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Interesting article about the teen who hacked into MediaDefender.
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Exonerated RIAA defendant scores double victory in court
A US District Court judge in Oregon has reaffirmed a magistrate's award of attorneys' fees and the dismissal of exonerated RIAA defendant Tanya Andersen's counterclaims against the RIAA without prejudice so that her class-action lawsuit against the record labels can move ahead.
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2nd Canadian charged with camcording
Claiming Canada is a hotbed of pirate crime, a haven for file sharing ‘criminals," Hollywood lobbyists were 100% successful in brow-beating Stephen Harper’s government into changing Canadian laws to suit the movie industry.

The result was Bill C-59, Hollywood’s fast-tracked Canadian anti-camcording law.

Now, 20-year-old Richard Craig Lissaman is said to have videotaped a movie at a Calgary theatre.

"Police say they were called to a theatre in northeastern Calgary after someone called them about a suspicious person complaint," says CTV, going on, "Officers then went into the theatre, where they say the suspect was allegedly recording the Tim Burton movie ‘Sweeney Todd’."

Lissaman is the first person in Alberta to face charges of illegally recording a movie and it’s only the second time the charge has been laid in Canada.

"Those charged under the new law could face two years in jail," says the story.
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GEMA obtains injunctions against data exchange services
The German collecting society GEMA has obtained from the District Court in Cologne temporary injunctions against the operator of the data exchange services http://www.rapidshare.de and http://www.rapidshare.com. The latter is said to have used copyright protected works of GEMA members in an unlawful fashion. The services make virtual storage space available into which users can upload content that is thereby made publicly available to other users. GEMA spokesman Hans-Herwig Geyer told heise online that the services should not be allowed to continue to operate in their present form. The collecting society is now demanding that the operator provide details on how many copyright protected works of GEMA members are currently stored on the said sites.
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Tanya Andersen to get her attorneys fees against the RIAA
The Magistrate Judge's decision granting Tanya Andersen's motion for attorneys fees in Atlantic v. Andersen has now been affirmed by the District Judge, Hon. James A. Redden.

This means that Ms. Andersen will get her attorneys fees, and the only question remaining is how much.
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AT&T involved in torrent filtering
http://www.techspot.com/news/28669-inte ... ering.html
With all the focus that has been put on Comcast and the torrent-filtering fiasco, it has made many wonder what their local ISP or other large ISPs are doing about the situation. There's a revealing interview with AT&T over at Slyck. An AT&T VP is quizzed on what AT&Ts take on the situation is, which could be crucial in the years to come as they control a large number of the world's largest backbones.
For consumers, the worst case scenario is if ISP's begin filtering files, but like everything someone will find a way around it. AT&T even mention that the methods they have tried have failed.
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"OK, life [as you chose to define it] repeats until there are no more lessons to be learned." - nrnoble (June 12, 2005)
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A South Carolina woman sued by the record labels for file-sharing is fighting the RIAA's attempt to amend its original complaint is arguing that the RIAA's proposed amended complaint contradicts the testimony of an expert witness that testified for the labels in the Jammie Thomas trial.

At issue is the boilerplate complaint used by the RIAA in its nearly 30,000 file-sharing lawsuits until last fall. The RIAA's standard language has come under fire in a handful of cases for its lack of specificity. One of those cases is Atlantic Records v. Catherine Njuguna, a case Ars last covered in September.
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Anti-Piracy Company Breaches Privacy, Ordered to Shut Down

The infamous anti-piracy tracking outfit Logistep has been criticized by the data protection commissioner in Switzerland for helping to breach the privacy of people on file-sharing networks. Logistep, who track file-sharers all over Europe, has 30 days to stop collecting data, or face further action.
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IFPI Fails to Force ISPs to Become Anti-Piracy Enforcers

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has been lobbying politicians of the European Parliament to force ISP’s to identify, filter, block and remove copyright infringing content from the Internet. Now, according to an early report, it appears that all three anti-piracy measures have been defeated.
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Winny virus writer arrested
Written by battye
25 Jan 2008 03:03 pm

http://www.cricketmx.com/articles/read/ ... -arrested/
Japanese authorities have stated that three people have been arrested for writing and distributing a virus over Japan's top P2P program, Winny. The creator of the virus is believed to be a graduate student from Osaka. This is the first such occasion that somebody in Japan has been arrested due to virus creation.

The virus which was written in the programming language Visual Basic was named Harada. It deceived its victims by posing as a screensaver of a popular anime show, thus making it more likely for someone to download.
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The Oregon attorney general's office is investigating the Recording Industry Association of America's practices regarding 17 University of Oregon students accused of copyright infringement. While the AG isn't minimizing the seriousness of copyright violations, his office has submitted a brief questioning the data mining tactics and subpoena practices employed by the RIAA.

The AG filed a motion stating that the university was unable to provide details on user-to-IP address mapping for the dates in question for most of the IP addresses under scrutiny by the RIAA. The office is pushing to essentially cross-investigate RIAA representatives to ascertain the legality of its investigative practices--a discovery request that could be very expensive for the RIAA to respond to. The AG's motion asked the court to allow the university to determine whether the RIAA does, in fact, possess no additional information with which to identify the 17 John Does, and seeks to quash the plaintiff's subpoena as "overboard and burdensome." The office further suggested that the RIAA may be spying on students who use the university's computer system and accessing much more than IP addresses.

All this boils down to a substantial challenge to the RIAA and member labels at the same time that the RIAA is supporting the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007. The gist of this imaginatively named pending legislation is that schools would need to draft plans for technology to limit and/or prevent P2P activities on their networks. The current version of the bill has no penalty provisions for noncompliance, but it's still viewed by many user advocacy groups as a first step toward more restrictive policies.
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Legislation allowing the French government to send e-mail warnings to anyone downloading music tracks without paying for them should be passed by the summer, a senior official said on Sunday.

Illegal downloading in France had reached such a point, said Jean Berbinau, general secretary of Armt, the regulatory authority for digital copyright, that the authorities had to act.

“We have to do something, but it is only transitional, only to give time to the industry to adapt and maybe to encourage a new business model,” said Mr Berbinau at the Midem international music market.

He is charged with implementing the measures announced last year by French president Nicolas Sarkozy. They include a “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” policy for people downloading illegally.

After two warnings, another breach would mean internet service providers would have to block a person’s web access.

The e-mail warnings, which would tell people they had been caught breaking copyright laws, would not only be sent to those involved in large-scale file-sharing, he said.

“They would be sent to each IP [internet protocol] address. It is not a huge technical challenge.”

Mr Berbinau did not agree with Professor Lawrence Lessig, who urged delegates to Midem to realise that criminalising young music fans was not the way to cope with the problems.

“I don’t think it is possible for society to have laws and then to tolerate a universal breach of them,” he added.
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IFPI raids hundreds of Internet cafes: 600 cops, one arrest
the IFPI announced today that the music industry organization conducted 335 raids on Internet cafes in Brazil, making good on its threat to step up its antipiracy efforts there. The raids were conducted the first two weeks of January but are only being announced now.
EU court P2P ruling may bolster case for ISP-level filtering
The EU's highest court struck a major blow to Big Content today, ruling that the identities of Internet subscribers should only be disclosed in criminal cases, not civil. The decision came in the case of Promusicae v. Telefónica de España, which pitted the Spanish music association against one of Spain's largest ISPs, and closely follows the recommendations
of one of the court's advocates general last summer. Ultimately, it is likely to provide a further impetus for content filtering in the EU.
P2P users blast Comcast in FCC proceeding
Two weeks into a Federal Communications Commission public comment period on whether Comcast deliberately degrades P2P broadband traffic, there's no shortage of angry users who feel cheated and want the tampering to stop. Evidence is also mounting that Comcast is blocking more than just P2P traffic.
Judge accuses RIAA of ‘gamesmanship’
A judge has accused Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA of using “gamesmanship” tactics in joinder cases where defendants are linked together.

One such is Arista v Does 1-27 in which two of the victims are being officially represented by two University of Maine School of Law’s Cumberland Legal Aid Clinic students.

These kinds of cases allow the corporate enforcer to efficiently terrorise a number of people simultaneously, in effect.

It also means they’re spared the time and expense of going after their victims one by one and, “it is difficult to ignore the kind of gamesmanship that is going on here” writes magistrate judge Margaret J. Kravchuk.
Pay Up, Binghampton Uni advises RIAA victim

Rapidshare's future in doubt following legal defeat
The popular file-sharing service may be forced to shut down if it can not control the uploading of pirated music to its service after a German court ruling.

The German equivalent of the RIAA, GEMA, won a legal battle in district court in Düsseldorf last week which found that Rapidshare should be held responsible for the uploading of infringing material to its site.
Sweden to charge Pirate Bay in copyright case
Sweden plans this week to charge the people running Pirate Bay, one of the world's most visited Web sites, with being accessories in breaking copyright law.

Pirate Bay helps Web surfers share copyrighted music and film files, which is illegal in many countries, including Sweden.

Public prosecutor Hakan Roswall said last week he will charge the Swedish site's organizers with accessory and conspiracy to break copyright law, which could lead to fines or up to two years in prison.

The charges will be filed in a district court on January 31.
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p2p-sharing-rules wrote:
Sweden plans this week to charge the people running Pirate Bay, one of the world's most visited Web sites, with being accessories in breaking copyright law.

Pirate Bay helps Web surfers share copyrighted music and film files, which is illegal in many countries, including Sweden.

Public prosecutor Hakan Roswall said last week he will charge the Swedish site's organizers with accessory and conspiracy to break copyright law, which could lead to fines or up to two years in prison.

The charges will be filed in a district court on January 31.
OUCH :!: this could be a big one
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Yep it'll be an interesting case to follow & the outcome will affect the future of torrent search sites depending on who wins.
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