As a native American of the north, I naturally have a rivalry against my brown brothers of the south. You guys suck.

what happens on the internet is supposed to stay on the internet. It is not the US Judicial system's authority to judge what happens on the internet. Didn't Bill Clinton sign a bill saying this?

i think im more white than you, but no prob, that doesnt make me special

You fucking racist.

Tell them with wine, it totally helps.

Frank, I didn't get banned for having a big sig, I got banned for posting a murder scene (and yet donotcall isn't banned yet).

And as said in numerous other threads, donotcall is a faggot and can go fuck himself with an iron pipe.

that's the truth

Just to refesh since so much garbage got into this thread...my whole point is that the RIAA keeps going after people in order to stop people from d/l music, when in fact, it gains in popularity everyday. It's the perfect example of futility out there today.

Does the RIAA pay ANY attention to iTunes sales? I mean, those downloads sell by the millions!

I immediately cut the amount of actual buying I did in half when they started suing people. Most of my favorite artists don't even come close to making money with album sales, and many of the rest have far more money than I will earn in my entire life. So why the fuck put money into a machine that shits on the people making the music and doesn't even make all that much economic business sense, anyway, anymore?

let the record companies die, sell records yourself

OH HELL YEAH

RIAA told to pay legal fees for harrassed defendant
Pigopolist pursuit penalized

Where do you stand?

Tanya Andersen, a single mother and unlikely file-sharers' champion for hoisting the RIAA with its own petard, has scored another victory.

A US District Court judge in Oregon affirmed an earlier decision to award Andersen attorneys' fees for the two-and-a-half year legal pursuit by the Recording Industry Ass. of America, that ultimately ended in dismissal. The latest poop on Andersen was spotted by hawk-like focus of Recording Industry vs The People(http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/.

The whole mess started when Andersen was sued by the RIAA in February 2005. The label cabal accused the disabled 44-year-old mother of downloading and distributing gangster rap over the Kazaa music sharing network under the handle "gotenkito." (Titles such as the 2003 Ludacris tune, "Hoes in My Room," in which the artist inquires who invited several undesirable women into his penthouse, and describes them in humorous detail.)

Andersen denied the allegations and countersued the RIAA later that year for fraud and racketeering.

Throughout the legal battle she accused the RIAA of using threats underhanded tactics to find evidence. (The RIAA couldn't find proof on her computer that she shared files). Notably, she claimed RIAA agents tried to contact her then 10-year-old daughter at school by impersonating the girl's grandmother on the phone.

In June 2007, the RIAA agreed to drop charges against Andersen, just hours before the court deadline to submit proof that she illegally downloaded the copyrighted material.

The case was then dismissed with prejudice, meaning Andersen could attempt to recover attorneys' fees from the RIAA. Andersen also dismissed her own countersuit without prejudice in order to pursue a separate malicious prosecution lawsuit against the RIAA.

The fees were awarded to Andersen by a federal magistrate judge last September. The RIAA quickly appealed the decision. But the magistrate's ruling was affirmed yesterday by Judge James Redden.

As a result, the RIAA will have to pay some amount to Andersen, but the amount is not apparent.

Andersen is also still pursuing her lawsuit against the RIAA and is seeking class-action status for others to join her. ®

yay

I miss SCSA

act of desperation:

Leodler heads RIAA's antipiracy fight
Former FBI agent to lead org's battle
A former FBI special agent will head up the recording industry's antipiracy fight in the western U.S., the RIAA announced.
In addition to spearheading RIAA's own efforts against bootleggers, Kathy Leodler, a 23-year FBI veteran most recently assigned as acting chief of the bureau's San Diego office, will "assist law enforcement authorities engaged in music piracy investigations," org said. "The work includes investigations into music theft both in traditional physical form and also online."

"Kathy's tremendous experience directing teams in sensitive and complex domestic and international investigations is supreme," said Brad Buckles, RIAA's exec veep of antipiracy, in a statement. "Her ability to utilize sophisticated techniques and tactical response will be a huge asset to the hard work we do to further our mission."

While in the San Diego office of the FBI, Leodler oversaw a multi-million dollar budget and a staff of 500, the RIAA said.

The RIAA's western region comprises Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming and Guam.

Woman Sues RIAA For Racketeering, Spying

http://www.fmqb.com/Article.asp?id=620968
March 17, 2008

A lawsuit that accuses the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) of racketeering, fraud and illegal spying was revived Friday after a federal judge dismissed the case a month ago. An Oregon woman, Tanya Andersen, originally counter-sued the RIAA after she was served with notice of an RIAA lawsuit falsely alleging copyright infringement and demanding penalties. A judge tossed Anderson's first case, but her amended lawsuit, filed Friday in Oregon U.S. District Court, seeks to represent thousands of people in a class-action suit as attorneys claim they have been wrongly targeted for music piracy by the RIAA.

The new suit claims that the RIAA and MediaSentry - the RIAA's private investigative arm that discovers file sharing by looking into peer-to-peer users' public files - "conspired to develop a massive threat and sham litigation enterprise targeting private citizens across the United States." The lawsuit also accuses the industry and MediaSentry of spying "by unlicensed, unregistered and uncertified private investigators" who "have illegally entered the hard drives of tens of thousands of private American citizens" in violation of laws "in virtually every state in the country," according to Wired.

Andersen's suit seeks class-action status to represent "those who were sued or were threatened with suit by defendants for file-sharing, downloading or other similar activities, who have not actually engaged in actual copyright infringement."

The judge said the new, amended complaint must demonstrate that the RIAA has been initiating "sham" litigation that is unsupported by any evidence. So far, there's been no ruling on whether the case can proceed or whether it can go on as a class action suit or solely represent Andersen. However, Andersen's lawyer says that if the amended complaint passes muster, the RIAA will be forced to disclose its investigative technique.

"We are going to have discovery," said attorney Lory Lybeck, according to PC World. "That's important because [the RIAA] has spent three years actively refusing to provide any discovery of any significance in the growing number of [file sharing] cases," that it is pursuing, he said. "It is very important for them to operate in secrecy because once their methodology is revealed it will be obvious they committed a crime"


This woman is a hero.

Music industry eases tactics in piracy fight
Shifts focus to education from enforcement

Antony Bruno, Reuters
Published: Wednesday, February 11, 2009



The Recording Industry Association of America's decision not to pursue new lawsuits against online file-sharers marks a fundamental shift in the music business's battle against piracy, from one focused on enforcement to one emphasizing education.

But as it makes this tactical adjustment, the industry and its representative trade group face new challenges. It will have to drop the largely go-it-alone nature of its recent court battles in favour of a more co-operative approach that will require the participation of cable companies, telecommunications carriers and even public officials and legislators.

The RIAA said it has secured the agreement of Internet service providers to participate in a "graduated response" strategy, under which ISPs would send warnings to infringing users to stop their activity or risk losing Internet access. That, in turn, could open the door to additional collaboration with ISPs, such as imposing surcharges on monthly broadband accounts to cover the cost of a blanket music licence, something Warner Music Group began exploring last year.

Although the graduated-response strategy developed independently from the surcharge idea, the two run on a parallel track, RIAA general counsel Steve Marks said.

"Any time you have companies working together on one issue co-operatively, it probably sets a good framework to work together on other things," he said.

Mr. Marks said the ISP plan was modeled after the RIAA's antipiracy initiatives at U. S. universities. Under that template, the RIAA worked with partner MediaSentry to flag the accounts of peer-to-peer (P2P) network users who were uploading tracks for others to share. It then sends the universities the account information of each infringer and asks the institution to warn the offending students to stop or face disconnection. In most cases, disconnected students can regain their Internet access after paying a fine, and various appeals processes are set up to settle disputes.

Enlisting the ISPs as allies, however, hasn't been an easy task. The RIAA claims it has secured the co-operation of leading ISPs in its graduated-response efforts, but Mr. Marks would not disclose which are onboard. Verizon, the second-largest U. S. telecom carrier, has said it is not participating at this time.

Sources close to the negotiations said the ISPs were resistant to participating until New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's office approached them during the summer to hammer out an antipiracy solution. These sources said Mr. Cuomo's office took on the task after several New York-based record labels communicated their concerns to him about the piracy issue -- an ironic twist, considering that the attorney general's office under Eliot Spitzer had battled with the major labels a few years ago during its investigation of radio payola.

The RIAA maintains that it won't seek government regulatory or legislative enforcement to get ISPs to agree to the plan, hoping they will voluntarily participate for business reasons as part of a broader network management solution. But label sources say the passage of similar "three strikes" laws in Europe have put pressure on U. S. ISPs to play ball.

As the RIAA moves away from suing file-sharers, it can look back on a litigation campaign that in many ways succeeded in its goal of raising public awareness that unauthorized P2P downloading is illegal.

But a 2008 NPD Group report said that 19% of U. S. Internet subscribers 13 and older still downloaded music from P2P services, little change from the 20% reported when the RIAA began its consumer litigation campaign in 2003. Moreover, the amount of music those users traded increased dramatically as new technologies like BitTorrent allowed them to trade entire libraries rather than just a few songs.

"It would be astonishing to me in this day and age that there is anybody in this country who believes that downloading music without paying for it is not unlawful," said Barry Slotnick, a copyright attorney for Loeb & Loeb in New York. "To the extent that people didn't know that before, they certainly know it now. So you have to move on to the next stage."

A 2008 study conducted by British consulting firm Entertainment Media Research found that 70% of survey respondents who currently use P2P networks said they would likely stop trading music files online if their ISP issued a cease-and-desist warning.

I pity the Irish file sharer.

Irish Internet firm to shut off illegal music users

By Andras Gergely, ReutersJanuary 29, 2009

DUBLIN - Irish Internet provider Eircom has agreed to disconnect users who download music illegally from the Web in a settlement with four major record companies that Irish media said was the first of its kind in the world.

The record companies -- EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner -- had wanted Eircom to install software from a U.S. firm to detect the "fingerprint" of copyrighted music files being sent on its network.

Eircom, which feared the software would have interfered with its broadband service and could break privacy laws, instead pledged to disconnect users who continue to download illegally after two warnings.

As part of the settlement reached after proceedings in an Irish court on Wednesday, the companies agreed to supply Eircom with the IP addresses of people they detect illegally uploading or downloading copyrighted works on a "peer-to-peer" basis.

Peer-to-peer sites like Napster, which allow anyone to share songs for free on the Web, became a headache for the music industry as the Internet gained popularity in the late 1990s.

The industry successfully beat Napster's song-swap service in court but music piracy continued to cripple the business, sending CD sales plummeting.

"High Court proceedings ... have been settled on an amicable basis with both sides expressing satisfaction with the outcome," Eircom said in a joint statement with the record companies.

"The record companies have agreed that they will take all necessary steps to put similar agreements in place with all other Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Ireland," said Eircom, which is majority owned by Australia's Babcock & Brown Capital and ranks itself as Ireland's biggest telecommunications supplier.

The head of the Irish Recorded Music Association said he was happy with the settlement.

"It's something we've had to work together to make sure this got to a stage where we can deal with what is an enormous difficulty within the Irish and worldwide record business," Willie Kavanagh, who is also managing director of EMI Ireland, told state television RTE.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) last month abandoned mass lawsuits against Internet users who steal music and will instead work with Internet Service Providers to discourage piracy.

The RIAA, which represents major U.S. record labels, said it would have the ISPs send warning notices to users who illegally download music files.

© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service

It is all rather simple. Do not steal things.