MegaUpload is currently being portrayed by the MPAA and RIAA as one of the world’s leading rogue sites. But top music stars including P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg and Kanye West disagree and are giving the site their full support
in a brand new song. TorrentFreak
caught up with the elusive founder of MegaUpload, Kim Dotcom, who shrugged off “this rogue nonsense” and told us he wants content owners to get paid. “
It works like an ad blocker but instead of blocking ads we show ads coming from Megaclick, our ad network,” says Kim. “
This way we will generate enough ad revenue to provide free premium services and licensed content so that our users can have it for free.”
posted by finite
on Dec 9, 2011 -
73 comments
The U.S. House of Representatives has
drafted their version of Senator
Leahy's Protect IP Act,
renaming the bill the
E-Parasites Act. Among other changes discussed
previ
ously, the bill
now makes internet service providers and websites liable for activities of their users that infringe upon copyrights, effectively overturning parts of the 13-year-old Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
posted by jeffburdges
on Oct 27, 2011 -
120 comments
Senator Leahy's
Protect IP Act would require that U.S. ISPs impose an 'internet death penalty' upon domain after merely a preliminary injunction from a U.S. court that suspects the site of being 'dedicated to infringing activities', even if the domain's owner had never been notified and was not subject to U.S. jurisdiction. There is concern that the legislation would fragment the DNS system and
facilitate DNS spoofing by
obstructing DNSSEC (
pdf). There is also an
open letter opposing the bill signed by 108 Law Professors who study intellectual property law.
[more inside]
posted by jeffburdges
on Jul 24, 2011 -
29 comments
Radio, RIAA: mandatory FM radio in cell phones is the future. 'Music labels and radio broadcasters can't agree on much, including whether radio should be forced to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to pay for the music it plays. But the two sides can agree on this: Congress should mandate that FM radio receivers be built into cell phones, PDAs, and other portable electronics. The Consumer Electronics Association, whose members build the devices that would be affected by such a directive, is incandescent with rage. "The backroom scheme of the [National Association of Broadcasters] and RIAA to have Congress mandate broadcast radios in portable devices, including mobile phones, is the height of absurdity," thundered CEA president Gary Shapiro. Such a move is "not in our national interest."
"Rather than adapt to the digital marketplace, NAB and RIAA act like buggy-whip industries that refuse to innovate and seek to impose penalties on those that do."
But the music and radio industries say it's a consumer-focused proposition, one that would provide "more music choices."'
[more inside]
posted by VikingSword
on Aug 16, 2010 -
96 comments
DJ/musician
Mr. Fab and RIAA (no, not
them) have released
USA, a four-hour-long mix album with 335 different sources, many of them fairly unusual and most of them previously unused. It's ... fairly brilliant.
[more inside]
posted by WCityMike
on Aug 1, 2010 -
16 comments
The RIAA paid Holmes Roberts & Owen $9,364,901 in 2008, Jenner & Block more than $7,000,000, and Cravath Swain & Moore $1.25 million, to pursue its "copyright infringement" claims, in order to recover a mere $391,000. ... for a 3 year period, they spent around $64,000,000 in legal and investigative expenses to recover around $1,361,000. (via Slashdot)
posted by Joe Beese
on Jul 14, 2010 -
63 comments
Ars Technica reports on the US Copyright Group (website:
SAVECINEMA.ORG), an entity that
has sent out over 14,000 subpoenas in the past 5 months to P2P users who have downloaded smaller independent movies such as
Uwe Boll's Far Cry and
best picture Oscar winner The Hurt Locker. To put that in perspective,
the RIAA sued 18,000 P2P users during their multi-year anti-file sharing campaign. The law firm takes the moviemakers cases on for free, splitting with them the money the defendants pay to settle the case ($1,500 to $2,500 per subpoena) on a site that will conveniently take your credit card. The law firm and the filmmakers could end up splitting $19.7 million, and it's likely that this kind of approach will be tried with more movies. As you might expect,
some targeted individuals have been wrongly accused.
posted by The Devil Tesla
on Jun 3, 2010 -
166 comments
"I've said all along, we are in this together." John Simson, executive director of
SoundExchange - the royalty collecting arm of the RIAA -
extends an olive branch through 2008 that will cap the advance payments internet broadcasters will have to cough up at $2500 per year. This comes in the wake of the
Day of Silence, (it was June 26,
did anyone notice?) spearheaded by Los Angeles-based terrestrial/online radio station
KCRW (home of the brilliant
Morning Becomes Eclectic) and
SaveNetRadio, during which some of the biggest names in online radio - include
Live365, NPR and
Pandora - went dark for 24 hours, airing a
one-hour broadcast twice during that day on the history of flat fees in public broadcasting. [direct .mp3, 38mb] Under the much-maligned changes made by our government's Copyright Royalty Board,
the top six internet radio stations would have had to pay 47 percent of their total revenue (anticipated to be around $37.5 mil.) to the RIAA, starting this July. The Internet Radio Equality Act
[summary, in its entire pdf glory] has been introduced to the House of Representatives, seeking to permanently reverse this decision.
posted by phaedon
on Jul 3, 2007 -
69 comments
The Record Industry's Decline. "The record companies have created this situation themselves," says Simon Wright, CEO of Virgin Entertainment Group, which operates Virgin Megastores. Rosen and others see that 2001-03 period as disastrous for the business. "That's when we lost the users," Rosen says. "Peer-to-peer took hold. That's when we went from music having real value in people's minds to music having no economic value, just emotional value."
posted by geoff.
on Jun 26, 2007 -
279 comments
