I used to be a Boy Scout. There, I’ve said it. One of the things I loved about Scouting (besides the camping, gaming and learning about knots of course) was badge hunting. The merit badges I remember obtaining were Backpacking, Knots, Forestry, Swimming, Electricity, First Aid and Astronomy. Had I Read more
LimeWire has replied to the RIAA suit against them with a countersuit. LimeWire has issued its answer to the plaintiff’s claim, and have counter-sued. The document makes an interesting argument against the RIAA’s anti-competitive practices. The main claim is that the RIAA has been operating as a cartel by promoting Read more
There have been several signs recently that eDonkey would join the legal download market. It seems like this is the road to be taken by commercial clients, which will continue to fall or be taken out by litigation. eDonkey have now paid the RIAA $30 million USD to avoid litigation. Read more
Vivendi Universal has announced that it will offer its music catalogue for free in a legal download site in exchange of advertisement. This could be a tremendous hit for other legal download sites. This may be an indication that some music executives could be throwing in the towel in their Read more
Two comedy items received through the Cyberprof mailing list, one intentional and one not (we hope). Behold the Campus Downloading video, a release by the RIAA to scare students into not downloading music on campus. I bet that this video will acquire cult status only equaled by Reefer Madness, due Read more
LimeWire, the popular Gnutella P2P client, has been sued by music industry giants Sony BMG, Vivendi Universal, Warner Music and EMI Music. This new case will be the first to try the inducement test introduced by MGM v Grokster, as the music companies will claim that LimeWire is “actively facilitating, Read more
The international record industry has been heralding as a great victory their deal with P2P software producer Sharman Networks, the makers of the KaZaA P2P client. Read for example this note from FT.com, where the settlement is described as one of the biggest victories against online piracy for the music Read more
Is it possible to fill an iPod legitimately? I will ignore the fact that the act of ripping your own CD is still an infringing activity under UK law due to the absence of a private copying exception in copyright law. As reported earlier, the British Phonogram Industry has kindly Read more
(picture by Attila Kelényi)Comments are now open on the three declarations to come out from the Rio iCommons Summit, you can submit your ideas on the iCommons wiki. The less controversial and (in my opinion) most worthy of the three proposed texts is the Open Access Declaration, which states that Read more
Pirate Bay, the Swedish-based bittorrent search engine, is back online after the raid this week to their servers, where Swedish police confiscated some index files. Pirate Bay is a tricky one for authorities because there are no copies of any shared files, the system apparently only contains links to tracker Read more