For a long time, pirates have taken asylum in Russia. No, we’re not talking about some twisted Treasure Island fantasy, but instead music piracy. With the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) picking off Napster, Kazaa, and Limewire one-by-one, the watchdog has set its sights on Stalin’s old stomping grounds. That’s where the current king of legally questionable music dealers, AllofMP3, sits atop its (now shaky) throne. Despite recent reports that AllofMP3 is in danger of being overthrown by the RIAA, the media is now detailing litigation strategy that will allow it to remain operational until at least June, 2007.

Just a couple days ago we reported on the US government’s joint venture with the Kremlin in an attempt to take down AllofMP3 and music pirates operating outside of America’s borders. However, representatives for Russian music site are now publicly speaking out against allegations that it is, indeed, a pirate site. Attorneys have flatly denied that AllofMP3 has broken any laws, and as a result it will not be shutting down. In addition, AllofMP3 refuses to admit that they have even been contacted by either the Russian or U.S. governments.

In a worldwide clampdown on internet piracy, the International Federation for the Phonograph Industry (IFPI) has issued a huge wave of lawsuits against peer-to-peer fileswappers. A total of 8,000 individuals in 17 countries are being sued, which includes the first cases to be filed in Brazil, Mexico and Poland.

The trade group, which represents the world’s music companies, has said some 20 billion songs were illegally downloaded worldwide last year - 1 billion of those being in Brazil - the largest market in Latin America. The latest crackdown sees the total number of lawsuits soar to 31,000 worldwide, with 18,000 coming from the United States.

Those targeted for litigation were the “uploaders” — those who put songs on filesharing networks without permission for others to download. File sharing networks targeted include BitTorrent, eDonkey, DirectConnect, Gnutella, Limewire, SoulSeek and WinMX, the IFPI said. Countries involved in the latest round of suits are Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Singapore and Switzerland.

Sources:
- Reuters
- Betanews

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has issued a press release announcing its latest battleplan in its war on movie piracy. The trade group will team up with Los Angeles Area Boy Scouts of America to educate some 52,000 young scouts about the value of copyrights in an attempt to change attitudes towards theft of intellectual property.
“One of the most important tools we have to fight piracy is education and I commend the Los Angeles area Boy Scouts for working with us to help raise awareness about piracy among their troops in Los Angeles,” said MPAA CEO & Chairman Dan Glickman. “The film industry is a major contributor to the Los Angeles economy and as such, it is important to protect the economic vitality film brings to L.A. and the state of California. Working with the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles, we have a real opportunity to educate a new generation about how movies are made, why they are valuable, and hopefully change attitudes about intellectual property theft.”

Press Release, www.mpaa.org

In a few hours AllPeers is going to be released in the wild after 5 months of private testing. We did not invite all the testers during that phase but rest assured the remaining one will receive an email when the application is available.

We know some people have high expectations about this product so maybe it is time for me to put a few things straight:
1/ AllPeers is still a beta product so don’t expect it to be perfect (yet).
2/ Some features have not make it into this version so they will come out later; they include Chat, Comments, Tagging, support for external torrents.
3/ AllPeers is for sharing privately with friends and family; not for massively distributing files amongst strangers.

I’m very proud of the development team. They have created certainly what is the most ambitious Firefox extension to date (more than 200,000 lines of C++ and JavaScript) and the result is impressive, cool and useful!

I am using AllPeers everyday and have stopped attaching files to email (this is soooo 2005). I also love our ability to drag and share any picture off the web but my favorite feature has to be the ability to send a webpage to my friends just by drag and drop.

Finally before our young company moves to another phase of its life, I would like to personally thank all the private testers who gave us their time and some very valuable feedback to help us make AllPeers better and better. This is just the beginning…

www.allpeers.com

The RIAA is facing some major problems as one chap, amongst the legions the RIAA is suing as a matter of course, is fighting back with an awesome line of legal defence.

So far, the RIAA has gone after alleged P2P moguls by showing that an IP address was involved in downloading an illegal song, then going to the ISP that allocated that IP and finding out who it was assigned to.

The connection between the two has been enough to convince many of its targets to cough up ‘compensation’ to the RIAA in the thousands of dollars, and has warranted a trial of many others.

However, Paul Wilkes, the industry’s latest target, has hit the court he’s being sued in with something of a crucial point. Given that there is no evidence that he actually has the song on his computer, has any P2P software on his computer, or no actual evidence of anything, in fact - is this enough to even bring the lawsuit on?

Paul protests his innocence, saying that he doesn’t have the song or P2P software, thus effectively proving his own point.

He has filed for summary judgement in the case, which means that he believes that there is not enough evidence being presented by the RIAA for the case to even go to court formally. The court is now having to consider whether it should actually require the RIAA to have evidence beyond an IP address.
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/

A Fletcher woman is one of 42 people in seven states sued last week by the Recording Industry Association of America for alleged copyright infringement.A lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Asheville accuses Tiffany Redmond of 134 Upper Brush Creek Road of illegally distributing copyrighted music on the Internet using peer-to-peer services such as LimeWire.

The association, which represents the nation’s major record companies, has sued more than 18,000 people since 2003 in an effort to deter illegal sharing and downloading of music and to increase public awareness of the issue.

A survey by the association found that before the lawsuits, 37 percent of those polled believed it was illegal to make music available for free from a computer, a figure that has since risen to 73 percent, spokeswoman Jenni Engebretsen said

http://www.citizen-times.com

Controversial Russian music site AllofMP3.com has suffered more unexplained downtime.

Back in May the site all but disappeared for three days, leading to fears it had been crushed by Russian authorities stung into action by the US. A group of US senators asked George Bush to block Russian entry to the World Trade Organisation unless he took a firmer line on intellectual property.

AllofMP3 has been down for just under 11 hours today. It was down for three hours and 22 minutes yesterday. So far this month, it’s been out of action for a total of one day, seven hours and 29 minutes.

Its sister site alltunes.com has suffered the same outage time.

Peter Alguacil, from monitoring company Ipwalk, said: “It’s weird to have so much downtime during the day - last time it happened as they launched the new service. Maybe all the publicity has brought them a lot of visitors.”

The RIAA continues to fire flaming subpoenas against suspected file-swappers across the country, many of whom lack the resources with which to defend themselves. Those without cash find themselves hard-pressed to even begin defending against a federal lawsuit of the kind that the RIAA usually files, and few legal firms are willing to help.

Ray Beckerman is one of the few lawyers who has taken a stand against the RIAA, and he recently took part in a conference call organized by Defective by Design, an anti-DRM coalition. Beckerman gave a broad overview of the RIAA’s tactics; not surprisingly, he was opposed to them on the grounds that the group’s investigations turn out very little actual evidence.

“They say the defendant downloaded, distributed and/or made available for distribution certain song files. But they have no evidence of any downloading, they have no evidence of any distributing, and at most they can say that someone who might somehow be associated with the IP address might have made some files available. But they certainly don’t know what the defendant did. All they know that the defendant did was to write out a check for internet access.”

Despite these key weaknesses, the RIAA uses its resources to file suit against individuals and then presses them to settle out of court for cash—usually $3750 or $4250.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060721-7322.html

According to a couple of reports circulating the Internet the last couple of days, and bolstered by recent RIAA lawsuit losses, the best way to defend yourself against a lawsuit from the RIAA is to open up your WiFi network.

From CD Freaks:

Earlier this month, the inability to prove who actually did the file sharing caused the RIAA to drop a case in Oklahoma and now it looks like the same defense has worked in a California case as well. In both cases, though, as soon as the RIAA realized the person was using this defense, they dropped the case, rather than lose it and set a precedent showing they really don’t have the unequivocal evidence they claim they do.

Of course, I don’t know many people who are too keen on sharing their Internet connection with all their neighbors, but this is an interesting development in the ongoing RIAA lawsuits that sheds even more negative light on the RIAA.

http://mp3.about.com/b/a/256814.htm

In a gesture that mirrors a petition the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) is presenting to Congress, Flowerburger Records is circulating a petition requesting that the British Parliament and the BPI, Britain’s recording industry trade group, stop the lawsuits against music fans and develop constructive alternatives aimed at compensating artists.

“Fans generally want payment for musicians but cannot always afford to buy CDs or downloads and will therefore naturally use P2P file-sharing and other downloading methods to listen to music,” the petition states. “The music industry is a creative industry that should be exploring ways to earn money for its artists from P2P, not using the destructive force of litigation.”

Read more »

About 1.8 million people in Japan are active users of file-sharing software, a sharp increase from a year ago, according to a survey by the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ), TV broadcasters and other industry groups.

The figure is equal to about 3.5 percent of all Internet users and represents a jump from last year’s survey, which put the number at about 1.3 million, or about 2.7 percent of Internet users. The survey was conducted online in mid-June and gathered 18,596 responses.

The average number of downloads per user per year was 194 files, of which about 87 were music, 79 were movies, 11 were images, nine were software applications and eight were documents.

The most popular file-sharing application being used was Winny, according to the survey. WinMX was ranked second and Limewire third. BitTorrent clients, popular in the West, were fifth on the list, with only 6 percent of people using it as their main application.

Read more »

The police have as yetl not return the Piratebay servers that were raided last month. The servers were seized after the US government threatened Sweden

According to the local, Internet hosting company PRQ had demanded the return of both paperwork and all the computer equipment seized by police during the raid, saying that the material had no significance for the investigation and arguing that it was vital for PRQ’s work.

However, Stockholm District Court ruled that they stay with the police a little longer, a decision that PRQ will probably appeal.

Torrentfreak.com

A Swedish company is offering insurance against p2p lawsuits and fines. And it’s pretty cheap actually, just $19 US Dollars per year.

So if you get in trouble with the MPAA or the RIAA, your insurance company will handle the bills for you. Now this is a great idea. And on top of paying your bills, you will get a nice t-shirt.

$19 a year for someone to tell me to plead guilty? I don’t think so!

TorrentFreak.com

LIMA, Peru - Music piracy is unstoppable, and justified for poor fans, Puerto Rican reggaeton sensation Daddy Yankee said Saturday in the Peruvian capital of Lima.

Daddy Yankee spoke before a one-night appearance to promote his “Barrio Fino en Directo” album, which features live and remixed versions of 2004 hits like “Gasolina” and “Lo Que Paso Paso.”

“You can’t control (piracy). They gonna keep on doing it,” said the Latin Grammy-winning Yankee, who was born Raymond Ayala.

Read more »

For those of you who have been living in a cave, this might be news to you. The Pirate Bay, one of the world’s most popular websites for illegal downloading of movies, has increased its traffic by more than 300% after Swedish police shut down the site for three days. They are back up and running, but for how long, that remains the question.

Having all this traffic is however nothing more than a flash in the pan if we look at the graph attached from Alexa. Looking at the stats, we note with interest that the traffic is running back down to where it was before the raid. The average “Page Views per user” is coming back down as well as its reach.

Read more »