Take my movie—please. Nasty Old People is a Swedish movie about just that. However, it's been released freely on the web by its creator, Hanna Sköld, under a Creative Commons License, being the first Swedish film to do so. [more inside]
posted by Askiba on Oct 23, 2009 - 36 comments

Jammie Thomas to pay RIAA $1.92 million. Found guilty of willful copyright infringement, the jury awarded the RIAA $80,000 each for 24 songs. This is up from $220,000 in the first trial (previously). Ars Technica has a good review of the case. [more inside]
posted by 6550 on Jun 18, 2009 - 138 comments

Home taping downloading is killing music authorship. The Society of Authors warns that authors will simply stop writing if they aren't compensated for piracy of their work (as unlikely as that seems). Perhaps they should follow the example of Jim Griffin, newly hired at Warner Music to persuade broadband providers to attach a $5 per month surcharge for the benefit of the major labels, in exchange for halting the lawsuits that have thus far been their mainstay weapon against piracy.
posted by Horace Rumpole on Apr 2, 2008 - 88 comments

A proposal for the monetization of the file sharing of music from the Songwriters and Recording Artists of Canada. "Most Canadians are aware that the Internet and mobile phone networks have become major sources of music. What they may not know is that songwriters and performers typically receive no compensation of any kind when their music is shared or illegally downloaded... We believe the time has come to put in place a reasonable and unobtrusive system of compensation for creators of music in regard to this popular and growing use of their work."
posted by tranquileye on Jan 29, 2008 - 38 comments

Anti-Piracy agents MediaDefender have 700MiB of juicy internal emails leaked on BitTorrent; are in trouble.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 on Sep 16, 2007 - 83 comments

Tube Wars: A new front opens as the IFPI [think global RIAA] threatens imminent legal war with ISP's.
posted by trinarian on Jan 17, 2007 - 30 comments

I know you're all lining up to buy Sealand, but The Pirate Bay wants to beat you to the punch.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Jan 12, 2007 - 33 comments

Doom 3: It may possibly be the most pirated game in history.
posted by Keyser Soze on Aug 5, 2004 - 68 comments

The file-sharing fight continues.
Recording industry associations in Denmark, Germany, Italy and Canada have filed lawsuits or taken other legal action, aiming mainly at heavy users accused of offering a large number of songs online.

In other news, A study of file-sharing's effects on music sales says online music trading appears to have had little part in the recent slide in CD sales.
posted by ashbury on Mar 31, 2004 - 9 comments

Vans Stevenson, senior lobbyist for MPAA (the Motion Picture Association of America), was the last to revise a letter California State Attorney General Bill Lockyer is to distribute to other attorney generals. Lockyer is the president of the National Association of Attorneys General. - is your government owned? Lockyer receives thousands in campaign contributions from MPAA, RIAA, and '[via: The Register]..corporate and private donations from the major studios, including The Paramount Pictures Group, Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., Warner Bros PAC, AOL Time Warner. Senior executives, such as Alan Horn and Howard Welinsky, respectively CEO and senior VP at Warner Brothers..." Adam Eisgrau of P2P United said that "the draft attributed to the attorney general's office contains many significant factual errors, eyebrow-raising metadata, and articulates a very broad expansion in several important respects of product liability and consumer protection law that would have enormous effects..' It's in The NY Times. Slyck has the original document.
posted by giantkicks on Mar 15, 2004 - 3 comments

A friendly PSA from the RIAA (9mb mpg) or 5mb quicktime
posted by Espoo2 on Aug 22, 2003 - 13 comments

"Movies: They're worth it!" In a move to educate those darn thieving kids and their evil P2P file-sharing networks which are used to trade ripped movies, the MPAA has launched a public service campaign to explain, in layman's terms, why violating their copyrights is wrong. …Yes, these are the same people who have just brought us an entire summer of bloated sequels, shameless celebrity vehicles and uninspired hack-work. Respect!
posted by Down10 on Aug 3, 2003 - 81 comments

Federal judge rules Morpheus, Grokster not liable for Internet piracy. Well that is until the big pocketed music industry finds a favorable judge and wins the appeal.
posted by thedailygrowl on Apr 25, 2003 - 3 comments

Piracy is Progressive Taxation says Tim O'Reilly. Of the 7 lessons in this article, "Free is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service" is probably the best model of how things will progress.
posted by tboz on Dec 12, 2002 - 36 comments

Finally, a Fair Fight with Big Music From a Business Week Online column..."Telecom giant Verizon is battling the industry's bid to make it name a file-sharing subscriber. It's also defending your right to privacy. On July 24, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) made an unprecedented request of Verizon Communications (VZ). The music industry's trade association served the telecom with a subpoena, seeking the identity of a Verizon subscriber who had allegedly illegally traded digital songs by artists including Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, and "boy band" N'Sync. The RIAA didn't specify why it wanted to know who the user was or what it would do with the information."
posted by fpatrick on Sep 12, 2002 - 22 comments

Hosting Provider Bans RIAA - According to this press release, Information Wave Technologies will actively block all RIAA IP space because RIAA is intentionally seeking to invade customer networks / hosts to check for copyright violations. Additionally, they are going to deploy a "honeypot" system (simulates a GNUtella client sharing copyrighted material) in order to log requests for the files and correlate them with attempts to invade the host -- RIAA's stated plan to combate music piracy.
posted by Irontom on Aug 19, 2002 - 24 comments

Charley Pride's Copy-protected CD hacked -- or is it? Apparently, the people involved in trying to keep the CD off Napster failed to realize they are dealing with the World Wide Web.
posted by Hankins on May 16, 2001 - 6 comments

Kazaa is the most robust peer-to-peer application I've ever seen, and I've seen plenty. Among its innovations are multi-sourced downloads, automatic resume, searching by genre (and other metadata), and "supernodes." And it's getting big fast. 54,214 users online as I type this, sharing 22,250GB of files. (Sorry, Windows only.)
posted by waxpancake on May 12, 2001 - 25 comments

How to win friends and influence people! Metallica goes after Seattle ISP for copyright infringement. I got this link from a pal-has anyone else heard about it?
posted by black8 on Apr 30, 2001 - 19 comments

If you are downloading from Napster or some other service, the RIAA is tracking you. Here's a screenshot of the Recording Industry's secret weapon.
posted by andre_111 on Mar 23, 2001 - 17 comments

Disney's Michael Eisner on what to do about all those kids who use Napster: Arrest and prosecute the little SOBs. I know I'd sleep better at night knowing that those devious conspiratorial 11-year-olds were behind bars. [second item]
posted by aaron on Mar 16, 2001 - 15 comments

CD Sales down by 39%? And guess who's to blame. (Also linked in the article is the interesting stopnapster.com site.)
posted by gi_wrighty on Feb 26, 2001 - 43 comments

The ninth circuit court will be releasing their verdict on the linked page by 10am PST (noon CST). Is this the end for poor old Napster, or will other options be made available?
posted by Zebulun on Feb 12, 2001 - 6 comments

DivX + filenavigator = headaches for MPAA. Of course the SPA and RIAA can't be too pleased about filenavigator either. I've checked and the DivX of Castaway is on the net already.
posted by john on Jan 17, 2001 - 3 comments

If you haven't already read "The Heavenly Jukebox", you should really check it out. The Atlantic Monthly recently posted this great article subtitled "Rampant music piracy may hurt musicians less than they fear. The real threat -- to listeners and, conceivably, democracy itself -- is the music industry's reaction to it". While somewhat long, it's a very interesting read, going into the original copyright lawsuits in England over a hundred years ago to today's ordeal pitting the RIAA against the millions of people downloading Metallica mp3s off of Napster. Well worth reading.
posted by ookamaka on Aug 18, 2000 - 1 comment

Perhaps Lance was right. No maybe Peter was right. Regardless, the wheels of progress continue to turn, this time it's a p-to-p app that allows the swapping of console video games napster/gnutella-style, with the 17 year-old creator saying this about the possibility of getting shut down: "Sure, it is a concern that they may try to shut us down, despite the fact that we don't permit piracy, but I am confident in the law and believe we will prevail." Riiiiiight.
posted by mathowie on Aug 2, 2000 - 12 comments

Shut it down! Napster ordered to shut down immediately. Backlash anyone?
posted by Mick on Jul 26, 2000 - 42 comments

"Hatch Warns Labels, Don't Make Me Come Over There and Spank You" Oooh! This is gonna be good. [ From Inside via Dan Lyke's excellent Flutterby. ]
posted by baylink on Jul 13, 2000 - 20 comments

Motley disses Metallica Mister Sixx and pals give their response to Lars' crew, on the whole mp3/napster issue. Sounds like 2 groups of people are benefitting from all these lawsuits, lawyers and flash-cartoonists...
posted by nomisxid on May 31, 2000 - 4 comments

Dr. Dre follows in Metallica's footseps and hands over a list of 239,612 user ID's to Napster to for possible termination of these accounts.
posted by vitaflo on May 17, 2000 - 13 comments

Download an Mp3... ...and goto jail. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Of course, you can always DoS attack the Motion Pictures Association of America's website, (which was down as I was writing this.) but that would most likely only land you in even deeper water than downloading the Mp3.
posted by da5id on Apr 17, 2000 - 5 comments

WTF!?! Everyone's favorite band (back in high school) Metallica is suing Napster and a handful of universities for unlawful trading of their music. This is ridiculous, and I hope it doesn't set a precedence. If anyone would just slap a revenue model on napster so artists could get paid for their work, none of this piracy crap would happen. And Metallica, what about the other apps that do the same thing, are you going to sue them too? And what about every other band on earth? What do you expect to get out of universities, tighter controls over bandwidth, or student monitoring of internet usage? What about every cable modem and DSL provider that lets people use Napster, are you going after them too? Why don't you sue everyone on earth that's heard your songs but didn't pay for them? Side question: Is it better to burn out or fade away?
posted by mathowie on Apr 13, 2000 - 17 comments

The warez, mp3-traders, hacker and terrorist industry just got a just got a boost in the arm. the goverment and all the music companies are going to see that the internet is not to be regulated. You cannot stop individuals from sharing files between themselves and everytime you start to ban one program another one more innovative than the last pops up. I am going to stop my little rant here because I don't want to seem like i am anti goverment ...viva la revolution.
posted by neo452 on Apr 10, 2000 - 0 comments