Well, in a new twist, grad student Joel Tenenbaum – in hopes for getting a new trial – is putting the blame on the record labels for selling “DRM-free CD’s [that make] the proliferation of their recordings on the peer-to-peer networks trivially easy.”

Doesn’t this guy wish he settled for $5k like he was offered to begin with?

In a similar case last year, torrent search engine TorrentSpy was ordered to pay $110 million in damages to the MPAA.

It appears to this Hobo that the “search engine defense” is no longer going to hold up when all you index is copyrighted material. The judge decided that the “safe harbor” statutes, in this case, did not apply, as they require, “passive good faith conduct aimed at operating a legitimate internet business,” which he did not see.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/04/13/pirate-bay-heroes-or-criminals/?mod=rss_WSJBlog

The friggin’ movie is available online. Sure its incomplete and lacking some special effects, but it seems that the punishment doesn’t quite fit the crime here. Glad that its OK for bloggers (for now) to point out what is floating around in cyberspace, even if the mainstream media can’t. Apparently you can only write about the fact that the movie has been stolen and is actively being distributed, but you can’t comment on whether the movie is any good.

Hell, I wrote about how many bad versions of Star Wars had been leaked. Took me at least 5-6 tries before I found a copy without a timecode, with proper Dolby Digital 5.1 and accurate color balance. Too bad the movie still sucked.

Congrats, Roger. You’ll have a job at a real media outlet soon enough. Like this one. And at least the movie was good.

Telenor rejects the demand from the IFPI to block access to the Swedish website, The Pirate Bay, and finds there to be no legal basis for the demand for ISPs to control and/or assess the content users download. At the same time, Telenor does not condone pirating of material and illegal file sharing.

“Asking an ISP to control and assess what Internet users can and cannot download is just as wrong as asking the post office to open and read letters and decide what should and should not be delivered.”

“This is by no means a new issue, and it applies to the entire Western knowledge-based economy. Telenor sympathises with Intellectual property rights holders whose content has been illegally
distributed, but in our opinion, it is wrong to claim an ISP is liable for any illegal activity by its users on the Internet,”

Shelly Palmer reports:

Enough with the goose reference, and apparently, enough with DRM for Apple. Seems the iEverything people struck a deal with the labels to set the music free…for a small price. 10 million songs from the iTunes store will be available with no DRM.

Apple marketing guy Philip Schiller announced that iTunes song prices will come in three tiers: 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29. The labels get to choose the prices.

Additionally, Apple announced a “Set My Music Free” tax / fee. For $.30, Apple will replace the DRM tracks you’ve previously purchased with the restrictions for tracks without any. The upside to the charge is that a) you don’t have to pay it, and b) you’ll get a higher bit-rate track in return. Hopefully everyone has done the math and will make this model work.

Personally, as I’ve said before, I’ve never had any problems with music with DRM preventing me from doing anything that falls within “fair use.” Only when you start to do the things you aren’t supposed to do you run into trouble.

Bottom line – the solution to the DRM crisis isn’t to abandon DRM. It is to put a sensible DRM solution in place that works well enough for everyone to stay in business.

“We think this is going to be a different form of stick, but we absolutely think this will be a meaningful alternative approach that will have a significant impact,” said Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the RIAA.

Different stick? More like a wet noodle. Stop, or we’ll say stop again. Translation: its mp3 season.

AppleInsider has tipped that Apple could be going DRM free by the end of the year. With Amazon already offering DRM free tracks, iTunes is forced to compete. But if DRM goes down, it will be down for good.

In case it isn’t clear enough, DRM developers need to get off their asses and create some system that works well enough for the labels and well enough for the vendors and end users to keep everyone happy. I personally haven’t had any situation where DRM prevented me from doing anything with my music that would fall under “fair use” and I think the definition is fairly broad.

Hasn’t this become more of a philosophical argument at this point rather than a practical one?

New shmuck of the week goes to Boston University graduate student Joel Tenenbaum, for getting caught and earning himself a $1 million lawsuit from the RIAA.

Why does Mr. Tenenbaum deserve such notoriaty? Certainly not because he’s just another busted music pirate. No, of course not. It’s because of his mom.

His mom, you say? Yes. According to the article in Boston University’s Daily Free Press, Mr. Tenenbaum’s mother is a lawyer who specializes in copyright and Internet law.

Now he’s being helped by cross-river rival Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson.