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.

The FCC had accused Comcast of violating their net neutrality principles by slowing or blocking peer-to-peer traffic on their network.

The settlement allots for a maximum of $16 credit to people affected. Frankly, I just don’t get it. $16 million isn’t much money to a company like Comcast (buying NBC for $30 BILLION…paying their COO $20 mil over 5 years), and $16 whole dollars doesn’t seem like much when my monthly cable bill is nearing $200. Is it even worth anyone’s time to go through this crap?

Comcast did not have to admit any wrongdoing, but is protected from additional lawsuits moving forward.

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,”

In an interesting twist of events, the judge determined that he gave the jury bad instructions that could have “substantially prejudiced” the outcome.

The judge has now put the burden of proof back on the RIAA and record companies to show that Ms. Thomas actually “distributed” the copyrighted material, not just made them available. How they will trace back any P2P connections at this point is beyond me, but I suspect somewhere, somehow, someone knows how to do it.

What continues to amaze me more, however, is that people are still using Kazaa and leaving the “share” function on. While I agree with the judge and hope for the best for Ms. Thomas, I still maintain that if you are too stupid to protect yourself, you deserve to get fucked. Just not this royally.

In the past week, Mediapost’s Wendy Davis has written about Pirate Bay’s new blogging platform as well as ISPs and their efforts to throttle bandwidth.

Thanks for putting some of these issues in front of a new audience. Too often, the coverage we see is biased and prejudiced against anyone who uses a lot of bandwidth – even for legal P2P applications, like Joost or Vuze.

admins posted business as usual on 4/11.