The Story

In Brazil, an antipiracy group known as the Anti-Piracy Association of Film and Music (APCM) has recently won a case which has made any kind of peer-to-peer filesharing software illegal. This ruling is in followup to an earlier case in which a company called iPlay was sued for facilitating the transfer of copyrighted files. The APCM named a bunch of files to be filtered, but iPlay were not developers of the P2P software in question. This led the judge in the case to go back and say that any website which hosted P2P software “would be committing a crime, punishable by between two and four years in jail.”

Yes, That Means They’re All Illegal

You know how when you were in middle school you and your friends would talk about how it’s illegal to possess marijuana but not to smoke marijuana? This is the same thing. And why do you make it illegal to distribute something? So that no one can have it. The goal of this statute is to keep P2P software out of the hands of users, regardless of whether or not the users would use the software to infringe on …

A woman in Germany was sued back in 2008 for uploading a pornographic movie via the eD2K network. Only thing is that she was running an add-on that made it so her filesharing client is unable to upload anything. Additionally, there is no evidence to support the claim that she did any uploading.

The judge presiding over the suit doesn’t know anything about filesharing or tech, so he is requiring the woman to hire an outside expert to testify as to whether or not the woman could have uploaded the files in question. The source information is pretty unclear as to whether the woman is using the expert offensively or defensively (she did file her own suit against the rightholder), but we do know that the woman is paying for the expert out of her own pocket. The total cost is 5000 euros, 3000 of which are being supplied by a lawyer. The rest of the money is going to come from donations.

Requiring the woman to pay to hire her own expert is not as unfair as it may initially sound (especially if the expert is testifying for the woman as a plaintiff). Germany is one of many countries which, unlike …

It seems that GGF wants to pay you for filesharing

Hans Pandeya of Global Gaming Factory (GGF), the folks buying The Pirate Bay, said in an interview that GGF plans to utilize the network of filesharers for bandwidth. According to Mr. Pandeya, “the only way to make something more attractive than free,” no doubt in reference to illegal filesharing, is “to pay users to share files.” Rather than hosting files from a centralized hub, GGF’s plan is to use the network of users exchanging data with one another to minimize the amount of bandwidth that an ISP needs to pump to one location. Money will still go to the copyright holders, but “users who share that song” will receive “a payment for putting that file on the P2P network.”

The plan that Mr. Pandeya is describing seems a bit odd as his interview impliees that GGF has no plans of charging  people for using The Pirate Bay. Instead, he seems to suggest that the money to be made is from relieving the burden on ISPs – they pay GGF to …

The judge behind the PirateBay trial, famous now for not disclosing time spent working in pro-copyright lobbyist groups, has won. There will be no retrial.  Love or hating torrenting and pirates, this trial was a crock of lies. Using such a judge, with a proven and demonstrated bent against the defendants is beyond reprehensible. It should be the cause of international outrage, broken trials are the symbol of tyranny and repressions. No person or organization deserves an unfair trial, regardless of their supposed crimes. Justice must stand.

Now, what can be done? Nothing legally, the judgement is not open for appeal. If you have a chance, make some ruckus in your own way.

Last week, Charles Nesson wrote an editorial on the reasoning behind his pro-bono defense of Joel Tenenbaum and on why he’s choosing to fight the RIAA in general. Now RIAA counsel Steven Marks has submitted his own editorial, which flows somewhat pathetically. The piece itself essentially is general phrases leading into the same old rhetoric. Two points on which we take issue with Mr. Marks (and with the other RIAA staff who almost certainly collaborated on this piece): first, Mr. Marks lays “hundreds of artists dropped from rosters, billions of dollars and thousands of jobs lost during the last ten years” at the feet of filesharing. Second, Marks defends the $1 million suit against Tenenbaum by saying that the RIAA has “never once sought maximum damages in our court cases.” These points are both sort of ridiculous; we’ll take them to task.

First, there has never been conclusive evidence on how filesharing has affected music industry profits, so claiming that “billions of dollars” have been effectively stolen by pirates is absurd. Again, let’s turn to some real data saying that pirates buy more music than non-pirates. Here’s what’s …

It looks like Spain has set a pretty strong legal precedent on filesharing. A Spanish man who downloaded, for starters, 3322 copyrighted movies, and then shared them, is not guilty of any crime because “there was no evidence that he profitted from downloading the movies and music, or sharing them with others.” While this precedent is pretty liberal definition of filesharing, it does right what so many laws here in the US do wrong: it keeps the law a shield, not a sword.

Too often in in the States, it seems that our legal system is set up to punish rather than to protect. The point of copyright, for example, is so that if I write up some code, Microsoft can’t just sell my code as their own. But copyright law is being abused to sue the pants of kids like Joel Tenenbaum instead of being used properly. In New York, there are street vendors who sell burned CDs all over the place, but you never hear about the RIAA trying to shut down those guys. 

But the problem isn’t just confined to copyright law, though that’s where we see it most. It may be outside the realm of technology, but child …

We all have something called a “BS meter.” It is what starts ringing when you hear something that you know is malarkey. Mine went off today in response to a report that was published by Nielsen about video consumption. The important numbers can be found here. I’ll summarize the findings: only 1% of all watched video is online. Now, gut reaction, does that sound right? Or course not! Let’s take a look.

Most of the report (the full PDF is here), is filled with tidbits on television viewing, which is at an all time high of 153 hours a month average. I never watch TV, so I cannot comment on that, but it  seems consistent with what I have heard a dozen times. Whatever. The internet numbers are what we need to focus on. That one percent breaks down into 131 million people watching three hours of video a month. Sounds innocuous enough, until you begin to question where they received their data from. Do you think that they have any data for pirated content? I bet not, and that alone makes the statistic bogus.

In 2004, P2P accounted for an …

When The Sims 3 leaked onto torrent sites earlier this week, our article on it focused on the big picture of software piracy, but we missed something. After talking to a friend of mine at The Second Opinion, it became apparent that the big issue is not in the generalities of the leak, but that the game that leaked is a Sims game, which is a causal game with a rampant following. Hell, it’s the best-selling PC game of all time, and it’s not a gamer’s game. It’s targeted at moms and younger sisters more than anyone else. So the popularity of The Sims 3 on torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay could mean that moms and younger sisters have found their way into the world of P2P software.

Towards the end of last year, Boston University student Joel Tenenbaum was sued by the RIAA for $1 million. And who came to his defense by Charles Nesson, a professor at the prestigious Harvard Law School. As big as that was, Mr. Nesson is now shooting for an even bigger landmark: his claim is now that peer to peer (P2P) file transfers that are done without commercial intent are all fair use, which, if he can win his case, would leave the majority of file sharing cases dead in the water. But Mr. Nesson’s position seems to one that necessarily cannot be deemed legal status if intellectual property is to continue having any value.

It’s no secret that the music industry hates piracy with a fiery passion. Yet the lawsuits that have occurred over the past few years seem a bit gratuitous every time another study comes to light saying that those who use P2P to acquire music illegally are bigger music consumers. This time around, the pirates are the de-facto “biggest consumers of legal music options,” buying ten times as much music as the non-pirates. The reason for this behavior makes far more sense than the record industry would like you to think.