The RIAA is like the mafiaSays Dow Jones writerBy Egan Orion: Friday, 21 March 2008, 9:56 AMA COMMENTATOR at Dow Jones MarketWatch yesterday concurred with what we've been suggesting for a while - that the RIAA is behaving like the mafia.Theresa Poletti's March 20 column begins: "As any fan of The Sopranos knows, the mob often takes out its enemies in a gruesome fashion as a way to warn others to fall in line. The same can be said of the campaign over the past four years instigated by the dreaded Recording Industry Association of America...."She relates the RIAA's practice of sending college students extortionate letters demanding payments of thousands of dollars and threatening federal lawsuits. She writes:"I don't condone [copyright infringement], but the RIAA's tactics are nearly as bad as the actions of mobsters, real or fictional. The analogy comes up easily and frequently in any discussion of the RIAA's maneuvers."The column quotes Robert Talbot, who is a law professor at the University of San Francisco, as saying, "My students were saying it's extortion."He teaches an Internet and intellectual property clinic. Many of his law students volunteer to assist people who get threatening letters from the RIAA.Talbot said, "The letters are kind of scary. These are usually kids who are 17 or 18 years old, they don't have any money and they are scared. Students are trying to negotiate, but I don't have much hope. They don't want to negotiate. It's pay up or we go into federal court."Poletti doesn't believe it's quite fair that the RIAA should be placing students' educations at risk, lashing out at them to make up for its own lack of vision in failing to adjust its obsolete business model to the realities of new technology.She mentions that the RIAA won a big victory last October when a jury found Jammie Thomas, a single mother of two, liable for copyright infringement and ordered her to pay the sum of $222,000 as damages for 24 songs.The column also summarises the ordeal of Tanya Andersen. The disabled single mother of a young daughter, Andersen was unjustly accused by the RIAA in a federal lawsuit and harrassed for years by the RIAA's minions.The RIAA's lawsuit against Andersen was eventually dismissed and the RIAA was found liable to pay her attorney fees, in an amount yet to be determined.A week ago, Andersen filed an amended complaint in her countersuit against the RIAA and its member companies, unlicensed private investigators Media Sentry and settlement collections agency. Her lawsuit requests class action status on behalf of others who have been similarly victimised by the RIAA's campaign of threats and intimidation.As Poletti notes, Andersen's lawsuit alleges that the RIAA and its associates violated the US federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) statues. Those laws were passed in order to prosecute the US mafia.There's more below, but it's good to see that someone in the mainstream media is at last beginning to "get it" about the RIAA and its goons.
RIAA can't sue over P2PMaking songs available not unlawfulBy Stewart Meagher: Wednesday, 02 April 2008, 3:21 PMA NEW YORK JUDGE has ruled that the act of making files available for download does not constitute copyright theft. The ruling is likely to knobble thousands of pending cases brought against file sharing networks and individuals by the content Mafiaa.The new ruling places the onus on organisations like the RIAA to prove that the actual unlawful download - ergo copying - took place.The whole "making available" argument, which the RIAA has successfully used in a number of cases, one of which resulted in one poor geezer having to cough up $220,000, seems to have been shot down in flames.And not before time as, if the suit had been successful, anyone with an open internet connection and an unprotected folder on a hard drive could technically have fallen foul of the law.That's not the end of the matter by a long chalk, however, as the judge also ruled that "Making an offer to distribute" does constitute an infringement.
Cops intensify kiddie DNA sweep5,000 a day keeps the terrors at bayBy Mark Ballard: Monday, 07 April 2008, 6:24 PMTHE BRITISH PLOD have been adding 5,000 children to the DNA database every day, according to figures released by the Home Office.A quarter of DNA swabs collected by police between October and January 2008 were from kids, according to data the government placed in the House of Commons Library early last month (but did not place in Hansard, its official record).Jenny Willcott, the Justice spokeswoman for the Liberal Democrats, who asked for the data, said it represented nothing less than the "mass criminalisation of our children"."Hauling thousands into police stations to keep their DNA on record for life is a grotesque overreaction to the problems caused by a very small minority of young people," she said.The figures showed that police collected the details of over 200,000 children in the three months to January.Helen Wallace, a campaigner at Genewatch, said that arrest targets were forcing the police to pick up kids for minor offences. The Police Federation has said this is also the reason why there is a disproportionate number of black men on the DNA database.Wallace estimated that there were 100,000 children on the DNA database who had never been convicted or even cautioned for any crime.The Libdems called for people who have not been convicted to be removed from the DNA database.But Tony Lake, chief constable of Lincolnshire Police and the outgoing national DNA chief, insisted people should be kept on the database once they were there. Both the Ipswich murderer and the murderer of Sally-Anne Bowman were both found and convicted using DNA evidence gathered for minor offences, he said.The trouble with the kids on the DNA database, he said, was that they were not so "young and innocent" as people made them out to be."There's a fairly hefty chunk of people who get arrested in their early teens. Many of those are repeat offenders. A person's criminal career starts at a young age," he said.He said more criminological research needed to be done to understand the reasons why some children grow into criminals.Dr. Priscilla Anderson, professor of childhood studies at the University of London, said the reasons were largely linked to poverty. Most people associated with crime came from deprived backgrounds.And most of the kids put on the DNA database without a conviction were merely poor kids without anywhere else to go but the streets."If you are going to have a police database, at least have it record only convicted criminals," she said."Wouldn't it be better to be more supportive of young people who get into trouble instead of treating them like criminals," she said.Chief Constable Lake said last year children could be stigmatised by having their details added to the DNA database.But the police database is under heavier attack, with a case in the European Court of Human Rights challenging the right of the police to keep the records of people who commit minor offences for long periods.The UK's Equality and Human Rights Commission said it was watching the case closely as well. It is deciding whether to sue the government over its storing the details of a disproportionate number of black men on the DNA database.
RIAA sued homeless manLeft summons at old addressBy Egan Orion: Friday, 18 April 2008, 3:36 PMRIAA LAWYERS narrowly avoided a court sanction in a case where they sued a homeless man.In Warner v. Berry, the RIAA sued a man who was then staying in a homeless shelter. Apparently undeterred in the least by the defendant's impecunious circumstances, big music's legal furies unleashed a minion to track the man down and serve him with a summons and complaint. The sequence of events that ensued went thusly:On April 9, 2007, the mafiaa's process server posted a copy of the summons and complaint on the door of the defendant's former apartment, even though the plaintiffs knew that it was not his then current address.On April 17, 2007, the recording industry plaintiffs asked for a postponement of a scheduled conference because their "attempts at service at Defendant's last-known address were unsuccessful." They requested a 60 day adjournment for "conducting a thorough address investigation to locate a current address."On April 25, 2007, the plaintiffs' process server executed an affidavit of service, declaring that on April 9, 2007, at 3:50 p.m., she had "served" the summons by affixing one copy "in a conspicuous place on the property known as: 1713 Adee Ave Apt. 1 Bronx, N.Y. 10469" -- an address where they knew at the time that the defendant was no longer in residence.Magistrate Judge Kevin Fox caught the discrepancy and called the plaintiffs on it. He observed that, at the time the plaintiffs requested postponement on April 17, 2007, the plaintiffs "had already resorted to the 'affix and mail' method of service because they affixed the summons to the defendant's last known residence on April 9, 2007."Magistrate Judge Fox found "the plaintiffs demonstrated they never intended to conduct 'a thorough address investigation'...." He concluded that the plaintiffs' representation to the court that they intended to conduct an inve stigation to locate defendant's current address implicated Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 11(b) because it was made for the improper purpose of unnecessary delay.US District Court Judge Harold Baer, Jr., agreed with the Magistrate in most respects, but he declined to sanction the RIAA's lawyers because he believed their misrepresentation resulted from sloppiness rather than an intention to mislead, "giving them as officers of the Court the benefit of the doubt."But Judge Baer did deny the plaintiffs the default judgement they'd requested. µ
Secret pact allows the US to spy on UK motoristsBig Buddy is watching y'allBy Egan Orion: Monday, 21 April 2008, 4:16 PMTHE UK Home Secretary secretively signed a "special certificate" last year that gives foreign security agencies real-time access to traffic camera images and related data monitoring British motorists on highways throughout the UK.Opposition politicians and civil liberties advocates yesterday accused Gordon Brown's government of attempting to hide from Parliament its covert plans to facilitate international surveillance of UK citizens in violation of privacy laws.Under the authorisation signed last July 4 by Jacqui Smith, video feeds and still images captured from roadside TV cameras, along with personal data derived from them, can be transmitted out of the UK to countries such as the US, that are outside the European Economic Area.Home Secretary Smith failed to mention the exception in a statement she made to Parliament less than two weeks later on July 17, 2007 outlining Metropolitan Police exemptions to the 1998 Data Protection Act.The dispensation gives British police "anti-terrorism" officers the permission to transmit images and information overseas, based upon any representation that the materials are relevant to a "terrorism" threat either in the UK or elsewhere.Liberal Democratic leader Nick Clegg said last night, "This confirms that this Government is happy to hand over potentially huge amounts of information on British citizens under the catch-all pretext of 'national security'."UK civil liberties groups are appalled that the UK government is monitoring the daily movements of British citizens on a wholesale basis, even more so that it's willing to provide surveillance images and data to foreign intelligence agencies.Opponents of what they view as a nascent surveillance state fear the imposition of a "data mining" programme to filter and correlate billions of pieces of data to profile individuals, activities and relationships in ways that might be abused, such as to target minorities and political groups and suppress peaceful dissent.A Home Office spokesman defended powers granted by the "special certificate" on the grounds of "counter terrorism" and national security, as they always do, of course. Speaking anonymously, he said "We would like to reassure the public that robust controls have been put in place to control and safeguard access to, and use of, the information."In other words, "Trust us."
Fingerprint departing foreigners says US Homeland SecurityGive us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free... err, sorry, sod offBy Sylvie Barak: Wednesday, 23 April 2008, 10:01 AMNOT ONLY DOES the US government want to know who comes in to America, they want to know who leaves as well, and in order to do this, the Bush administration has dumped responsibility on US airlines and cruise ships to digitally fingerprint every departing foreigner.The Government claims the move is necessary to combat the mass of illegal immigration, in which at least one million foreign nationals find ways to stay in the US undetected, every year. Most of them doing the jobs that hold US society together.Unsurprisingly, the various trade organisations representing airlines and cruise operators are none too pleased about being ordered to shoulder responsibility for forcing foreigners to ‘hand’ over their fingerprints on the way out, nor the outrageous costs such a system would incur.But Homeland Insecurity, which has been invading people’s privacy for quite some time already, don’t seem bothered that their new pettiness will cost the already hurting US airline industry another $2.7 billion in the next decade.Head of the International Air Transport Association, Giovanni Bisignani (sounds like a foreigner to us), said on behalf of the 240 airlines his organisation represents that “outsourcing exit formalities to airlines is not a responsible approach". Especially seeing as most members of US airline security are illegal Mexicans anyway.But Stewart Baker, assistant lackey at the Homeland Security department, threatened that if the airlines refused to comply, they’d be facing fines of up to $1,000 a day per passenger who left without giving up his private biometric details. And possibly water board torture too. Tsk, tsk, who do they think they are? Britain?Congress has demanded that the new rules be implemented by June 30, 2009, but it’s likely they’ll already be in place by January 2009, just in case. Wouldn’t want six million foreigners slipping through the cracks till June, would we now
Metallica backs file sharingGreat U turns of our timeBy Nick Farrell: Monday, 28 April 2008, 8:11 AMPOPULAR BEAT COMBO and bunch of corporate crybabies Metallica has finally seen the writing on the wall and decided to support file sharing.In 2000, the group was behind the lawsuit that killed Napster and became one of the loudest critics of file sharing. The band has had a change of heart, apprently, after seeing the huge wads of cash Radiohead and, err, Cliff Richard, made out of sticking albums online.In a statement the band said that its fight was not about downloading really, it was about piracy and the money that the artists make.At the time of the Napster lawsuit, pretentious Metallica shed builder Lars Ulrich said: "We take our craft - whether it be the music, the lyrics, or the photos and artwork - very seriously, as do most artists. It is therefore sickening to know that our art is being traded like a commodity rather than the art that it is."As a result of the band's cynical U turn, it appears that Metallica is doing only one more album with its current record label, Warner.Anyone with more than two operational synapses to bang together might think that band members have realised that they can make a lot more money on their own by embracing the Internet without the label taking a cut.Rock 'n' Roll, eh?
Court rules against RIAAMAFIAA bloodsuckers get legal stake through black heartBy Andrew Thomas: Thursday, 01 May 2008, 12:40 PMTORCHBEARING peasants are making their way toward Castle RIAA following a Federal Court ruling that, "Merely making an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work available to the public does not violate a copyright holder's exclusive right of distribution."According to one copyright lawyer, the decision means the end of the MAFIAA's litigation strategy.In Atlantic Records v. Howell, Judge Neil V. Wake rejected the RIAA's claim that the defendants had distributed music files merely by making them available through Kazaa.A private investigator hired by the RIAA identifed 4,000 files available from the Howells' Kazaa account, took screenshots showing the files listed and downloaded some of the songs.The Howells maintained that they made legitimate copies of their CDs for personal use and they didn't know Kazaa was making them public. Asked if he was sharing music files online, Jeffrey Howell told the court, "I was not, no. The computer was, but I was not. The computer in some form ... made files that I did not know available on the Internet."The ruling means the onus is now on the RIAA to prove exactly who was making copyrighted files available, rather than simply prosecuting the owner of the computer.A lawyer investigating appeals for people already ordered to pay damages of up to $150,000 a song says that, following the new ruling, he believes the convictions were reached following improper instructions to juries. He added that damages of $750 per song would be ruled unconstitutional, as the actual lost profit when a song is copied is more like 40 cents.
Mafiaa ups campaign against studentsMassive surge in threatening lettersBy Stewart Meagher: Friday, 02 May 2008, 2:27 PMUNIVERSITY CAMPUSES throughout the United States, and in the Mid West in particular, are reporting huge increases in the number of legal letters sent by music industry pitbulls, despite no measurable increase in downloading activity.Wired is reporting that some colleges are getting as many notices in one day as they would normally expect in a month.Indiana University was receiving 80 notices a day from the RIAA last month when it usually gets less than 100 a month from all of the major copyright cops combined.The move could just be something to do with RIAA-supported legislation which wants organisations to be forced to install deep-packet monitoring equipment if they receive a certain number of notices.An RIAA spokeshound said "We are always making an effort to more effectively and efficiently detect infringing activity on the Internet, as we are continuously looking for ways to improve our ability to find and act on incidences of theft online. Having said that, there's been no change in our procedures."The music industry once claimed that more than 40 per cent of illegal downloads came from college students. The estimate was recently reduced to 15 percent for college-aged students of which only three per cent was carried out on college kit.
US border police copy visitors' laptop dataFile sharingBy Nick Farrell: Tuesday, 06 May 2008, 8:49 AMTHE LAND of the Free has officially become crazier at its borders and is now demanding that punters allow data on their laptops and mobile phones to be copied by airport officials.New rules mean that visitors to the United States will face even longer queues as immigration officials download gigabytes of data from visitor’s laptops for snooping later.Already visitors face long queues while armed officials take fingerprints and snaps of you as you enter the country now it looks like things are going to get much worse.Travel agents' group Abta told the Mirror that it is getting silly in the US saying the new laws were not a good thing for passengers and the country had become Big Brother.Abta was also worried that flat-footed IT illiterate staff could corrupt or wipe computer dataSecurity outfit Symantec said that the new rules were an ass, particularly if they tried to search everyone with a laptop. Dr Guy Bunker said that visitors to the US could wait in line for weeks if border guards were ordered to check everyone.He thought it might be better for visitors to the US to leave their laptops behind or make sure that all the data is taken off it.After all, you can just download all the files you need off the Interweb when you arrive and the security checks at the border absolutely pointless.
DRM alive and kickingMAFIAA wants to bring it back from the deadBy Nick Farrell: Friday, 09 May 2008, 8:24 AMDESPITE BEING HATED, causing its members legal woes, and not actually working, the Recording Industry Association of America wants to bring back DRM.David Hughes, who heads up the RIAA's technology unit, said that while lots of recording companies were trying to distance themselves from DRM he thinks it will make a comeback.According to Cnet he made a list of the 22 ways to sell music, and 20 of them still required DRM so therefore "DRM was not dead."Hughes thought there was going to be a shift in music distribution towards subscription services, which means that DRM has to be used. He added that while the music was playing, punters did not care about DRM.It was when it stopped them from doing something that they started to get miffed.
Cut and paste could be outlawedHacks quake with fearBy Nick Farrell: Tuesday, 27 May 2008, 6:10 AMA US COURT CASE against Youtube could threaten the ancient media practice of cutting and pasting news.According to AP, the billion dollar copyright infringement case from Viacom is over Youtube's inability to keep copyrighted material off its site.However the outfit's owner, Google, claims that if it loses it will turn around the way people share internet information over the world wide wibble.Viacom claims that the internet has led to "an explosion of copyright infringement" by Youtube and it wants it switched off by next Tuesday.Google claims that Youtube goes beyond any legal requirements to protect copyrighted material.The Viacom case would make carriers and hosting providers liable for internet communications and, if it wins, it will prevent millions of people from legitimately exchanging information.If a hack cut and pastes a story from another source then his ISP could be sued by the person who originally wrote the story. Of course that means that ISPs will be unlikely to want to take on sites that are cutting and pasting or they are going to be sued if people do not come up with anything original.It would be the death of blogging, digg, fark and all sorts of other sites that have sprung up over the years.
Storm Warning for Cloud Computing: More Like a MiasmaBy Bill ThompsonMy friend Simon is one of those net entrepreneurs with the attention to detail it takes to have an idea and turn it into an effective company. He’s currently on his second job search service, and it seems to be going very well.One reason for the success may be that Simon has embraced the network age with a dedication that most of us can only wonder at. He uses a range of productivity tools, scheduling services and collaborative systems to manage both his personal and professional life, and once confessed to me that he had ‘outsourced his memory’ to Microsoft Outlook and its calendar service.So far I’ve resisted the temptation to pay a team of hackers to break into his laptop and add ‘jump off a cliff’ as his 10am appointment on Thursday.Recently I’ve noticed that Simon’s head is in the cloud. Or rather, his business is, as he and his team have moved most of their systems online, taking advantage of the move from local storage and processing to ‘cloud computing’, where data and services are provided online and accessed from a PC or any other device.For a small but growing business it means that new storage and processing capacity can be added incrementally instead of having to buy a whole new server at a time.And for a distributed company like WorkCircle, where the team all work from their own homes or offices, it makes coordination, document sharing and collaboration a lot easier.The approach is growing in popularity, and Google, Microsoft and Amazon are among the many large companies working on ways to attract users to their offerings, with Google Apps, Microsoft’s Live Mesh and Amazon S3 all signing up customers as they try to figure out what works and what can turn a profit.The technical obstacles to making distributed systems work are formidable, and while books like Nick Carr’s ‘The Big Switch’ talk optimistically about the potential for utility computing to be offered to homes and businesses just like electric power, building robust, reliable and scalable systems around these new models will tax our ingenuity.As we become more reliant on the cloud any problems will become more severe, as we can see in the irritation that many users feel with Twitter at the moment because of constant outages, dropped messages and general flakiness as the company tries to cope with what was clearly an unanticipated growth in usage.It would be a lot worse if your spreadsheets or presentations were inaccessible because of problems in the cloud, or rather because of problems with the physical computers or network connections that make cloud computing possible.Because behind all the rhetoric and promotional guff the ‘cloud’ is no such thing: every piece of data is stored on a physical hard drive or in solid state memory, every instruction is processed by a physical computer and the every network interaction connects two locations in the real world.It is often useful to conceptualise online activities as ‘cyberspace’, the place behind the screen, but the internet is firmly of the real world, and that is one of the greatest problems facing cloud computing today.In the real world national borders, commercial rivalries and political imperatives all come into play, turning the cloud into a miasma as heavy with menace as the fog over the Grimpen Mire that concealed the Hound of the Baskervilles in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story.The issue was recently highlighted by reports that the Canadian government has a policy of not allowing public sector IT projects to use US-based hosting services because of concerns over data protection.Under the USA PATRIOT Act the FBI and other agencies can demand to see content stored on any computer, even if it being hosted on behalf of another sovereign state. If your data hosting company gets a National Security Letter then not only do they have to hand over the information, they are forbidden from telling you or anyone else — apart from their lawyer — about it.The Canadians are rather concerned about this, and rightly so. According to the US-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that helped the Internet Archive successfully challenge an NSL, over 200,000 were issued between 2003 and 2006, and the chances are that Google, Microsoft and Amazon were on the recipient list.Even encrypting the data stored in data centres won’t always work, as one of the benefits of Amazon’s S3 and other services is that they do remote processing too, and the data needs to be decrypted before that can happen.This is not just a US issue, of course, although attention has focused on the US because that it where most of the ‘cloud’ data centres can be found. It applies just as much to the UK, where the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act will allow the police or secret services to demand access to databases and servers. And other countries may lack even the thin veneer of democratic oversight that the USA and UK offer to the surveillance activities of their intelligence agencies.Companies have no real choice but to comply with the law in countries where they operate, and I don’t expect a campaign of civil disobedience from the big hosting providers. Those of us who use the cloud just need to be clear about the realities of the situation — and not send or store anything on GoogleMail or HotMail that the US government might want to use against us.Part of the attraction of the internet was always that it transcended geographic boundaries of all forms, whether political or physical. Communities grew because people shared interests or values, not because they lived in the same place or were under the same government. It was far from perfect, but it gave us a glimpse of a better world.The push towards cloud computing may force us to be more realistic about the boundaries that have always existed. Perhaps it is time for the UN to consider a ‘cyberspace rights treaty’ that will outline what it’s acceptable to do when other people’s data comes into your jurisdiction.
RIAA tactics reach new lowIf at first you don't succeed... cheatBy Nick Farrell: Thursday, 19 June 2008, 9:02 AMTHE RECORDING INDUSTRY Association of America has a novel method of dealing with court cases it has lost. According to PC World, it is re-suing the same person in the hope of getting another friendlier judge.Last year the RIAA got stricter about file-sharing, claiming the act of making files available for sharing breaks copyright laws and is available for prosecution. It had a number of cases booked up where were de to be charged using this definition.All these cases were chucked out by US District Judge Neil Wake ruling that the definition was pants and making copyrighted material available via a shared folder does not warrant a copyright infringement lawsuit.He told the RIAA that it must prove that the material actually changed hands.However the RIAA has simply dropped the cases and refiled them as a defendant to be identified later. The cunning plan is that because they are so called 'John Doe' cases it might get a new judge who may not be so inhospitble.So far its actions have not been pointed out to any Judge, who might not like the idea of double jeopardy and abuse of process.
Google keeps search code secretViacom told to go forth and multiplyBy Nick Farrell: Thursday, 03 July 2008, 9:41 AMClick here to find out more!A FEDERAL Judge has told Viacom that it cannot have access to Google's secret search code as part of the evidence needed for its $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against the search outfit.US District Judge Louis Stanton said it was a trade secret and could not be revealed without Google going down the gurgler.He said that placing such a vital asset in the paws of the great unwashed merely to allay speculation was unfair.The judge also refused to let Viacom's have a look under the bonnet of Google's Video Identification Tool, which helps notify Google of copyright infringement.The judge did allow Viacom to take the records of every video watched by Youtube users, including their login names and IP addresses.This means that anyone who posted a video on Youtube that Viacom thinks infringed its copyright could be taken to the cleaners.The Electronic Frontier Foundation has called foul, saying that the ruling ignores the protections of the federal Video Privacy Protection Act and threatens to expose deeply private information
New York to censor video gamesGovernor signs controversial lawBy Aharon Etengoff: Wednesday, 23 July 2008, 8:48 AMClick here to find out more!NEW YORK GOVERNOR David Paterson has signed a controversial law which will require the prominent display of age ratings on game packages and mandatory parental controls on game consoles by 2010.Richard Taylor of the Entertainment Software Association told ABC News that the bill unfairly "singled out the video game industry over all other forms of media". Taylor also voiced concern that the government could eventually shift its focus to other content such as "books, theatre and film."Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, criticised the bill as little more than "moral preening". Norquist told ABC News that the bill was legally "unconstitutional" and noted that it had been struck down by numerous US states.New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman concurred. "New Yorkers do not need the State judging which video games are appropriate and which aren't.” According to Lieberman, "parents, not government committees, should be responsible for making those judgments."
Thus it appears that ACTA may be set in place by the end of the year. The new policy allows random warrantless search and seizures at the border. Under ACTA, border patrol agents will be able to seize peoples’ laptops, iPods, and other electronics which they suspect contain illegally-obtained media. If the border patrol thinks they've found such media on the devices, they are authorized to destroy them at their discretion.
Music industry backs down over Itunes closure threatThe price is right... for the next five yearsBy Emma Hughes: Friday, 03 October 2008, 10:59 AMAPPLE’S THREAT to close down Itunes seems to have done the trick in getting the Copyright Royalty Board to keep the price of royalties paid to record companies for downloaded music at 9 cents a song.The Cupertino company threatened to close down the incredibly successful music marketplace if the decision went through to up the price of downloading songs from nine cents to 15, a 66 per cent price hike.So, The National Music Publishers Association, which has been pushing for the rise in royalties for 18 months seems to have backed down, no doubt realising that, without the huge amounts of wonga put its way by Apple fans would leave it rather impoverished.An Apple representative said, "We're pleased with the CRB's decision."The CRB achieved a hollow victory by getting a proposed cut in the rate to 4.8 cents proposed by some vendors, coming to an agreement of 9.1 cents a song for at least five years. We can't help but wonder how much cash went into the lawyers pockets over this whole shambles.This decision has been pronounced by the NMPA as “a positive development for all songwriters and music publishers" and is the first time royalty rates have been mechanically decided for digital music.Jonathan Potter of the Digital Music Association, which represents online music stores like Apple said, "Keeping rates where they are will help digital services and retailers continue to innovate and grow for the next several years. "This move doesn’t come as much of a surprise, as Apple was highly unlikely to close the store – over the last five years it has sold more than five billion songs online, and that's a whole load of nine cents.Digital sales figures show that songs and album sales rose by almost 50 percent last year according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Meanwhile CD sales dropped 20 per cent to $7.4bn (£4bn).Looks like our predictions were correct. Then again, the chances of Apple killing its cash cow were always pretty slim.
