.

The initial database includes 125 subpoenas issued through July 8, 2003, although EFF will update the database with hundreds of additional subpoenas as they become available through the court system.

To provide information and legal referrals for people targeted by subpoenas, EFF has partnered with the U.S. Internet Industry Association and other organizations to form the Subpoena Defense Alliance. The Subpoena Defense Alliance assists consumers and Internet Service Providers.

BOSTON (AP) Boston College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, citing privacy concerns, have moved to quash subpoenas issued by the recording industry to discover the identities of students accused of illegally copying music.

Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America, vowed legal action to obtain the information. The association, which has issued hundreds of subpoenas, has asked MIT for information about one student and BC for information about three students.

''These universities have chosen to litigate this in an attempt to deny copyright holders the right so clearly granted in Congress,'' Lamy told The Boston Globe.

MIT and Boston College said they support rights of copyright holders and would comply with any subpoena that addresses concerns about proper notification of students. The schools said they're required under the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act to notify students before they release personal information, such as names and addresses.

MIT also said it would wait until the subpoenas were filed in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, not in Washington D.C. It said the subpoenas weren't in compliance with court rules concerning the proper venue for such a filing and didn't give the school time to send notice, as required by law.

The recording industry association has filed at least 871 subpoenas in U.S. District Court in Washington this month, demanding information from universities and Internet service providers about users of the Internet file sharing network KaZaA.

Some educational institutions have said they will comply with the subpoenas.

The strategy of pursuing small-time downloaders as well as large, high-profile users is intended as a jolt to Internet music enthusiasts. The association hasn't said what damages it would seek. By law, it can ask for $750 to $150,000 for each illegally shared song.

Under a provision of the 1998 federal law enacted to combat music piracy, music companies may issue the subpoenas without a judge's approval. Verizon has challenged that part of the law, saying it violates users' rights to privacy.

At least 871 file traders can expect their lives to get significantly more interesting soon as the RIAA continues its quest to identify heavy file traders. According to reports that surfaced over the weekend, the RIAA has won approximately 871 federal subpoenas, with an additional 75 being generated daily. The push comes after a legal battle versus Verizon where the Recording Industry used certain provisions of the controversial DMCA legislation to force the telco to reveal file trader identities.

ISP's were concerned that the court victory would open the flood gates to a bombardment of similar subpoenas; fears that apparently were well founded.

With Verizon's latest legal thumping, the job of enforcing copyright has begun to teeter and fall into the lap of network providers. ISP's would like nothing more than to remain invisible in the process, hoping to leave the bad PR generated by prosecuting users in the lap of the RIAA. That's in part because, the entertainment industry has charged, the ISP's have been making a back room killing off the lure of broadband file trading services as a premier reason for broadband adoption, and aren't particular interested in seeing things change.

But changing they are. With this latest salvo of subpoenas, the reality of prosecution is becoming tangibly more real. File traders who for the past several years received little more than a thump on the wrist, may now find themselves in court, given they download enough Simpson's episodes to get the attention of the entertainment industry. Though light file traders apparently aren't being totally overlooked, several of the subpoenas (which should be sent out in the next 8 weeks) will be headed to users who were logged as sharing as few as five songs.

As these lawyer "nastygrams" began to circulate more frequently in years past, users began to turn their venom on their provider, believing they were being monitored by their ISP. The reality is that "p2p intelligence" companies like BayTSP scour file trading networks for significant offenders, then report both the files traded and the IP address back to their RIAA/MPAA masters. The music and film industry in turn send a letter to the ISP, whose only responsibility had been to pass that letter on to the offender.

Now that the precedent has been made that the DMCA can be used to force an ISP to reveal a trader's personal information, the RIAA hopes that by suing enough users, the ensuing fear will clamp their financial blood loss. The bad PR created by users who have their identities revealed could also lead to greater anti-trading measures among the ISP's themselves.

But as we've mentioned in the past, traders have already begun working on file trading networks that not only deal with the flood of RIAA created phony files, but prevent companies like BayTSP from obtaining their IP addresses (though the RIAA has some plans of their own). Some users are planning organized protests as well, though with the law on the RIAA's side, the "I'm tired of paying $20 for an album" argument isn't likely to hold much sway when push comes to shove.

There are more than 60 million Americans who engage in file-sharing every day. Many more worldwide hop onto their favorite P2P application and share ideas and information. In addition, CD sales are down by 25% and falling rapidly. A quick survey of online Internet users show that some people are more afraid of the RIAA than Al Queda.

Few other indications dictate a more obvious vote of no confidence in an industry. The consumer base is frustrated at paying anywhere from 15$ or more for a CD, as only one or two songs are acceptable. Furthermore, the quality of music has suffered considerably, where consumers have acts such as Christina Aguilera and Insync thrown at them.

While the RIAA and its agents readily compare the P2P population as pirates, thieves and degenerates, they are not willing to accept that their antiquated and out of touch business practice is to blame.

So determined to destroy P2P networking, the RIAA blew a perfect chance to grab the reigns in this debacle. When Napster and the RIAA were battling it out in court, the music industry had a chance to settle, and perhaps even take over Napster. Although its regeneration under the RIAA would have been a far cry from its past, its name alone would have brought about success.

Instead of dealing with this serious problem head on, they have offered substandard "legitimate" online music that has only strengthened P2P networking. Sites such as MusicNet and PressPlay have failed miserably, due to lack of interest and music file portability. Apple's iTunes, while achieving initial success, may have any hope of a fruitful existence cut short due to major record labels refusing to cooperate in the venture.

Further demonstrating their warped sense of reality, the decision to sue their own customer base symbolizes the great rift that exists between the RIAA and the people. This division, spurred by the RIAA turning their backs on its consumers, has only grown wider. Their latest effort to sue the American people back into the music stores is a desperate; last ditch effort to win the Internet copyright war.

The RIAA is using the simple tactic of fear and terror to bully the American people into submission. Considering this is a tactic used by organizations such as Al Queda or Hamas, its disturbing to think an American organization is willing to instill fear in its own people. In the end, this war that the RIAA has declared will ultimately work against them. If they're had tough time convincing consumers to buy music in the past, this latest scheme will only make their life more difficult in the future.

Michael Jackson has slammed a proposed US bill which could see music file traders jailed for downloading just one illegal copy.

In a statement, the superstar said: "I am speechless about the idea of putting music fans in jail for downloading music. It is wrong to illegally download, but the answer cannot be jail.

"Here in America we create new opportunities out of adversity, not punitive laws, and we should look to new technologies ... for solutions.

"This way, innovation continues to be the hallmark of America. It is the fans that drive the success of the music business."

Last week Congressmen Howard Berman and John Conyer (both Democrats) teamed up to propose legislation that would, as El Reg's Thomas Green wrote: "Simply assume that any P2P activity with a copyrighted file involves more than ten copies and represents a retail value of $2,500, automatically making it a felony and bringing in the possibility of incarceration. That's ten copies and a minimum of $2,500 assumed per individual file, we believe."

This is too whacko even for Jacko. Surely, the bill won't make it through the House?

In response to the 'sue your own customer' strategy been pursued by the US music industry, a series of protests and other boycotts have been organized. Central to the series of protests is the group Boycott-RIAA and Bill Evans.

The street protests are been organized for August 2nd with a clear aim of getting a message across to the big 5 labels, the RIAA and congress. There are already street leaders planning protests in states including Texas, New Mexico and Georgia. A series of protests are been planed for various venues in California. The street protests have been gaining large momentum in recent days.

One person who plans to distribute anti-US music industry information on August 2 told Slyck that that he was doing it to show the music industry how much they have lost touch with their own consumer.

Boycott-RIAA are also, in line with the EFF, encouraging P2P users to pick up the phone and contact your Congress person and Senators on Friday August 1st to encourage them to hold hearings on p2p and file sharing.

Some other groups are attempting to organize an indefinite boycott of CD purchases from August 1.

Consumers have started to protest at attempts by the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) to sue individuals for downloading files from peer-to-peer (P2P) sites such as Kazaa and Grokster.

Users are furious that the RIAA has issued subpoenas to internet service providers (ISPs) to force them to identify customers who share music.

The RIAA claims that downloaders illegally share copyrighted music, costing the industry millions.

But websites detailing the music of RIAA members have been put on the internet to aid boycotts, while street protests have been planned in a number of US states, including Texas, New Mexico and Georgia.

In California, protests have been planned for various venues as anti-RIAA momentum grows.

"They are picking on the kids, hoping their parents will go crazy and scream at their children for doing something the RIAA says is illegal," claimed Wayne Rosso (pictured), president at P2P network Grokster.

"But the parents are going to ask: 'Why are you suing me because my kid downloaded a couple of files? You must be out of your mind'."

Rosso described the RIAA's actions as "insane" and predicted that the organisation could find its mission to sue individuals blowing up in its face.

He pointed out that the growing backlash in the US could prove more damaging to the industry than the cost of illegal downloads, and said the only result of legal action would be to turn more than a quarter of Americans into instant "felons".

Rosso also disputed a recent Nielsen/NetRatings survey, which purports to show that use of file sharing applications has fallen 15 per cent since the RIAA began to threaten users with legal action.

"These figures were from the week 29 June up to 6 July, which runs into Independence Day celebrations. The kids who download files are on holiday," he said.

"But if there has been a fall-off can they produce evidence that CD sales have risen? I think not."

But despite the RIAA's attacks on downloaders in the US, there is unlikely to be much effect on other countries where file sharing is also common.

According to Rosso, the successful launch of a paid-for edition of the Grokster software shows just how little impact the RIAA's legal moves will have globally.

"The software is selling like hot cakes, including in the US; but most of our downloads come from London, England," he added.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Internet users who allow others to copy songs from their hard drives could face prison time under legislation introduced by two Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday.

The bill is the strongest attempt yet to deter the widespread online song copying that recording companies say has led to a decline in CD sales.

Sponsored by Michigan Rep. John Conyers and California Rep. Howard Berman, the bill would make it easier to slap criminal charges on Internet users who copy music, movies and other copyrighted files over "peer-to-peer" networks.

The recording industry has aggressively pursued Napster, Kazaa and other peer-to-peer networks in court and recently announced it planned to sue individual users as well.

In a series of hearings on Capitol Hill last spring, lawmakers condemned online song swapping and expressed concern the networks could spread computer viruses, create government security risks and allow children access to pornography.

Few online copyright violators have faced criminal charges so far. A New Jersey man pleaded guilty to distributing a digital copy of the movie "The Hulk" in federal court three weeks ago, but the Justice Department has not taken action against Internet users who offer millions of copies of songs each day.

The Conyers-Berman bill would operate under the assumption that each copyrighted work made available through a computer network was copied at least 10 times for a total retail value of $2,500. That would bump the activity from a misdemeanor to a felony, carrying a sentence of up to five years in jail.

It would also outlaw the practice of videotaping a movie in the theater, a favorite illicit method of copying movies.

"While existing laws have been useful in stemming this problem, they simply do not go far enough," said Conyers, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.

A Conyers staffer said the bill had won the backing of many Democrats but Republicans had yet to endorse it.

The staffer said backers hoped to discuss the bill at a hearing on Thursday and combine it next week with another sponsored by Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith.

A Smith spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

Peer-to-peer users who swap copyrighted files could be in danger of becoming federal felons, under a new proposal backed by Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Their legislation, introduced Wednesday, would punish an Internet user who shares even a single file without permission from a copyright holder with prison terms of up to five years and fines of up to $250,000.

Written by Michigan's John Conyers, the senior Democrat on the House judiciary committee, the Author, Consumer, and Computer Owner Protection and Security Act (ACCOPS) represents Congress' boldest attempt yet to shutter peer-to-peer networks, which the major record labels and movie studios view as a serious threat.

Currently, under a little-known 1997 law called the No Electronic Theft Act, many P2P users are technically already violating criminal laws. But if the ACCOPS bill were to succeed, prosecutors would not have to prove that a copyrighted file was repeatedly downloaded. Conyers' proposal would require them to prove only that the file was publicly accessible.

Other sponsors of ACCOPS are Reps. Howard Berman of California, Adam Schiff of California, Marty Meehan of Massachusetts, Robert Wexler of Florida and Anthony Weiner of New York. No Republican has supported the proposal.

One legal scholar viewed the legislation as an over-the-top measure.

"The business of expanding the criminal law so that making unauthorized personal copies of copyrighted works becomes a criminal violation is overreacting six ways from Tuesday," said Jessica Litman, who teaches copyright law at Wayne State University. "It's exceptional. But that does seem to be what the bill is trying to do."

Litman said that, without ACCOPS, criminal copyright infringement currently is "hard to prove, because you (have) to prove that a copy was actually distributed."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group in San Francisco, also criticized the bill. "Jailing people for file sharing is not the answer," EFF lawyer Fred von Lohmann said. "Proponents of this bill are casting aside privacy, innovation and even our personal liberty as collateral damage in their war against file sharing."

ACCOPS would also do the following:

• Require that anyone distributing certain search software include a notice that "clearly and conspicuously" warns downloaders that the software may offer a security and privacy risk. The definition of search software is broad and includes any application that "enables third parties to store data" on a computer. Violators could face up to six months in prison.
• Punish anyone who knowingly provides false contact information, with intent to defraud, while registering a domain name. Penalties would include fines and up to five years in prison.
• Order the U.S. Department of Justice to share information with foreign governments to aid in tracking suspected copyright infringers. Information that can be shared includes "the technological means through which violations of the copyright law has occurred" and "the identity and location of the person who has committed such violation."
• Create a new copyright crime of recording a "motion picture as it is being performed or displayed in a motion picture theater."

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced on June 25, 2003, that it will begin suing users of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing systems within the next few weeks. According to the announcement, the RIAA will be targeting users who upload/share "substantial" amounts of copyrighted music. The RIAA has stated that it will choose who to sue by using software that scans users' publicly available P2P directories and then identifies the ISP of each user. Then, using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the RIAA will subpoena the ISP for each user's name, address, and other personal information in order to sue that user.

While there is no way to know exactly what the RIAA is going to do, who it is going to sue, or even how much music qualifies as a "substantial" amount, users of P2P networks can take the following steps to reduce their chances of being sued.

Tired of being treated like a criminal online?

"You're in good company."

That's the message on the EFF's campaign page zeroing in on the RIAA's latest attempt to use file sharing as an excuse to continue retarding the natural growth of online music 'distribution' in the interests of maintaining the Big Five labels' offline profits.

"File-sharing has enabled music fans from around the world to build the largest library of recorded music in history,' says the EFF. "While this should be cause for celebration, large record labels have spent the last three years attacking peer-to-peer (P2P) technology and the people who use it. But neither user-empowering technologies nor consumers' desire for easy access to digital music are evil. Targeting technologists and users is not addressing the real problem."

The EFF is also running a great ad which among other things states, "... the record labels are bullying ISPs and hunting down college kids in an effort to shut down file-sharing."

But the RIAA, too, has thoughts on the subject.

On its re-designed hack-proof site, "Music is the world's universal form of communication," it states, going on,

"It touches every person of every culture on the globe ..."

What? Has the RIAA finally realised where it's at?

Not a chance.

The full sentence reads, "It touches every person of every culture on the globe" ... "to the tune of $40 billion annually, and the US recording industry accounts for fully one-third of that world market."

Rumours that the RIAA changed the look of its webpage so it wouldn't resemble boycott-riaa are, of course, true.

The war on filesharing doesn't look to be ending anytime soon, and the games of technological one-upmanship will likely continue on for as long as the internet survives. Broadband users still continue to share files, and the RIAA still continues press forward, sending out nastygrams and making examples out of people in court. The RIAA recently turned up the heat after winning their court case against Verizon. They then added more fuel to that fire by stating that they'd be targetting the biggest sharers out there.

So what have the filesharers done to combat this?

Some have voiced their opinions by boycotting the RIAA, which will be about as effective as the attempts to boycott Nissan for their domain name skulldoggery. A few have gone as far as to repeatedly hack the RIAA's website, though this generally reinforces the RIAA's ideology that all in favor of file-sharing are rebellious, law breaking criminals.

So what's the only thing left? Well, you could setup private file-sharing between yourself and some trusted friends, but then you have limited content. So what is there really left to do?

Anonymous, secured, peer-to-peer networks.

Earthstation5 promises the ability to go into "stealth mode". This means that your data is relayed through one of their many public proxies, masking your IP address. Right now, just like every other filesharing application early on in its lifespan, it's particularly slow. Also, thoughts come to mind about availability of bandwidth of public proxies. If everyone uses it, then won't the proxies become extremely bogged down?

There are other features of ESV. Aside from the one-click "stealth mode" proxy server, it allows for SSL. It also sends data using the UDP protocol, allowing for more efficient bandwidth usage. This also means that companies can't "batch scan" for users sharing files. The only way they could do so, is if they were in fact connected to the ESV network. ESV also uses Dynamic ports, making it more difficult for ISP's to do any traffic shaping (bandwidth limiting) of ESV.

But is it enough? Is it enough to protect the identity of those who wish to share files freely from large organizations like the RIAA/MPAA? ESV boasts that it doesn't display your IP address, but anyone with at least a miniscule level of computer proficiency can find other means of obtaining an IP address. So the question is, do the proxies really work? Will they continue to work when the masses join? Only time, (and the joining of masses) will tell.

EarthStation5 also addresses common flaws found in other filesharing applications. ESV has the ability to search for your desired file(s) across multiple super-nodes, offering better availability. The program also proactively ensures that the files are there, so that you're not trying to download from a host who's been offline for 30 minutes already. Also, ESV has employed a group of entrusted users which can put the "Green Light" on verified files. Supposedly, this means that you're guaranteed not to have a fake, or corrupted file.

The RIAA knows about this. But do they know how to combat it? How can they shut it down? They can't go after the developers, as they're based out of Palestine. International laws on filesharing are flaky at best, and as evidenced in the RIAA's attempts to prosecute the makers of KaZaa, finding and prosecuting individuals scattered around the globe is no easy task.

Can they target supernodes? Perhaps they may be able to build up a case that they're relaying pirated data, but the law states that only those who share the files are responsible. At best, the RIAA could only force the supernodes to release the IP addresses of those who share files through their proxies, but these proxies are intentionally setup to not carry logs of this information. So, what can you do? Make the proxies liable? But then you would make every single ISP and every single router on the internet liable for copyrighted material.

So now what? Only time can tell, but the game of cat and mouse will go on, and on, and on...

With the record industry preparing to sue its customers -- at least those who download without paying -- now comes the next step: file-sharing services that promise to keep users anonymous.

Recording Industry Association of America officials say they can find any song swapper on services such as Kazaa and Grokster using simple tracking software. But new services such as Earth Station 5 and eDonkey2000 say they can protect the identity of their users. And established file-sharing services say they will adapt to protect their customers.

The RIAA's actions ''will force us to come up with solutions that will make it harder, if not impossible, to detect who the users are,'' says Elan Oren of Imesh, a song- and game-swap firm based in Israel. ''It's the never-ending game of the firewall and the hacker.''

Imesh -- which has been in operation since 1999 and somehow never was sued, unlike Napster, Scour, Aimster, Audio Galaxy, Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster -- has 50 million registered users. Oren suggests that, instead of suing its customer base, the RIAA make peace with file sharers and learn to co-exist.

''By attacking its users, they are motivating them not to pay,'' he says. ''We met with them and begged them to make their material available on Imesh for a fee, because we know our users would gladly pay. (The RIAA) refused.''

Songs on Imesh are traded the traditional way -- click on a title to download the file, and it ends up on your hard drive. New programs such as eDonkey and Earth Station 5 do it differently, cutting a file into little pieces and reassembling it when it arrives at your hard drive -- a process that makes it harder for file sharers to be tracked and unmasked.

Still, Internet detective Mark Ishikawa insists that despite new technologies, if it happens online, he'll find it. ''If five buddies are sharing in their dorm room, that's one thing,'' says the CEO of BayTSP, which works for studios and record labels. ''Once it gets to critical mass and goes out onto the Internet, you can't hide.''

Another avenue that analysts expect to lure file sharers is instant messaging. AOL, MSN and Yahoo's chat programs have nearly 100 million users among them. Besides conversing with buddies, users of the software can send photos and music files to each other, without being tracked by the record industry.

For now, the RIAA says it will stay focused on the more established file-sharing programs. ''We can't solve every problem, only the biggest ones before us,'' says RIAA president Cary Sherman.

Kazaa, the most popular swap service with more than 240 million users, shows no sign of slowing down despite the legal threats: 890 million files were being traded Thursday afternoon by 4.3 million users.

WASHINGTON, June 25 (Reuters) - A recording-industry trade group said on Wednesday it plans to sue hundreds of individuals who illegally distribute copyrighted songs over the Internet, expanding its anti-piracy fight into millions of homes.

The Recording Industry Association of America said it hopes to curb online song-swapping by tracking down the heaviest users of popular "peer to peer" services like Kazaa and suing them for damages that could range up to $150,000 per violation.

The announcement from the RIAA, whose members include AOL Time Warner Inc and Sony Corp, marks a sharp escalation in the industry's battle against Internet piracy, which so far has concentrated on shutting down the services themselves.

Peer-to-peer users now copy more than 2.6 billion songs, movies and other files from each others' computers each month, according to industry estimates. Executives believe such file trading has led to a 14 percent slide in revenues since pioneering service Napster was introduced in 1999.

The RIAA has shut down Napster and several other peer-to-peer networks, and has leaned on universities, businesses and other institutions to make sure their computers block such activity. It sued four college students who operated file-trading networks on campus, reaching settlements between $12,000 and $17,500 each.

But the industry has until now shied away from directly suing users, opting instead to send them online warnings and clutter up the networks with dummy files.

RIAA President Cary Sherman said the time was right to go after individual users because a recent U.S. court ruling makes it easier to track down copyright violators through their Internet providers. A U.S. appeals court in Washington said earlier this month that copyright investigators do not need a subpoena to force Internet providers to reveal the name of customers who may be distributing copyrighted files.

While peer-to-peer users may believe that they remain anonymous online, "you are engaging in an activity that is every bit as public as setting up a stall at a local flea market," Sherman said in a conference call.

Other music executives said legitimate services like Apple Computer Inc.'s(NasdaqNM:AAPL - News) iTunes are beginning to catch on and provide a viable alternative.

Starting on Thursday, investigators will track down users who make their digital-music collections available for copying, he said. Those who download songs but do not allow others to copy them will not initially be targeted.

The trade group will probably file several hundred lawsuits in six to eight weeks, Sherman said.

Music fans who wish to avoid legal action should change the settings on their peer-to-peer software to block access to their hard drives or un-install the software completely, he said.

Reaction to the announcement was mixed.

The president of the Grokster peer-to-peer network said that while he does not support copyright infringement, the move could further estrange avid music fans.

"The RIAA, in their infinite wisdom, has decided to not only alienate their own customers but attempt to drive them into bankruptcy through litigation," said Grokster President Wayne Rosso, who won a courtroom victory in April when a judge ruled that his network should not be shut down because it could not control what users chose to trade.

One copyright expert who has clashed with the RIAA in the past said she preferred that the industry go after big violators rather than relying on copy-protection technologies that could limit law-abiding citizens' rights.

"On a visceral level it doesn't sound like it's the smartest thing to do, but obviously they've done the cost-benefit analysis and they've decided they have to do it," said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a nonprofit advocacy group.

The Recording Industry Association of America said it has sent cease-and-desist letters to five people whom it suspects of illegally offering massive amounts of copyrighted music through peer-to-peer networks.

The RIAA learned of the swappers' identities after a protracted legal battle with Verizon Communications, which unsuccessfully fought attempts to unmask its subscribers, citing concerns about privacy and legal liability.

Four of the five persons whom the letters targeted are the Verizon subscribers involved in the legal case. An RIAA representative said on Thursday that the fifth recipient is a subscriber of Internet service provider EarthLink, which agreed to turn over the individual's name after an appeals court panel ordered Verizon to unveil the identities of its piracy-suspected subscribers earlier this month.

The RIAA would not identify the suspects' names, nor would it comment on whether the subscribers had responded to the letters or whether it planned to follow up with further legal action.

The record labels have stepped up their pursuit of individual file swappers in recent months.

In April, the RIAA filed its first lawsuit against students whom it suspected of peer-to-peer piracy. Until then, it had sued companies that provided file-sharing technologies, not the people who used them. In May, the four students agreed to a settlement that required each student to pay the RIAA between $12,000 and $17,000.

A recent court decision also may bolster the RIAA's plan to pursue individuals rather than companies. The RIAA had argued that the parent companies of the Grokster and Morpheus services violate copyright law by providing software that enables piracy. In April, a judge disagreed, saying the makers of Grokster and Morpheus weren't liable for copyright infringement and thus leaving the record labels little alternative but to go after individuals who use the services.

Following the Grokster ruling, RIAA CEO Hilary Rosen warned that "individual infringers cannot expect to remain anonymous when they engage in this illegal activity."

While Verizon lost their recent broadband privacy related court battle against the RIAA, so far the music industry hasn't brought out the whipping post. According to these Associated Press and New York Times reports, the four users who were recently identified will so far only receive "cease and desist" letters. What will happen if they fail to cease and desist isn't clear. The RIAA would not reveal either the letters themselves or the names of the four individuals involved. Of interesting note in the article is mention of a fifth file trader over at Earthlink, whose identity was released freely after the original suit.

The RIAA's battle against the P2P networks seems to be bogged down. Networks such as eDonkey, FastTrack, Piolet, and others are stronger than ever, as the lashes the P2P community received from the blows of the RIAA have strengthened their resistance to attack. Now, while the RIAA contemplates what to do with the recently gained identities of alleged copyright infringers, they are faced with the crisis of how to convince a major portion of the population that what they are doing is wrong.

The RIAA has tried everything. They have taken down the big centralized networks, most notably Napster. They have flooded networks with files that look like they are one thing but are really just FAKES. They have even contemplated ways of attacking the computers of users of file-sharing networks. They have attempted to extend the laws covering copyright infringement to the act of file-sharing itself, denying any legitimate use -- there is no legitimate art to them that is not copyrighted. They have sent letters to corporations and institutions to try to convince them of the misconception that these networks in and of themselves are illegal.

Nothing has worked for them.

So according to a recent N.Y. Times article, they are taking their battle in two directions. First, they are going to try to legitimize the technology so that we will be offered a great selection of music for just a buck a song. Second, they are going to do something with these identities that they are getting from ISP's like Verizon and Earthlink. The problem is what to do with these P2P users.

According to U.S.A. Today, the RIAA has no public plans for what they are going to do with the alleged thieves. Can the RIAA be wondering how 43 million other thieves - who don't consider themselves thieves - are going to react when they begin trying to send all those millions of people to court proceedings? They must be. Their silence is speaking. They are testing, watching, instilling fear. They are in a real pickle now, however. They have got to make an example of these people or there will be nothing to stop us all from doing what we feel we should be able to do. But what kind of backlash will that bring?

Therein lies the RIAA's Dilemma.

Verizon this week reluctantly handed over the names of file traders at the behest of the RIAA, unmasking anonymous customers who had no idea they were the center of what will likely be a history defining industry legal battle. Late Thursday Verizon revealed the identities of customers accused of trading hundreds of files after being forced to comply by the U.S. Court of Appeals. The ruling could open the flood gate for a flurry of subpoenas from anyone looking to nail broadband customers to the wall for copyright infringement.

With this latest loss for Verizon, the job of enforcing copyright now begins to teeter and fall into the lap of network providers. In an industry begging for additional content, the entertainment and telecommunications industries are too busy fighting one another to cooperate long enough to make truly interesting content offerings a reality. That's in part because, the entertainment industry has charged, the ISP's have been making a backroom killing off of broadband file trading services and don't really want things to change.

According Sarah Deutsch, the Verizon attorney who has had a front row seat for the entire process, the company is planning to continue the battle on principle, something many wondered about when the whole thing began. "We're not going to become the Internet police for RIAA," she notes. "There's a delicate balance between copyright holders' rights and our customers' rights that needs to be preserved. RIAA crossed over the line."

As pointed out in a recent interview with Declan McCullagh, the RIAA battle has given Verizon some great press, helping the company to at least partially shake their lumbering anti-competitive image and placing them in the company of some strange bedfellows, many of whom they've come to blows with in year's past.

"It's been an interesting time to be on the same side as groups like Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We find ourselves with shared interests in making sure that fair use is preserved, that users' expectation in new digital services are fulfilled, and that copyright is ultimately a law that involves balancing the interests of many parties. We have a 300-pound gorilla on one side of the scale. Many of us are joining together on the other, to reach that necessary balance."

That was in August of 2002. Now that the smoke has cleared and Verizon has been handed a loss, it will be interesting to see if the stance taken by Deutsch is one that Verizon clings closely to. "It's probably time for Congress to step in to offer a legislative solution," Deutsch said this week after the loss.

According to a statement issued by RIAA president Cary Sherman, "The courts have repeatedly affirmed that the DMCA subpoena authority is constitutional, and does not threaten anyone's free speech or privacy rights."

Both sides concede the end confrontation will occur before the Supreme Court, which has some serious decisions to make about how the DMCA can be applied.

In the interim, it will be interesting to see what the RIAA will do with the names, and if other entertainment and software makers will begin to seriously pursue the consumer without fear of customer alientation. When asked what the organization was planning to do with the names, the RIAA informed the press this week they were "weighing their options."

With an estimated 2.6 billion files (the RIAA's numbers) illegally downloaded each month around the world, can we expect a flurry of legal bloodshed now that the flood gates have opened?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday ordered Verizon Communications to immediately reveal the names of two customers suspected of illegally distributing hundreds of songs over the Internet.

Verizon said it would hand over the customers' names to recording-industry investigators within a day or so, opening them up to lawsuits or other disciplinary action. But the telecommunications giant said it would continue to fight the industry in court over the proper way to crack down on the online song-swapping that record labels say hurts CD sales.

The Recording Industry Association of America (news - web sites) has been aggressively trying to shut down "peer to peer" networks like Kazaa and Morpheus that allow users to download songs for free, and has also been pursuing individuals who use those services.

The RIAA asked Verizon last summer for the name of one customer believed to be sharing music illegally and added a second request this past winter. Verizon refused to do so without a court subpoena, saying such a move would violate customer privacy and due-process rights protected by the U.S. Constitution.

A federal court ordered Verizon to reveal the names of the suspected song-swappers in April, prompting Verizon to ask a higher court to stay the order while it appeals the case.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington declined to suspend the order, allowing RIAA investigators to easily obtain the names of other Internet users it suspects of trading music illegally.

"The Court of Appeals decision confirms our long-held position that music pirates must be held accountable for their actions, and not be allowed to hide behind the company that provides their Internet service," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement.

Verizon Associate General Counsel Sarah Deutsch said the court order could open the door to a wave of similar requests, enabling stalkers to use the process to track down victims.

"This subpoena process is like allowing someone to go the clerk at the U.S. Post Office and demanding the key to that person's home because you claim that that person has a piece of your property," said Deutsch, who noted that the RIAA had sent out erroneous requests in the past.

An RIAA official said the trade group had not decided whether to sue the two individuals or take other action.

The Court of Appeals is scheduled to hear the case in September.

The record industry is quietly financing the testing of software designed to sabotage the computers and internet connections of copyright offenders. This New York Times Report published over the weekend claims the various counter-measures being worked on have "varying degrees of legality" and are more extreme than any tactics the RIAA has focused on in the past (such as publishing bogus files or sending instant messages). Among the nasty software being tested are programs that can freeze your PC, attempt to delete any pirated files on your PC, and even one that via "interdiction" could choke your internet connection.

Some of the world's largest record labels are quietly financing the creation of programs by small software firms that, if implemented, would sabotage the computers and Internet connections of people who download pirated music, according to a published report.

Citing industry executives, The New York Times reported in an article that appeared on its Web site on Saturday, that the efforts bear varying degrees of legality including attacking a computer's Internet connection to slow or halt downloads and overwhelming distribution networks with programs that masquerade as music files.

"There are a lot of things you can do--some quite nasty," the Times quoted Marc Morgenstern, chief executive of software company Overpeer, as saying. The company receives support from several large media companies, it said.

If large record labels introduce the programs, it would be the most aggressive tactic yet in the music piracy wars by the recording industry, which has claimed that music piracy costs it more than $4 billion in annual sales worldwide.

Last month a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that file-sharing services Grokster and Morpheus were not guilty of copyright infringement.

The Times said approaches under development range from relatively modest in degree to quite severe.

One method is a "Trojan horse" program that simply redirects users to Web sites where they can legitimately buy the songs they had tried to download.

Another locks up a computer for a certain amount of time, minutes or hours, risking the loss of data that was not saved if the user restarts the computer, the paper reported.

The industry's big five labels--Vivendi's Universal Music Group, AOL Time Warner's Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Bertelsmann's BMG and EMI Group--have all backed the development of counterpiracy programs, according the industry executives, but none would discuss details publicly, the paper reported.

Four university students on Thursday agreed to pay thousands of dollars each to settle online music piracy charges, ending the record industry's most aggressive thrust yet against individual file swappers.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued four students separately last month for running services that searched computers connected to their college networks for MP3 song files. The students also shared copyrighted music from own machines. The lawsuits marked the first time that the RIAA directly sued students, as opposed to companies, associated with peer-to-peer piracy.

The settlements will see each student making payments to the RIAA totaling between $12,000 and $17,000, split into annual installments between 2003 and 2006. The lawsuits as filed could have entailed damages (in theory) of up to $100 million.

"The record companies indicated right from the beginning that they were amenable to settling this case," said Howard Ende, a Drinker Biddle & Reath attorney who represented defendant Princeton sophomore Daniel Peng. "In my view, this was not about Daniel Peng, per se, but was a utilization of the legal system to make a point--essentially to intimidate Internet users."

The lawsuits--on top of a series of communications that the RIAA and other copyright holders have had with universities over the past year--have led to a crackdown on campus file swapping and the kind of network search tools created by Peng and the other students.

College officials recently reprimanded a large group of students at Pennsylvania State University for using or operating similar services. This week, the New Jersey Institute of Technology banned the use of file-sharing software on its campus, citing the danger of lawsuits, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Also last month, Naval Academy officials said they had disciplined a group of 85 students who were allegedly caught using campus resources for file sharing.

Despite the settlements, the students did not admit any guilt.

"I don't believe that I did anything wrong," 18-year-old Peng said in a statement. "I am glad that the case has been settled amicably, and I hope that, for the sake of artists, the larger issues can soon be resolved."

In their suits against Peng and the three other students, the RIAA called the services they had created "mini-Napsters." Ende said that Peng, as well as his attorneys, believed that the service he had run was more like Google than Napster, since it had simply searched computers that were hooked up to the campus network, whether or not they contained his software.

As part of their settlements, the students agreed not to knowingly infringe the record label's copyrights while using the Internet. They will also shut down their network search services. Peng's attorneys said he will instead provide links to a record industry Web site.

"We believe it's in everyone's best interest to come to a quick resolution, and that these four defendants now clearly understand the seriousness with which we view this type of illegal behavior," said RIAA Senior Vice President Matt Oppenheim in a statement. "We have also sent a clear signal to others that this kind of activity is illegal."

The RIAA said that any future similar enforcement actions could lead to "stiffer settlement obligations."

A U.S district court on Thursday ruled for a second time that Verizon Communications must give up the identity of an anonymous Internet subscriber accused of swapping music files online.

The case has been closely watched by entertainment industry figures and privacy advocates as a key test for how easily file-swappers can be found and identified by copyright holders.

An earlier court decision that also said Verizon would have to give up the information had been temporarily put on hold. Thursday's decision will force the telephone company to give up its subscriber's name in 14 days, unless an appeals court steps in to block the decision pending further review.

"Verizon cannot demonstrate that it has a substantial likelihood of prevailing...and has not shown that it will be irreparably harmed if a stay pending appeal is not granted," Judge John Bates wrote in his decision.

The decision closes a second round of fighting in district court over the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA's) attempt to subpoena Verizon for information about a subscriber accused of offering music files for download using Kazaa.

Bates earlier ruled that the RIAA was able to subpoena the subscriber's information under existing copyright law, even without an open legal case. Verizon had contended that the trade group needed to file suit against the anonymous subscriber for a subpoena to be valid.

Thursday's ruling stems from a new round of sparring, following a second RIAA subpoena issued in February. Verizon had asked that the subpoena be deemed invalid on constitutional grounds and that the original decision be put on hold until an appeals court could rule on the issue.

Bates denied both motions. The subpoena laws that the RIAA is using do not violate constitutional separations of power, Bates said, nor do the laws violate computer users' free speech rights.

The RIAA, whose position had been supported by the U.S. Department of Justice in recent days, welcomed Bates' ruling.

"Today's decision makes clear that these individuals cannot rely on their (Internet service providers) to shield them from accountability," Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, said in a statement. "If users of pirate peer-to-peer sites don't want to be identified, they should not break the law by illegally distributing music."

Verizon said it would immediately appeal the ruling.

"Today's ruling goes far beyond the interests of large copyright monopolists--such as the RIAA--in enforcing its copyrights," Verizon Senior Vice President John Thorne said in a statement. "This decision exposes anyone who uses the Internet to potential predators, scam artists and crooks, including identity thieves and stalkers. We will continue to use every legal means available to protect our subscribers' privacy and will immediately seek a stay from the U.S. Court of Appeals."

In somewhat of a trend reversal for RIAA versus file sharing legal battles, an LA federal judge has handed a victory to file swapping services Streamcast networks and Grokster, ruling that their technology is not liable for the copyright abuses that occurs within them. According to a statement by Judge Stephen Wilson, "Defendants distribute and support software, the users of which can and do choose to employ it for both lawful and unlawful ends." Wilson also made the determination that "Grokster and Streamcast are not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders or copy machines, both of which can be and are used to infringe copyrights."

The RIAA has worked very hard over the years to establish a culture of fear among corporations, universities, and file traders by threatening to sue every one of them silly....and it's working. Penn State officials this week pulled the plug on 220 students who had been heavy file traders on the University's network; the Navy recently disciplined 85 students for file trading, and now the RIAA has launched a suit against the financial backers of long dead Napster apparently just to drive the point home. As the Inquirer wonders, since most file trading occurs at home, how long is it before the lawsuits are against regular, residential users?

The U.S. government positioned itself with the recording industry in its dispute with Verizon Communications on Friday, saying a digital-copyright law invoked by record labels to track down Internet song-swappers did not violate the U.S. Constitution.

The move, while expected, came as a blow to the Internet access provider as it struggles to shield its customers.

"We would have expected they would have recognized there are important privacy and safety issues beyond the narrow copyright claims here," said Verizon Vice President Sarah Deutsch, who is also associate general counsel.

Verizon and a recording-industry trade group have been in court since September, arguing over whether Verizon should be forced to help crack down on the online song-swapping that record labels blame for a decline in CD sales.

The Recording Industry Association of America says Verizon is required under law to protect copyrights. Verizon has said it is willing to help, but that the law only applies to Web pages stored on its computers, not the peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa that merely travel across its wires.

A district court sided with the recording industry in January. Verizon appealed the decision, and is arguing that the names of suspected copyright violators should not be revealed in the meantime.

Verizon argues that the law in question, the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, known as the DMCA, violates free-speech and due-process rights protected by the U.S. Constitution.

In a filing with the U.S. District Court in Washington, the Department of Justice said the law is not unconstitutional. The Justice Department is required to weigh in on cases where constitutional issues are raised.

Deutsch said she was disappointed that the Justice Department would take such a stand, as stalkers and other criminals could conceivably use the law to track down victims.

"The government's filing today supports the proposition that we have long advocated: copyright owners have a clear and unambiguous entitlement to determine who is infringing their copyrights online and that entitlement is constitutional," said Matt Oppenheimer, senior vice president for business and legal affairs at the RIAA.

"Verizon's persistent efforts to protect copy thieves on pirate peer-to-peer networks will not succeed," he said.

The Justice Department said the law did not violate the free-speech rights of everyday users because it is only targeted at those who violate copyrights.

"It is manifest that the DMCA's subpoena provision targets the identity of alleged copyright infringers, not spoken words or conduct commonly associated with expression," the Justice Department said.

The government also said the law did not violate due-process protections because nothing in the Constitution specifically barred the investigative process set up by the DMCA, which requires record labels to get approval from a court clerk before asking Verizon or other Internet providers to surrender customer names.

Verizon argues that record labels should be required to get permission from a judge, rather than a clerk, a move that would add another legal hurdle to any copyright investigation.

The company says such a move is necessary to protect user privacy because otherwise any copyright holder--or anybody claiming to be a copyright holder--could easily obtain the name and address of any Internet user.

Lawsuits against four college students accused of trading copyrighted songs are the biggest punch yet by the recording industry against its core audience, and has experts worried that the next step will be suing the colleges themselves.

The Recording Industry Association of America filed the suits Thursday in three federal courts, naming one student each at Michigan Technological University and Princeton University and two others from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who ran Napster-like file-sharing services on their campus computer networks.

The damages sought by the suits are astronomical: $150,000 per song, the maximum allowed by law. Multiply that by the 652,000 or so songs the RIAA alleges student Joseph Nievelt offered to other Michigan Tech students on his service, and the scope of the suit is clear.

That total? About $97.8 trillion -- yes, trillion with a T -- or enough money to buy every CD sold in America last year over again for the next 120,000 years, according to RIAA statistics. And that's just Nievelt's case.

RIAA senior vice president for business and legal affairs Matthew Oppenheim said the suits are intended to send a clear message to anyone running these types of services that punishment will be swift and severe.

Experts say they worry that the students, who are unlikely to actually have to pay those soaring sums, won't always be the sole targets of the RIAA's notoriously aggressive copyright defenses.

The RIAA has traditionally encouraged colleges to work with it and other industry groups, sending two letters in the past six months to university presidents urging them to take action against student violators.

But Oppenheim said he also expected Thursday's suits to be a notice to colleges officials who haven't kept track of what's happening on their networks. These weren't small violations, he stresses, and at this scale, the amount of Internet traffic generated by one account is huge.

His group didn't send its standard cease-and-desist letter to Michigan Tech before filing suit, something that Michigan Tech officials have publicly complained about. But this wasn't a typical situation, he said.

In a continuation of the organization's campaign against piracy, the Recording Industry Association of America yesterday filed suit against four college students who were hosting internal Napster trading systems on their respective college networks. Of the four students, only one has confirmed they are being sued, and as of yesterday, three of the four trading systems had been shut down. According to the RIAA's suit, the four defendants offered between 27,000 and 1 million songs each for free trading. The suit asks for the maximum punishment allowable by law, which would be $150,000 per copyright infringement or pirated song. If awarded, the settlements for each student could run in the millions of dollars.

College students, listen up: Don't mess with Texas.

Texas Rep. John Carter, that is.

During a recent hearing of the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property, the Republican congressman said jailing college students who download copyrighted music would help stop piracy.

"What these kids don't realize is that every time they pull up music and movies and make a copy, they are committing a felony under the United States code," Carter said in an interview. "If you were to prosecute someone and give them three years, I think this would act as a deterrent."

But some university officials say they have stepped up efforts to stop piracy on their networks, and packing kids off to prison won't solve the problem.

"I can't see turning millions of college students into criminals," said Graham Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State University. "We'd have to build a lot of new prisons to hold the lawbreakers engaged in piracy of copyrighted materials."

Carter said making an example of a few college students could go a long way toward bringing home the message that sharing and duplicating copyrighted materials is wrong.

"Sometimes it takes the shock value of someone actually being punished," Carter said. "In this particular instance it might also send a message to these kids that are operating on these networks that, 'Hey, I better stop.'"

Students would learn quickly that copying even one album is not worth the potential punishment, he said.

"That information sent out to kids would be a real eye opener," he said. "I think you would have a 50 percent falloff, at least, of these people (who are pirating files).

"I'm not out to get the kids, I'm out to get their attention."

Carter, now in his first term in the House, served as a state district judge for 20 years in Williamson County, known as the Lone Star State's toughest county for criminals. If rampant file sharing was going on back home, he said, people would likely be prosecuted.

"A felony conviction is a terrible thing to have on your record," Carter said. Among other things, he said, a person would not be able to become an officer in the U.S. military if convicted of a felony.

A statement from the Recording Industry Association of America seems to back Carter's point of view.

"We support criminal prosecution of those who break the law and believe that effective deterrence is a necessary part of combating piracy," an RIAA spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail.

In October, the RIAA sent a letter to 2,300 colleges and universities urging them to "impose effective remedies against violators." In response, colleges have "dramatically" stepped up their responses to piracy problems, according to Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel for the American Council on Education.

"Although one would like to have a simple solution to the problem of misuse of university bandwidth, the congressman's proposed solution does not go to the core elements of the issue," Steinbach said of Carter's push to prosecute college file traders. "There is no simple answer."

An attack on corporate use of peer-to-peer software is under way, as companies face increasing pressure from record labels and other copyright holders to stop employees from file trading.

The latest salvo against companies came last week, when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sent letters to about 300 companies providing evidence of specific instances of their internal networks being used to swap copyrighted songs, and warning of potential legal liability. The RIAA for months has been pressing companies to crack down on the use of file-swapping networks.

Corporations have been responding to this growing pressure in various ways, nearly all of which are giving companies increasing potential visibility into their employees' communications. Many have outlawed the use of file-trading programs, but in companies with sprawling internal networks, and hundreds or thousands of PCs connected to the Net, using high-tech tools to enforce these policies can still be a difficult task.

"Part of the problem is you have a trusted (network) session that's in theory being opened by a trusted user," said Jerry Periolat, president of Apreo, a company that sells network management and monitoring tools. "If you initiate this kind of connection from the desktop, it can be very hard to catch, because it's not coming in a way that a traditional firewall is going to stop."

The high-tech battle over peer-to-peer network usage has been going on for several years now, at least since network administrators at universities first started noticing that Napster use was suddenly taking up a huge proportion of schools' network bandwidth. The recent push from the RIAA and movie studios, with increasingly less veiled threats of lawsuits and liability, has added urgency to the effort, however.

With early generations of file-swapping software, it was a relatively simple task for network administrators to simply block the network "ports," or designated paths, that the software would use to communicate with the outside world. Many software programs use specific ports to communicate with each other, and so this proved effective. From CNET:

That capability has been lost with recent generations of file-swapping programs, however. Programs including Kazaa can switch which port they use, essentially trying all the network doors available until they find one that is open. Some also use the same path used by ordinary Web traffic--blocking this would block all of an employee's ability to visit outside Web sites, an unacceptable outcome for many companies.

In response, a generation of tools has emerged that looks closely at network traffic to see exactly what kind of information is included in the data stream, or scans employees' computers to see what kinds of software they have running.

Among the most popular network tools today are monitoring systems that can look inside a data stream and figure out what kind of protocol is being used to transfer the information. This tactic would not necessarily give monitors information about the data itself, but only its wrapper--a little like noting that a car is a Toyota gives little indication about who is actually driving it.

That protocol information can be used to block or prioritize traffic, however. Rick Koenig, a network engineer at Concordia University in Austin, says he's started using tools from Cisco to identify and de-emphasize file-swapping traffic on his school's networks.

"You can block it, or you can create policies to block it, or you can totally limit the amount of bandwidth that is available," Koenig said. "That's how we're doing it."

Another company, called Packeteer, has found considerable success helping companies monitor their traffic flow for file-swapping and other suspect applications. That company turned profitable in 2002 based in large part on sales of its net monitoring tools.

Aveo's software works differently, scanning computers connected to a company's internal network, looking for specified applications such as Kazaa, iMesh, BearShare or others that a company has decided to ban, block, or otherwise regulate. The software runs on a company's central server, but also contains a small desktop component that would live on each employee's desktop, and the two pieces work together to notify corporate administrators when banned software is running.

As pressure from the copyright holders mounts, these and other similar tools are likely to become the focus of even more attention from IT managers eager to eliminate security and legal risks.

"We…encourage you to adopt and fully implement employee policies and technical measures that prevent copyright infringement on your corporate network, as we will continue to monitor for infringing conduct and take any appropriate legal action necessary to protect our rights," the RIAA wrote last week in its letter to corporations whose employees were found to be using file-swapping software. "The consequences for not taking action…can be quite serious."

The music industry's leading trade group has sent letters to 300 U.S. companies complaining about alleged acts of piracy and copyright infringement in their corporate computer networks and warning of possible fines.

The letter from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a copy of which was obtained by Reuters on Monday, is the latest in the association's campaign to stem the tide of piracy and online file-sharing, which it blames in part for an industry slump that saw CD sales fall by 9 percent in 2002.

The RIAA has recently begun to track down individual users it says are among the worst offenders, and last month it distributed a guide to Fortune 1000 companies containing ways to prevent copyright abuse on their networks.

An RIAA representative declined to comment on the letter or name the companies that received it. The largest share of the letters, about 35 percent, went to technology companies, with 20 percent going to medical-related companies, 20 percent to manufacturing companies and the rest to other industries.

The letter tells the recipients of specific instances where people using Internet connections coming from the companies' networks accessed file-sharing services such as Kazaa and iMesh, where pirated songs and movies are readily available.

"In short, your computer network and resources are being used to illegally distribute copyrighted music on the Internet," the letter said. "We strongly urge you to take immediate steps to prevent the continued infringement of our members' sound recordings on your corporate network."

Those who received the letter were also sent a CD with logs of music files on the companies' networks that were being offered on the various file-swapping services.

The letter warned of potential penalties for copyright infringement, including fines and the seizure of equipment used in the process.

"These acts of infringement could expose your employees and your company to significant legal damages," the letter said.

Australian police have executed search warrants on Telstra, the country's largest phone company, as part of one of the nation's biggest investigations of online music piracy.

A representative for Telstra, which is also an Internet service provider, said Thursday that federal police visited one of its Melbourne offices last week in connection with alleged piracy that involved downloads of music potentially worth up to $36 million (60 million Australian dollars).

"There was a warrant executed in relation to that investigation, which was dealt with. But it is not a matter of a raid,'' the Telstra representative said.

Other ISPs were also targeted in the investigation, which is aimed at uncovering the activities of subscribers on servers and not directed at the companies themselves.

Telstra said police execute warrants for its records from "time to time.''

A representative for the federal police said the investigation is continuing and would not provide any further information.

The Australian, a national newspaper, said the wholesale value of the pirated music could be as a high as $36 million, making it one of Australia's largest investigations of copyright infringement.

The recording industry has launched its most aggressive offensive yet against illegal music swapping over the internet.

In the Federal Court in Sydney today, record companies will try to seize evidence of song swapping by students using the computer networks of the universities of Sydney, Melbourne and Tasmania.

Record labels in the United States and Europe have warned the world's top 1000 companies they must stop illegal music swapping on their networks or face legal action.

Australia's major record companies, Sony, EMI and Universal, are acting on suspicions that students, and possibly staff, are using the universities' computers to swap digital music files. The industry says the three universities have not divulged information, but that others have co-operated.

Michael Speck, the director of Music Industry Piracy Investigations, which tracks swapping on behalf of the Australian record industry, believes the illegal file trading is significant.

"And we're not talking about one track here, one track there," he said. "We're talking piracy, significant examples of piracy."

The University of Sydney says it knows of one student who established a website with a handful of songs for swapping on its system. It has "isolated the website, and will hand over the evidence at an appropriate time", a spokesman said.

There are hundreds of thousands of song files on personal computers worldwide. They are "swapped" for free using special software, robbing artists and their record companies of royalties.

But the president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, Cameron Murphy, said the industry was wrong to target students.

"The focus of these organisations should be on people who are running or pirating music for clear commercial benefit," he said. "I don't think there is any benefit to the community in prosecuting individuals who do this as a one-off. I mean, we'd have half the students in Australia in jail."

Mr Murphy also questioned whether the universities should be forced into the role of policing their students.

Mr Speck denied the industry was making an example of the universities. "Somebody gets caught being involved in a wrongdoing and they utter, 'We're not the only ones, why are we here?' Well, you got caught."

Utilizing your workplace bandwidth to download that Duran Duran mp3 could bring some serious legal repercussions for your company, a new brochure being circulated by the RIAA this week warns. The "Corporate Policy Guide to Copyright Use and Security" (pdf file) includes a sample memo to employees, and informs businesses that "such unauthorized copying of music, movies and other copyright material is illegal and can tarnish corporate reputations, increase security risks for computer systems, and put organizations at risk of legal liability." Last October the RIAA sent a similarly themed letter to 1000 corporations, but has so far only taken legal action against one company for hosting mp3's on a corporate server. (they settled for a cool $million)

Verizon Communications struggled Thursday to convince a skeptical judge that it should not be forced to reveal the name of a customer alleged to have downloaded more than 600 songs over the Internet.

U.S. District Judge John Bates ordered Verizon last month to give the name of the alleged song-swapper to recording companies who are trying to crack down on the practice, which they believe cuts into compact-disc sales.

Verizon asked Bates to suspend the order while it appeals his decision to a higher court, arguing that the appeal would be pointless if the record companies already knew the alleged infringer's identity. "Once the cat's out of the bag, it can't be put back," said attorney Andrew McBride, who argued the case for Verizon.

An attorney for a recording-industry trade group said Verizon's argument was weakened by its previous suggestion that record companies use an alternate legal method to get the user's identity. "This is not a case of whether the cat is going to get out of the bag; this is a case of how the cat is going to get out of the bag,'' Don Verilli, representing the Recording Industry Association of America, told the judge.

Under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Internet providers have voluntarily shut down Web sites that contain infringing material, but Verizon has balked at requests to disconnect users who trade songs with each other directly over peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa and the now-defunct Napster. Such a move would violate users' privacy and free-speech rights, Verizon said, because it would require Internet providers to police their users' Internet activity, rather than simply the material they post on Verizon server computers.

The move could have severe consequences for Internet providers worldwide if record companies--or anybody claiming copyright violations--could easily obtain the name and address of any Internet user, McBride argued. Bates did not seemed inclined to change his mind at Thursday's hearing, and questioned whether his ruling would have the sort of impact claimed by Verizon. "I'm just hard-pressed to understand how I am supposed to take into account all these consequences to Internet providers, when it's just a single decision by a lowly district court judge,'' Bates said. Bates said he would rule quickly.

Verizon has indicated that if the judge refuses to suspend his order, the company will ask the appeals court to suspend it. The RIAA represents the five largest recording companies: AOL Time Warner's Warner Music; Sony's Sony Music; Bertelsmann AG's BMG; Vivendi Universal's Universal Music Group; and EMI Group.

Trade groups for the record and film industries are turning up the heat in their efforts to get corporations to crack down on music and video piracy conducted on workplace networks. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) are jointly distributing a brochure warning of the dangers of Internet piracy to hundreds of corporations around the world. The document, which is going out to the Fortune 1000 companies in the United States, urges the companies to crack down on employees' copyright infringement--or face legal consequences.

"Unfortunately, employees of companies and other organizations sometimes use their employers' computer systems to engage in unauthorized copying of music, movies and other copyrighted material," says an attached letter jointly signed by RIAA Chief Executive Hilary Rosen and MPAA Chief Executive Jack Valenti. "Such activities on your systems can put your organization at legal risk, tarnish your organization's reputation and increase security risks for your computer systems."

As they pursue file-trading software companies such as Sharman Networks in court, the big copyright-holder trade associations are increasingly trying to stem Net piracy at its source. Late in 2002, the U.S. organizations sent similar letters to Fortune 500 executives and legal counsels at universities around the country, warning them that their high-speed networks could be used for piracy.

In addition, the record industry is in court seeking the right to subpoena Internet service providers directly for the names of subscribers who are trading files illegally online. Verizon Communications is fighting this request in federal court, saying the request violates the privacy of its customers.

The new brochure contains one of the starkest warnings yet that businesses face legal liability for their employees' actions. The RIAA has already struck a $1 million settlement with one company in which employees were widely sharing music files on an internal network, and the document makes it clear that other businesses could be targeted if similar activities are found.

"When your employees put music, movies, videogames or other software on your computer systems without a license or other permission from the copyright owner, it is not 'sharing' or 'fair use.' It is theft," the brochure reads. "When these works are made available to others in your organization, or to the public over the Internet, it is no different than running an illegal distribution business."

The brochure exhorts companies to audit their own networks for pirated material, delete any copyrighted works found, and designate a copyright-compliance officer.

It also turns the spotlight on the drain on corporate resources and on the security problems raised by employees trading copyrighted files. Corporate security companies say these concerns in particular have been resonating among businesses in recent months.

Pete Cafarchio, vice president of business development for Pest Patrol, says the security company's corporate clients have increasingly been interested in eradicating any unauthorized applications that are using network resources or--more importantly--sending data of any kind outside the corporate firewall. Many free file-swapping programs are distributed along with advertising software that collects user information and sends it back to the parent company's servers.

"Business customers' argument is that there should be no unauthorized (network) communication," Cafarchio said. "Bandwidth and resource consumption is the real driver for them."

A story over at MSNBC talks about the Global Release Indentifier (GRid). It is a code akin to the Universal Product Code (UPC) bar code found on a CD or cassette tape in stores. Each track will be distributed online with an individual GRid serial number and will be reported back to rights societies and collection agencies sold or transferred.

The aim is to track each time a record label, online retailer or distributor such as Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) MSN or Italian Internet service provider Tiscali (MI:TIS) sells a song in the form of a Web stream or download.

Such tracking iniatives are considered vital to an industry that is reeling from lost sales compounded by a slumping global economy and the growth in online music piracy.

With the GRid initiative, resellers would be charged an annual fee of 150 pounds ($245.10), for which they can issue an identity tag to millions of songs sold online.

Each track will be distributed with an individual GRid serial number. Like a bar code, it will be reported back to rights societies and collection agencies so that artists can be compensated for sales.

International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have been developing the standard for the past two years.

"If this is done properly, the artists and authors of music will be paid adequately for the sale of their works online," said Paul Jessop, chief technology officer of the IFPI.

He added the GRid initiative is a voluntary system, and that the fee would, initially at least, be covered by the resellers.

NO SNOOPING

Jessop cautioned that GRid is not designed, nor is it intended for, keeping track of songs that wind up on online file-sharing networks, a major source of music piracy.

The music industry blames the popularity of such networks, including Kazaa and Grokster, where millions of consumers swap songs for free, for the decline in recorded music sales.

On Monday, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) reported a 3.7 percent decline in recorded music sales in the fourth quarter of 2002, traditionally the stongest selling period.

In an effort to provide consumers an alternative to illicit file-trading sites, the major record labels, including Sony Music (T:6758), Warner Music (NYSE:AOL), Universal Music (PA:EAUG), EMI (L:EMI) and Bertelsmann [BERT.UL], have begun selling more of their music online.

But music officials have complained that sales-tracking systems in place at the moment need to be standardised so that online sales, though small at the moment, can be better recorded.
"It's our ambition to evangelise this to the independent music labels and the new generation of online music distributors," Jessop said. "I would expect they'll be part of the second wave of adoptees."
"At first sight, this looks like a really good thing," said Gavin Robertson, general manager of MusicIndie.com, research and development and licensing arm of the Association of Independent Music, a trade body representing 700 independent music labels.

"The industry is really in need of interoperable identification tags and this technology appears to really fill a gap," he said, adding that the independent labels group would consider adopting the GRid technolgy.

Imagine yourself as a record company with a large steady stream of profit coming in. Then one day, someone appears to try to take some of that stream away from you. What is probably your first reaction -- to go after whoever is causing the trouble. Simple, primative, but generally effective for dealing with such situations.

This probably isn't too far from the mindset of record companies around the end of 1999. Napster appeared on the scene, record companies felt their profits threatened, and consequentially they launched a full out assault against Napster.

However, the situation was much more complex than Napster just causing the record companies some trouble. The files supported by Napster, mp3's, had been around for some time. Mp3's were popular not only because they were easy to transfer over computer networks, but also because people could turn their computers into supercharged jukeboxes with mp3's, adding things like visual effects and crossfading. Plus, mp3's could be used on portable devices that were quite a bit more convenient than discmans.

Mp3's, or something very similar, was bound to be the way that music would go for a large portion of the population. The problem for the record companies, though, was the ease with which these files could be transferred between individuals, as this would potentially result in fewer record sales.

Before Napster, mp3 trading was decentralized. Most trading took place using FTP servers. With such decentralized trading, there was essentially no way that record companies could have extracted any profits from these trades.

However, with Napster, everything became centralized. Millions of people were trading, but they were all trading at a central location simply because Napster was so easy to use. Napster may partially have been an annoyance, but it also centralized the behavior that the record companies were worried about.

Why should centralization matter? Because centralization allows control which means profits can be made. If you didn't like a certain FTP server, you could just try another one. But to get access to the wealth of files available on Napster, you had to connect to the Napster.

Napster could control who connected to it and, consequentially, fees could have been collected for the use of the Napster service. Studies indicated that people would have been happy to pay $5 to $10 a month for Napster. Money from these fees could have been paid to record companies and to artists.

Additionally, with these fees, the record companies could not have been much worse off than they were even before mp3's. Even then, consumers would copy albums from friends or join CD clubs to avoid paying full price. It has been reported that the average consumer buys six albums per year. Comparing this with $60 to $120 per consumer per year does not look bad at all.

Plus, the record companies would not have needed to produce anything. Consumers would have been doing all the work. The record companies would have had no CD's, cases, or liners to produce and no distribution costs.

What a wonderful world this would have been. Record companies would have been making money, artists would have been rewarded for their work, and consumers would have been able to freely and easily receive music and enjoy it in all the creative ways that mp3's can be enjoyed.

Might consumers have left Napster to avoid the fees? Possibly. But the fact that so many people were using Napster would have made it hard to leave as the returns to scale in file-sharing are tremendous. Plus, Napster could have implemented measures to guarantee the quality of the songs available, or it could have made it so that all its songs were normalized to the same volume level. Any of these would have made it unlikely for people to seek out alternatives.

Anyone who thought clearly about the situation knew that if Napster went down, other services would have appeared that would have been more robust to a fight with the record companies, and these might not have been as easy as Napster for the record companies to secure some profit from. There was just too much consumer demand for this type of service. Some entrepreneur would try to tap into it.

And look where we are now after the record companies did shut Napster down. There are dozens of file trading programs, and several file-sharing networks that are themselves decentralized. It is hard to imagine the record companies making any money at all from the current programs, but even if they do, it is even harder to imagine that that money would be even close to how much money they would have made if they had teamed up with Napster.

Plus, consider how much the record companies have spent so far on trying to fight all the file trading programs and how much they will keep on spending. Additionally, from a social perpective, law enforcement and legal resources are used as part of the battle on file trading that could have been used in other useful ways.

Consumers also are worse off. They have to worry about the programs they use containing "adware" or "spyware." And they have to constantly switch from programs that are being attacked or taken down by the recording industry.

And most importantly, consumers would collectively have an interest in royalties being paid to artists so that artists would continue to have incentives to make the music that we enjoy. Without the fees that Napster would have provided and given the tendency of people to free ride, it appears that the incentives that we will be able to provide artists will fall dramatically.

If the record companies had teamed up with Napster, wouldn't consumers then have missed the movies and TV shows that they can download now? Probably not. Most likely, Napster would have developed Napster Movies or Napster TV as fee services negotiated with the appropriate industries.

Couldn't the recording industry just team up with some file trading program now? Again, probably not. In 2000, we were in the unique situation where everyone was using Napster, and there was really no reason for anyone to take the time to develop a competing program. Now however, with dozens of such programs available that are free, it would be much more difficult to start a pay service.

You have to give credit to the Germans here, though. The one record company that figured all this out was Bertelsmann, and it worked out a deal with Napster, likely in hopes that the other record companies would figure it out also.

For the other four major companies, however, even with how shrewd we expect our corporate officers to be, they displayed little more than the moronic mindset described at the beginning of this essay. And because of that, every single one of us involved, including artists and record companies but perhaps with the exception of the adware companies, lives in a worse world now than that which we could have lived in.

Keep in mind, too, that every album you buy just provides more money for the legal fund of these bozos

If the RIAA's security experts can't keep its site up and running, who can?

For one reason or another, your business or organization has raised the ire of some very tech-savvy individuals, and you can't seem to keep your Web site up and running. What do you do?

That may just be what the Recording Industry Association of America is asking itself, given that its site RIAA.org came under attack yet again on Friday, knocking it offline.

The recent downing is just the latest in a string of assaults on the music industry group's site, apparently stemming from the RIAA's crackdown on illegal peer-to-peer file swapping.

Peer-to-Peer Problems: The popularity of P-to-P sites--beginning with the advent of Napster, which was pushed out of business by an RIAA lawsuit, and continuing with players such as Kazaa and Morpheus--has been considered a serious threat to record labels' business. The RIAA has expressed growing concern as more and more Net users opt to trade music for free rather than buy CDs. Hence, the group's problems.

The RIAA, which represents the Big Five record labels, has had its site felled repeatedly, and for longer periods of time, over the last several months. Hackers have even gone as far as modifying the RIAA site by adding links to illegal music downloads. Until Friday, the latest attack was last month, and IDG News Service staffers noted that they were not able to access the site for at least three days.

At that time, the RIAA announced that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Secret Service were investigating.

But because the RIAA has been reticent in commenting on the subject--it issued a standard statement Friday that it is "investigating the latest attack"--it is unclear why the deep-pocketed group has not been able to more adequately defend its site.

Making Changes: Records posted on the Netcraft's Web site, which offers reports on networks connected to the Internet, show that the RIAA has switched hosting providers twice in the last two months, moving from UUNET Technologies to Digex in December and then from Digex to Tomorrow's Solutions Today (TST) on January 29.

TST, a small company operating out of Rockville, Maryland, owns a block of IP addresses hosted by Savvis Communications. Alif Terranson, lead operations security network engineer at Savvis, confirmed that his company replaced Digex as the trade group's hosting provider. He also added that the RIAA had been bombarded by hackers and "script-kiddies" for some time now.

"It's part of the problem of attracting so much attention," Terranson said. "These kids have so much time to spare."

The RIAA's move to Savvis would seem to be a logical choice, given that the hosting company is offering a high-technology criminal investigation program to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, according to a press release posted on the company's Web site earlier this week. (The release was pulled from Savvis' site shortly after posting, however, because the program was not supposed to be officially launched until next week.)

But the downing of the RIAA site once again on Friday raises the question of why a hosting provider that is planning to train law enforcement officials and the FBI and Secret Service cannot keep the site up.

"The federal government is going out to see if they can get private industry to help for areas where they are lacking expertise," Terranson said, discussing efforts to collaborate on Internet security. "They don't have the background or expertise necessary to track attacks on a moment-to-moment basis."

He added that traditional law enforcement training does not always prepare investigators to conduct efficient investigations of security-related crime.

For the RIAA, and other Web site owners who have become the target of hackers, that fact may be cold comfort.

Several months ago, the RIAA requested that Verizon reveal the name of a person who was allegedly sharing over 600 songs on FastTrack. After Verizon failed to reveal the name of the alleged P2P pirate, the RIAA filed suit. Verizon recently lost the suit and tried to negotiate a settlement. The RIAA refused the deal, stating it wanted no limit to the number of P2P user's identities they could get. This proved unacceptable to Verizon, who appealed the lawsuit and asked for a stay on the decision.

It is that stay that the RIAA is currently opposing. Should the judge refuse the request for a stay to be put in place then the P2P user in question will have to be revealed by Verizon. Experts talking to the Wall Street Journal this week believe that if this happens then the RIAA will launch it's first lawsuit against a P2P user. However such a move is likely to be accompanied by massive consumer backlash.

It is more likely that the judge will allow the request for a stay prolonging whatever action the RIAA could take against the P2P user.

Verizon's response to the RIAA is due on Tuesday, and a hearing is scheduled for Feb. 13.

WASHINGTON--The recording industry on Friday fought to preserve a preliminary courtroom victory, arguing that Verizon Communications has no choice but to hand over the identity of an alleged Kazaa music pirate. In a strongly worded brief filed in federal district court in Washington, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) assailed Verizon's request for a stay of a Jan. 21 order as a brazen attempt by the telecommunications firm to "evade its responsibilities under the law."

The lawsuit, filed last August, pits the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against Internet users' right to remain anonymous online. With the vocal assistance of civil liberties groups, Verizon has argued that the DMCA's turbocharged subpoena process is not sufficiently privacy-protective, because it can be used to glean the identities of hundreds or thousands of suspected peer-to-peer pirates at a time.

Matthew Oppenheim, a senior vice president at the RIAA, said in a conference call Friday that Verizon was exaggerating the privacy risks of complying with requests made under the DMCA. Verizon and its allies, including a former Clinton administration privacy official, have suggested that copyright holders should file a "John Doe" lawsuit to unmask suspected peer-to-peer infringers instead of wielding DMCA subpoenas.

"In private conversations with the RIAA, Verizon has made it very clear that this is not a privacy issue," Oppenheim said. "They said they would be happy to turn over the names of some of their customers, as long as they don't have to turn over the names of a lot of their customers."

At issue in the RIAA's request is section 512 of the DMCA, which permits a copyright owner to send a subpoena ordering a "service provider" to turn over information about a subscriber. The service provider must promptly comply with that order, and no judge's approval is required first. In August, the RIAA asked a federal court for an order under the DMCA compelling Verizon Communications to reveal the name of a Kazaa subscriber accused of illegally trading hundreds of songs.

Oppenheim said that Congress had created a careful balance between privacy and copyright when drafting the DMCA, and Verizon's argument that the DMCA applies only to material hosted on its own servers is specious. "They're not engaged in private conduct," Oppenheim said about peer-to-peer users. "They're on public networks making available hundreds of music recordings to millions of other users. They're not doing anything in private. They don't have the right to anonymously commit a crime."

Sarah Deutsch, a Verizon vice president and associate general counsel, said: "This is just the RIAA's desperate attempt to divert public attention from the fact that they want unlimited access to private communications. They're trying to divert attention from some of the bad publicity that this case has garnered."

Deutsch said the RIAA had spurned a compromise proposal. "We offered that while the case was pending, we would forward cease-and-desist letters to our subscribers, at our own cost, without revealing our customers' identities," Deutsch said. "But RIAA refused."

Verizon has appealed last month's order to comply with the DMCA subpoena, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will not hear the case until U.S. District Judge John Bates decides, possibly in the next few weeks, to grant a stay or not.

In last month's 37-page decision, Bates ruled that Congress used "language that is clear" when crafting the DMCA. "Under Verizon's reading of the act, a significant amount of potential copyright infringement would be shielded from the subpoena authority of the DMCA," Bates wrote. "That would, in effect, give Internet copyright infringers shelter from the long arm of the DMCA subpoena power, and allow infringement to flourish."

In another court filing Friday, the RIAA moved to strike a declaration last Thursday from Peter Swire, an Ohio State University law professor and former Clinton administration official, as irrelevant. "Mr. Swire's declaration boils down to nothing more than a twelve-paragraph legal brief, largely derived from speculation--most, if not all, of which directly contradicts this court's prior ruling," stated the RIAA in its legal filing. "While his 'sworn' statements may have a place in law review articles and policy debates, they have no place in a court of law."

If the RIAA prevails in this legal skirmish, it seems intent on pursuing DMCA subpoenas against other Internet providers. In a third court filing Friday, the trade group filed a statement from Jonathan Whitehead, an antipiracy vice president at the RIAA. Whitehead's statement said he sent Internet service provider EarthLink a DMCA subpoena on Wednesday for the identification of a single peer-to-peer user.

An excellent article by the LA Times reveals the truth behind Verizon's defence of the RIAA lawsuit which seeks to reveal the identity of a person who allegedly shared 600 songs on FastTrack.

The Article reveals that Verizon would agree to the following terms in order to put an end to the case:

Forward letters from the RIAA to customers accused of piracy
Comply with a limited number of RIAA subpoenas and
Verizon was willing to name a few names of P2P pirates

The article portrays Verizon as a company that is aware of the massive copyright infringement that it's users are involved in. And as such, it is defending the lawsuit in order to protect the company from the volume of orders it would face .

In any case, the Verizon settlement proposal was rejected by the RIAA who would not accept any limits on the number of customer details that it should be given. As such, the case has now been appealed.

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) spends a lot of time trying to convince the entertainment industry at large, not to speak of the Big Five record companies in particular, that it's hard-core leading edge. That may be. The question is, however, the leading edge of what?

It's certainly been to the fore in leading its clients up the garden path when it comes to p2p and the most effective way to deal with it, and there's no doubt the RIAA's spokespeople are high on the list of the world's most practiced and efficient reality adjustors.

With RIAA boss Hilary 'Reach Out' Rosen's imminent departure slated, that may change, but in the meanwhile, is the music industry trade organ now among the first companies in the world to indulge in a new form of Spamming?

The RIAA is currently going blue trying to get the name of a Verizon user who, it says, used Kazaa to download music. Verizon doesn't want to oblige the RIAA with the user's name, an RIAA subpoena to do so notwithstanding. Whether Verizon's motivation centers on a genuine concern for user privacy, or its bottom line, is beside the point.

Peter Swire was former US president Bill Clinton's chief counsellor for privacy in the then US Office of Management and Budget. These days he's a professor Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University. And not at all incidentally, he's also just submitted a declaration in the case of the RIAA -v- Verizon, pending in the US District Court for the District of Columbia.

"The case began when the RIAA issued a subpoena to Verizon, demanding to know the identity of one of Verizon’s Internet customers," says Swire in a statement. "The RIAA suspected that Verizon’s customer was offering music files on his or her computer for distribution to other 'peer-to-peer' music swapping on the Internet.

"The RIAA brought this case under the previously untested subpoena provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)."

So? Is there something wrong with that?

There certainly is, declares Swire, who supports Verizon’s request for a stay of the court’s previous order to reveal the Verizon customer's ID.

Urging the court to reconsider its decision, he says:

"The subpoenas will become a new form of spam. Fraudulent subpoenas will be easy to file, with no judicial oversight. Any of us who visits a website, but don't want to reveal our names, will now be at serious risk of being tracked back to our homes.

"I have reviewed all the U.S. privacy laws. I helped write some of them. But I have never seen any provision like this. There is no due process under this provision before a person’s identity is revealed. There is no judicial supervision.

And ...

"This provision, as interpreted by the Court, would have a serious chilling effect on free speech on the Internet. When every web site can learn your name, will you feel free to surf the Net? What will you write if you know that your e-mail handle can easily be turned into your real name and address?"

Excellent question.

Verizon Communications seeks to block a court order to reveal the name of an Internet subscriber suspected of sharing music online.
A federal judge last week told Verizon Internet Services to turn over the name of a customer to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the trade group for the largest music labels. The Verizon customer reportedly downloaded large quantities of music from file-sharing sites, retrieving 600 tunes in a single day. Verizon is appealing that decision and has asked the court to stay the order pending appeal, it said in a statement.

Verizon was sued by the RIAA after it refused to comply with a subpoena asking for the name of the subscriber, who used the Kazaa peer-to-peer file-sharing service. The music industry says online sharing of music hurts music sales and compares it to stealing. In separate legal action, the RIAA is pursuing Kazaa and other P-to-P services.

Worried About Precedent: Verizon is not trying to shield customers who break copyright laws, but wants to halt the court order pending appeal to give the appeals court time to review the "statutory and constitutional issues" raised by this case, it said.

The recording industry brought this case as a test case, according to Verizon. If the ruling stands, consumers will be caught in a "digital dragnet," not only from recording companies alleging copyright infringement, but from anyone who can fill out a simple form, John Thorne, Verizon senior vice president and deputy general counsel said in a statement.

The RIAA subpoena was issued under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Verizon argued that the subpoena does not address Internet service providers as the copyright protected material is not stored on any of its computers, but on the customers' local hard disk drive.

Several privacy groups, including the Electronic Privacy Information Center, have sided with Verizon in the case.

While the DMCA based legal pugilism between the RIAA and Verizon rages over the ISP's responsibility to turn over accused 'pirate' personal info, the ISP's continue to sheepishly forward threatening letters to their customers at the behest of the RIAA/MPAA, though their level of enthusiasm for the practice clearly isn't substantial. But will casual half hearted requests eventually shift to court orders and prosecution?

Letters from the MPAA and RIAA warning file traders to cease and desist have been common for more than a year. Cox was busy sending letters to Simpsons pirates last summer. Sony music sent out its own round of letters to music traders last spring, and the rate of such "lawyer-grams" has only increased since.

Take this individual for instance, who just yesterday received an e-mail from his ISP warning him that he'd been a little too busy on the file trading circuit:

"You are receiving this notification because we have received complaints which have originated from your DSL line." the letter begins. "The complaints refer to copyright infringement activity originating from your network."

The customer immediately cried foul, claiming that DSLExtreme was stomping on his privacy, assuming that it was his ISP that was doing the threatening and keeping a watchful eye over his file trading adventures.

The reality is that "p2p intelligence" companies like BayTSP scour file trading networks for significant offenders, then report both the files traded and the IP address back to their RIAA/MPAA masters. The music and film industry in turn send a letter to the ISP, whose only responsibility (for the time being) is to pass that letter on to the offender.

"We suggest taking your computer of off your network until the problem is resolved." the letter continues. "This is the only warning you will receive from us and a period of 24 hours has been set so you can take appropriate action. If a second complaint is received after the 24 hour period, your account may be temporarily suspended."

Temporarily suspended? By Whom? The ISP? According to a DSLExtreme employee responding to the claims in our forums, they're simply passing the letter on. "What you do with that information is completely up to you. You may choose to take down the material or leave it on your computer," suggesting that most ISP's really don't care, provided they can't be held responsible for the offense.

And being held liable is the backbone of the entire issue. Some have been quick to paint Verizon as a champion of consumer rights in their courtroom battles, which isn't entirely accurate. Verizon is protecting itself. If the current court order becomes a trend, ISP's could face an endless sea of subpoenas from individuals and organizations claiming their copyrights had been violated without offering proof. Not to mention the impact it would have on their subscriber count.

Were you of the opinion that Verizon was simply "fighting the good fight" on principle?

The Los Angeles Times reports that Verizon is already happily sacrificing customer privacy by turning over several subscribers' personal information to the RIAA in the hopes of getting the ruling suspended or modified. Verizon had hoped there could be a limit set on the number of RIAA subpoenas they would have to process, but so far no agreement has been reached.

The user caught red handed downloading files really can't stomp his feet and demand justice, since DSLExtreme's acceptable use policy clearly dictates that "as a user of DSLExtreme.com, you agree not to use the service in a manner that violates any local, state or federal law." However much the file trading community would like to debate or justify it, it's impossible to argue that file trading is not illegal.

That said, consumer rights advocates are justifiably worried that the RIAA's use of the DMCA to obtain subscriber personal data eliminates the entire concept of due process. Whatever Verizon's motivation, their legal battle should be supported, as the court's interpretation of this particular provision of the DMCA gives companies (or almost anyone) the right to demand the name, address, and phone number of a subscriber without presenting evidence of any kind that they've actually done something wrong.

The case will likely bring a re-examination of the DMCA and some modifications making it more relevant to modern technology, something that many think is long overdue. Perhaps the fact that companies are stretching and warping (see Lexmark case) the vague legislation to serve whatever purpose they see fit is a good indication that something's wrong?

But even if the case is dismissed and the DMCA gets rewritten, how long can the ISP remain the messenger without enforcing the message? How long before they're obligated to both provide a name for each suspect IP address, and be the delivery vessel for bolder legal threats? Verizon has appealed the court ruling, but the courts show every indication of eventually making file traders pay for crossing the line.

How long before the threatening lawyer-gram becomes a subpoena?

Verizon Communications is asking an appeals court to block a court order that would reveal the identity of an alleged peer-to-peer pirate to the music industry.

In what is widely viewed as a test case pitting privacy against copyright laws, Verizon said on Thursday that it would file the request for a stay with the District of Columbia Court of Appeals by the end of the day.

"Verizon will use every legal means to protect its subscribers' privacy," said John Thorne, a senior vice president for Verizon. "If this ruling stands, consumers will be caught in a digital dragnet, not only from record companies alleging infringement of their copyright monopolies, but from anyone who can fill out a simple form."

As previously reported, Verizon has pledged to appeal the Jan. 21 decision by U.S. District Judge John Bates, who said the wording of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requires Verizon to give the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) the name of a Kazaa subscriber who allegedly downloaded hundreds of music recordings.

An RIAA spokesman said his organization did not immediately have a response.

The dispute is not about whether the RIAA will be able to force Verizon to reveal the identity of a suspected copyright infringer, but about what legal mechanism copyright holders may use. The RIAA would prefer to rely on the DMCA's turbocharged procedures because they are cheaper and faster than filing a "John Doe" lawsuit to unmask a peer-to-peer user.

This case represents the entertainment industry's latest legal assault on peer-to-peer piracy. If its invocation of the DMCA is upheld on appeal, music industry investigators or other copyright holders would have the power to identify hundreds or thousands of music pirates at a time without filing a lawsuit first.

Verizon has found allies among some nonprofit groups, including the Consumer Federation of America, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumer Alert, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and National Consumers League.

In his 37-page decision, Bates ruled that Congress used "language that is clear" when crafting the DMCA. "Under Verizon's reading of the act, a significant amount of potential copyright infringement would be shielded from the subpoena authority of the DMCA," Bates wrote. "That would, in effect, give Internet copyright infringers shelter from the long arm of the DMCA subpoena power and allow infringement to flourish."

WASHINGTON -- The website of the U.S. recording industry's trade group remained offline Tuesday, as federal officials probed the source of the hacking attack that has rendered the site unreachable since Friday.

The Recording Industry Association of America site has been a favorite hacker target since at least last summer, as the trade group pursues Kazaa and other Internet "peer-to-peer" song-swapping sites that allow users to download music for free.

The recording industry claims such services are to blame for a 9 percent decrease in CD sales. It has recently begun to track down individual users.

An RIAA spokeswoman said the FBI and the Secret Service are investigating the attack.

"How pathetic that those who want free music don't believe in free speech," said the RIAA's Amy Weiss.

RIAA officials believe the attack is unrelated to the SQL Slammer virus that knocked out online databases and disabled wide swaths of the Internet over the weekend.

Instead, it is akin to the targeted denial-of-service data blitzes that have overwhelmed prominent government and industry Web pages occasionally over the past few years, one RIAA official said.

Technicians would probably have the site up and running again within the next two days, the official said.

The debate is just starting over the recent ruling that forced Verizon to reveal the name of one of their p2p using broadband subscribers to the RIAA. The providers state that their customers' right to privacy and due process are at risk if the courts allow the release of private information to anyone who makes the mere allegation of copyright infringement. Part of the problem, argues the chief privacy officer for Earthlink, is that when the DMCA was drafted in 1998 "no one had heard of peer-to-peer trading." The land of the (DMCA) free, in this instance, would appear to be Canada.

Internet service providers said their customers' rights to privacy and due process are at risk after a judge ruled that one ISP must surrender the name of a subscriber suspected of illegally trading music files.

The Recording Industry Association of America subpoenaed the ISP, Verizon Communications, to hand over the subscriber's name using powers granted to copyright holders under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. When Verizon balked, the RIAA took its case to court. On Tuesday, the judge sided with the music industry group; Verizon plans to appeal the decision.

Other ISPs expressed concerns about how the ruling might affect their customers.

"The court should not open the door for anyone who makes a mere allegation of copyright infringement to gain complete access to private subscriber information without due process of law," said Mike Lamb, AT&T;'s chief privacy officer, in a statement.

"The statute at issue requires ISPs to disclose the identity of subscribers expeditiously in response to a subpoena issued by a court clerk," he added. "Such extraordinary disclosure obligations should be construed narrowly to afford subscribers the opportunity to challenge the requested disclosure."

A spokesman for the RIAA declined to comment on whether the trade group has any plans to pursue similar legal action against other suspected copyright violators.

"This is not a debate about privacy, it's about piracy and the 2.6 billion illegal downloads each month," the spokesman said. "To suggest that an Internet user's privacy is more at risk because of this decision is a red herring. Verizon never argued it in the case and there is no First Amendment protection for committing a federal crime."

Part of the problem, said Les Seagraves, chief privacy officer for Earthlink, is that when the DMCA was enacted in 1998 "no one had heard of peer-to-peer trading."

The law was created to prevent copyright violations on Web pages, he said.

"We've been complying with the DMCA ever since it was enacted," Seagraves said. "We want people to protect their copyright -- that's not the issue. We just think the law here is misapplied."

The decision puts undue burden on the ISPs to take responsibility for what customers download, he said.

"What's happening is this ruling has sort of applied (the DMCA) to people who have files on their computer, not on our servers."

Like AT&T;'s Lamb, Seagraves is troubled by the idea of severing subscribers' right to due process.

"This law is supposed to be a shield, and I think the RIAA is using it as a sword," Seagraves said. "It's designed to protect people's copyright. It's not designed so we can just turn somebody over to the copyright holder with no due process."

Jason Philbrook, president of a small ISP in Maine, said granting record companies the ability to obtain customer information this way sets a dangerous precedent.

"We shouldn't be forced to share this information," said Philbrook, who runs Midcoast Internet Solutions in Rockland, which provides Net access to about 6,000 customers. "Where does it stop? First record companies, then the next step might be Hollywood, then (copyright holders of) photos or books."

ISPs don't have any say in how customers use their computers, he said. If a customer gets a virus on their computer, it's not the ISP's responsibility. Nor is the ISP responsible if the computer gets struck by lightning through the phone line.

"I don't see music sharing as being any different," he said.

Researching when and what subscribers share online would be a huge undertaking for any ISP.

"We have the technical means to investigate any sort of problem but it takes a lot of time," Philbrook said. "Even if we can see that something is going on, we can't verify what the customer is sharing. We can't listen to what they are sharing or view what they are sharing."

"If this stands, I'm sure we'd work to get the law changed," Seagraves said.

ARIA – that’s the Australian Recording Industry Association – has vowed its continuing determination to fight online piracy, amid the revelation that the dollar value of the audio market - excluding music video and DVD – has slumped 8.9 per cent, or AU$56 million, in 2002. It has also admitted that “online piracy was just one of the factors which contributed to the slump, with others including…a tough retail environment…” Meanwhile, a Government advisory group’s report has claimed that: “Uncertainties surrounding digital rights are inhibiting the take-up of broadband in Australia.”

It seems ironic that ARIA should once again clamber to the top of the anti-file-sharing ramparts, at the same time as it admits other factors are hurting sales. Could it possibly be that one of those other factors contributing to a ‘tough retail environment’ might be increased global loathing? Perhaps they should take a leaf out of the infinitely more customer-friendly porn industry.

The Recording Industry continues to shoot itself in the foot over this one. Let’s be clear about what’s wrong with this picture:

They want to stop piracy. Fair enough. But they're also giving the impression that, as they see it, a bunch of friends sharing favourite tracks over the Web is the same as some professional bootlegging organization copying and distributing thousands if not millions of pirated recordings. It’s just not the same.

Consider VCRs. If you copy a favourite movie off the TV and then invite some mates around to watch it with you, it could be interpreted as illegal public viewing. But does anyone really expect or believe the publishers would have a right to invade your home and charge you with piracy?

Or, to put a more contemporary slant on it, would it be reasonable for the publishers to send letters to the various TV channels demanding they disconnect you for such behaviour?

Of course not, yet this is exactly what the Recording Industry moguls are demanding online. And it stinks, and we should all be voting with our feet.

After all, it is also ironic that ARIA should also be saying in this report that: “We are also seeing the continued development of legitimate online business models, particularly in the US, with many companies, including all the majors, now engaged in online distribution of their catalogues”, while another report says all this copyright witch-hunting is driving broadband take-up south.

Their current behaviour is undoubtedly turning people off the music industry itself and, perhaps, the broadband environment as a whole. And yet, they seriously think that, after all this, their own online business models are going to be attractive?

Sing it with me: “Bye, bye Miss American Pie...”

NEW YORK (AP) -- Hilary Rosen, the U.S. recording industry's head lobbyist who waged a high-profile battle against Napster and music piracy, is resigning at the end of the year.

Rosen cited personal reasons for leaving the Recording Industry Association of America, where she has served as chief executive since 1998.

"During my tenure here, the recording industry has undergone dramatic challenges and it is well positioned for future success. I have been extremely proud to be a part of this industry transition,'' Rosen said. ``But I have young children and I want to devote more of my time to them.''

"NYT Business reports Hilary Rosen is leaving. Question is, what head will spring from the Hydra next? Could this signal a shift in the RIAA's tactics? The article reports 'Rosen's departure comes as the organization sought to soften its image among Internet consumers, many of whom viewed the RIAA -- and Rosen personally -- with antipathy over incessant pressure for crackdowns on sharing digital music over the Internet.'"

One more note, yesterday afternoon RIAA CEO Hillary Rosen announced she was stepping down from the top position at the end of this year. Hillary says she wants to spend more time with her children, a very valid reason for a parent in her early 40's.

But there has been great personal backlash put on her from the very visible tactics she has lead the RIAA to employ over the past several years. Wired magazine this month called her the "The Most Hated Name in Music". The article has a photo of Hillary listening placidly to an Apple iPod.

Despit winning almost every major court ruling the RIAA was involved with, file trading has continued to exponentially grow. The industry wins the legal battles, but they are losing the war.

Maybe Hillary sees what's on the horizon and has decided now is the time to get off a runaway train. Maybe her skin is not as thick as she thought and the personal attacks (and threats, at one point she traveled only with security) have proven to much. Maybe she just misses her kids halfway through the work day.

And maybe, just maybe, this grassroots effort we call the Internet is dishing it back out to the music industry with considerably more force than it has been receiving it.

If that last statement is true, then taking this unknown KaZaa user and other file traders to task will only make that effort push back harder.

The Recording Industry Association of America's chief Hilary Rosen is to step down after five calamitous years shilling for the music distribution cartel.

In that period the pigopoly she represented squandered vast resources it could usefully have spent on creating alternative digital distribution channels on litigation against people who want to share music. Paradoxically, the reactionary Rosen is probably single-handedly the person most responsible for the now popular notion that we should get it all for free.

Rosen's vilest deed was not the crucifixion of Napster, but her determination to strangle Internet radio at birth. Rather than seeing it as a useful publicity medium, the RIAA fought long and dirty to burden stations with punitive royalties and administrative demands.

Three recent examples of the RIAA's benevolent works speak eloquently for Rosen's legacy. Exhibit one: five music labels - Universal, Sony, BMG, WEA and EMD, the parent of Virgin and EMI - agreed to pay between $15 and $40 million each to end a class action suit that alleged they'd colluded to fix the price of music CDs.

Exhibit two: this week ISP Verizon was obliged to hand over personal details of a customer who the RIAA had identified as downloading MP3 files. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out today, this blows a Scud through the constitution by permitting "any copyright owner who claims infringement can force an ISP to reveal subscribers' identities merely by obtaining a subpoena from a district court clerk, without any judicial oversight."

In other words, in the best tradition of the Salem witchhunts or the McCarthyite lists, a mere accusation of wrongdoing can land you in the clink.

"We will hold ISPs more accountable. Let's face it. They know there's a lot of demand for broadband simply because of the availability (of file-sharing)"

The RIAA is a powerful trade body that has taken a number of file-swapping services, including the now defunct Napster, to court in an effort to shut them down.

Rosen suggested one possible scenario for recouping lost sales from online piracy would be to impose a type of fee on ISPs that could be passed on to their customers who frequent these file-swapping services. Mario Mariani, senior vice president of media and access at Tiscali, Europe's third largest ISP, dismissed the notion, calling it impossible to enforce.

"The peer-to-peer sites are impossible to fight. In any given network, peer-to-peer traffic is between 30 (percent) and 60 percent of total traffic. We technically cannot control such traffic," he said.

Rosen's other suggestions for fighting online piracy were more conciliatory.

She urged the major music labels, which include Sony Music, Warner Music, EMI, Universal Music and Bertelsmann's BMG, to ease licensing restrictions, develop digital copyright protections for music and invest more in promoting subscription download services. Pressplay and MusicNet, the online services backed by the majors, plus independent legitimate services such as Britain's Wippit .com, sounded somewhat optimistic about their long-term chances to derail free services such as Kazaa and Morpheus. But they also acknowledged they cannot compete with the "free" players until the labels clear up the licensing morass that keeps new songs from being distributed online for a fee.

Officials from Pressplay and MusicNet, which are in their second year of operation, declined to disclose how many customers they have.

"We haven't really started yet," said Alan McGlade, CEO of MusicNet, when asked about his subscriber base. Michael Bebel, CEO of Pressplay, said his customer tally is in the tens of thousands. He added that the firm, backed by Universal and Sony, could expand into Canada in the first half of the year, its second market after the United States. He didn't have a timeframe for Europe.

Meanwhile, Kazaa and Morpheus claim tens of millions of registered users who download a wide variety of tracks for free.

In what is widely viewed as a test case, U.S. District Judge John Bates said the wording of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requires Verizon to give the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) the name of a Kazaa subscriber who allegedly has shared hundreds of music recordings. Bates said, "The court disagrees with Verizon's strained reading of the act," and ordered Verizon to comply with the DMCA request from the record labels.

The dispute is not about whether the RIAA will be able to force Verizon to reveal the identity of a suspected copyright infringer, but about what legal mechanism copyright holders may use. The RIAA would prefer to rely on the DMCA's turbocharged procedures because they are cheaper and faster than other methods, but Verizon and civil liberties groups have said the DMCA does not apply and that it does not adequately protect privacy.

Verizon plans to appeal the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, said Sarah Deutsch, the company's vice president and associate general counsel. "This is not a case in which we believe the court was right," Deutsch said. "This kind of decision could open the floodgates to copyright holders, sending numerous subpoenas to Internet providers seeking identities of subscribers."

At issue in the RIAA's request is section 512 of the DMCA, which permits a copyright owner to send a subpoena ordering a "service provider" to turn over information about a subscriber. The service provider must promptly comply with that order, and no judge's approval is required first.

When challenging the subpoena, Verizon said that section 512 does not apply to ISPs that are merely conduits for peer-to-peer users and which are not hosting potentially infringing material on their own servers. Bates rejected that argument, saying that "the court concludes that the subpoena authority of section 512 applies to all service providers within the coverage of the act, including Verizon."

A dozen consumer and privacy groups in August filed an amicus brief siding with Verizon and arguing that section 512 of the DMCA is unconstitutional. Their brief said the law violated Americans' rights to be anonymous online: "Purported copyright owners should not have the right to violate protected, anonymous speech with what amounts to a single snap of the fingers."

Megan Gray, an attorney who wrote the brief on behalf of groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumer Alert, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the National Consumers League, said Tuesday that she was not surprised by the decision. "I was disappointed that the court did not exert the time and energy to more thoroughly analyze the constitutional issues, which from our perspective were the crux of the case," Gray said.

Bates said he did not consider the First Amendment claim since Verizon had not argued that point, but predicted that even if he had, the outcome would have been the same. "Neither Verizon nor any amici has suggested that anonymously downloading more than 600 songs from the Internet without authorization is protected expression under the First Amendment," Bates wrote. "To be sure, this is not a case where Verizon's customer is anonymously using the Internet to distribute speeches of Lenin, Biblical passages, educational materials, or criticisms of the government--situations in which assertions of First Amendment rights more plausibly could be made."

"Verizon didn't bring an explicit challenge to the DMCA because we were one of the parties that negotiated it," Verizon's Deutsch said. "What we did tell the judge was that there were constitutional issues that required the court to construe the law narrowly."

Under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (news - web sites), Internet providers have voluntarily shut down Web sites that contain infringing material, but they have balked at requests to disconnect users who trade songs with each other directly over peer-to-peer networks.

Recording-industry investigators, using automated software, have been able to track down the numerical Internet addresses of file traders, but have not been able to match those addresses with individual names.

Investigators asked Verizon last summer for the name of one customer believed to have downloaded more than 600 songs in one day, but Verizon said they would have to jump through a few more legal hoops because the alleged infringer did not store the songs on Verizon servers but only used its wires to transfer the material.

Bates rejected Verizon's argument, saying that "Verizon has provided no sound reason why Congress would enable a copyright owner to obtain identifying information from a service provider storing the infringing material on its system, but would not enable a copyright owner to obtain identifying information from a service provider transmitting the material over its system."

The Danish Anti Pirat Gruppen (Anti Piracy Group) has issued invoices of up to $14,000 apiece to approximately 150 users of KaZaA and eDonkey for illegally downloading copyright material.

APG monitored the file sharing networks for available files with Danish IP addresses - and went to court to get the users' personal details from their ISPs, armed with screen shots of, for example, the KaZaA window showing the files on the user's hard-drive. The courts obliged and ordered the ISPs to deliver the personal details of the incriminated users. Then the bills were in the post ... landing on the mats of the unfortunate downloaders over the last few days.

The users are charged about $16 per CD and about $60 per full length movie. If they pay now - and delete the illegal content from their hard drives - then the amount is cut in half and they avoid going to court. Those who don't pay up are to be sued.

Question is: if the APG has only the file names from KaZaA or eDonkey - how can it make sure that they really are illegal files and not only "similar named files" or hoax files? Can APG prove that is the work of a certain user in a household - or will it go for the entire family?

It's easy to fail in e-business; what's hard is failing magnificently.

The Big Five music-recording companies have been transcendent in this respect. Their combined efforts have gone beyond killing their e-businesses and are close to destroying an entire industry.

Following are 10 rules of e-business failure, a list inspired by the recording industry's imaginative approach.

• Refuse to change: Computers are just tools, and useful only in making your existing marketing model more efficient. Give word-processors to your secretaries and install computerized stock-tracking systems so you can lay off staff. Declare the future to have arrived. Collect your performance bonus.
  
  
• Ignore the Internet: If you can't imagine any way of making money on-line, then no one else can either. Act surprised when the Internet starts to carry multimedia. Cry, "Who knew?" and insist the whole multimedia thing was invented only to ruin your business.
  
  
• Be sanctimonious: Claim to be more concerned about the artists than about your profits. You are selfless; your only interest is paying the musicians, without whom you would be nothing. Pray that nobody remembers countless rockers who signed away their souls on recording contracts and were dumped the moment their sales started slipping.
  
  
• Misunderstand your market: When you count the songs being swapped on peer-to-peer networks, do not notice that most are moldy oldies. It's still theft, you argue, even if you yourself stopped paying royalties for those songs in 1961. Blame piracy, not taste, for your inability to sell new songs that no radio station will play.
  
  
• Lie: Go on Kazaa, count the MP3 versions of songs you produced, old and new, and multiply that number by the current retail price of a CD; howl that you are losing a fortune. Forget that a Buddy Holly album sold for $2.95 in 1958; you sell records for much more now, and that's the price you use when calculating your losses — it's more impressive.
  
  
• Kill it: Hollywood failed to make the VCR illegal, but you're going to succeed with peer-to-peer technology. Spend millions on lawyers to sue Napster and Scour into oblivion. Sure, paying lawyers has suddenly become more important than paying your artists, but so what? Hedge your bets by setting up your own Web site, offering songs that aren't selling well in stores. When your e-business proves to be less than a thundering success, blame it on the pirates - meaning all your customers.
  
  
• Pray it will all go away: Your noble efforts to shut down Napster and Scour will so terrify pirates that they will decamp immediately and other industries will lose all interest in P2P. Act as though U.S. court rulings in your favour apply to all other countries in the world, regardless of their different legal principles. Do not make contingency plans.
  
  
• Insult your market: After calling your customers "pirates," antagonize them further by threatening to release a flood of "empty" MP3 files to frustrate swapping. Do not understand the technical reasons why this won't work. Threaten to hack into the P2P networks, like real criminals. Forget that some of these networks are based in foreign countries, which (for reasons you also cannot understand) do not subscribe to your system of justice. Then say you will launch denial-of-service attacks on pimply-faced file-swappers, even if they live in those other countries.
  
  
• Make government your accomplice: Demand exemptions from criminal prosecution by the U.S. government for your hacking and denial-of-service attacks. You're doing this for a Higher Cause, after all, which is paying royalties to your artists (remember them?). Drag Verizon Communications, an Internet provider, into court demanding it surrender the name of one of its subscribers allegedly sharing 600 music files, so your expensive lawyers can crush this kid's little skull. Then get the Canadian government to impose a levy on all recordable media sold here, whether it's used for burning pirated music or archiving corporate data or storing pictures of the kids. Make mortal enemies of Apple and Sony because the levy adds something like 20 per cent to the retail price of their portable jukeboxes, pricing them out of the market. Collect more than $30-million without disbursing a single cent to your artists — after all, you're Fighting the Good Fight, and you're going to have to tighten the artists' belts for them if you hope to win.
  
  
• Go back to giving it away: Organize British record companies for a Digital Download Day. Charge £5 ($12.50 Canadian), claim it's "free," and reason that people would rather pay for music than get it for nothing on Morpheus. The "free" fee entitles people to listen to 500 streamed songs, to download 50 songs or to get five songs that can be burned on a CD. Ignore the math, which shows your £1 price for every burnable song is higher than the retail price per song on a British CD. Pretend you haven't noticed that your "day" is actually a week (Oct. 3 to 9), further proof that you can't count. Act surprised when your music servers can't handle the traffic and grind to a halt; blame the technology that put you on this awful road in the first place. Angrily dismiss anyone who says that what you're doing is something you once told a judge is sheer piracy.
  
  

Got it? Now get out there and fail. Oblivion awaits..

"MediaForce, a hired Warner Net security firm which uses its mediaSentry to automatically scan p2p nets for "copyrighted works", has targeted a Canadian Grokster user for alleged copyright infringements.

MediaSentry crawls the Net looking for 'illegal' file sharers and when it finds one, shows the p2p app and sharers' IP addies. Address owners are then Whois-ed, MediaForce contacts the ISP or block owner involved and the downloader gets a 'Stop it or Else' notice."

"Friday the major record labels initiated a lawsuit against the leading Internet service providers (ISP) for contributory copyright infringement. The ISPs, the suit contends, are allowing free access to websites throughout the world that allow the free trading of copyrighted material. This, they claim, make the ISPs accomplices in music piracy."

"The labels are looking to legally force these providers to block all international traffic that they don't approve of. The goal is to get the courts to agree that import/export laws can apply to digital goods transferred over the Internet just like goods brought in by sea and air. If the labels can set a precedent here, any digital transfer of information can be regulated and blocked when native industries feel threatened."

"Don't they have something better to do during the summer than hack our site?" an anonymous RIAA representative, told CNET. "Perhaps it at least took 10 minutes away from stealing music."

The irony of the above statement is not hard to miss. The movie and record industries, through California Rep. Howard Berman, are sponsoring a bill that would allow Copyright owners to legally hack into peer-to-peer networks.

Such actions are criminal now, but should this bill ever become law, content organizations will have an exemption that would give them the right to drill into your personal PC and zap any digital music files they deem as "stolen". If they should do other damage to your system along the way, tough, you won't be able to claim damages.

RIAA CEO Hilary Rosen called the bill "an innovative approach". I call it hacking.

It is also myopic. The RIAA has proved time and time again that its technical initiatives - whether it is the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) or the designs of its Napster styled services PressPlay and MusicNet - are ill-conceived affairs when placed against the technical skills of the average garage coder.

Now they want to go against the world's script kiddies, individuals who continually develop the latest intrusion techniques that give network managers frequent headaches. Rosen is once again prying open Pandora's Box and the result will be damaging far beyond the scope of copyright should that bill ever pass.