While students have been consistently targeted by the RIAA for filesharing violations, it has usually been related to illegal free music downloads. The whole filesharing debacle has taken a turn as the makers of text books have started voicing concerns that students are using filesharing services to get copyrighted study books.
It’s a tough call. The students are presumably using the books to aid their education, but they are effectively stealing them. How do you approach such a situation? Sue the students for all the money they have?
Sites such as Textbook Torrents call on students to scan their text books and upload them. This is perhaps crossing the line. It’s one thing that filesharing is used to obtain material, but asking students to actively violate laws and upload data is a whole different matter.
A number of links to text books have been taken down recently and there will likely be more to follow. Where do you stand on this?
British Telecom (BT) has teamed up with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) to tackle the supposed problem of illegal filesharing. In shocking news, BT will apparently be cutting off customers who use their service to access copyrighted material through filesharing networks. We never thought this would happen in the UK.
This comes after Virgin announced that it will be sending out letters to people suspected of filesharing, but BT is taking it a step further. Virgin never implied it would be cutting off customers from the Internet.
BT has said that it isn’t doing anything out of the ordinary as customers should adhere to the ISP’s rules. Customers who continually break the rules (by downloading music?) will have their accounts suspended or terminated.
This is all kinds of stupid and can only result in a serious backlash. Where will BT draw the line in deciding who gets cut off?
Guardia di Finanza in Italy shut down a filesharing forum this week after discovering links — and only links – to pirated material, such as music and movies.
Downrevolution.net was locked down and four people were arrested pending a criminal investigation into the activity on the filesharing forum. Three of those arrested are reportedly children. Some 17 computers were seized in the filesharing raid, along with three external hard drives and a bunch of CDs and DVDs.
The arrested could face jail terms of up to four years for their supposed illegal filesharing activities. This again raises the issue of what constitutes copyright infringement. The filesharing website in question did not host any of the copyrighted material, so really, who is in the wrong?
We’ll be following this filesharing case closely. This is all similar to the arrest in the UK of the guy behind the filesharing website OiNK.cd. He remains under investigation.
Ha! We knew it. While the record industry has been harping on at people to pay for their music, it’s been revealed that a whole bunch of these paid websites don’t even have the rights to sell the music they are offering customers.
While free music downloads may land you in hot water, no-one would have thought that paying for music could do the same. There are, apparently, dozens of websites offering music downloads when they don’t have the rights to do so.
Many of these websites tout their services as having billions of songs available for legal music downloads. Just because you pay for a music service doesn’t mean it’s legal, which leaves consumers in a kind of odd position. Who are we supposed to trust now? Is this a message to give all our money to big brands, such as Apple?
This is the kind of news that destroys faith in buying music downloads through legal means. Long live filesharing and free music downloads.
While we all know that filesharing makes up a lot of the Internet’s traffic, we had no idea that it was quite this much. Believe it or not, about 44% of all North American Internet traffic is used up by people accessing P2P filesharing networks.
This number is up from 41% just one year ago. The top-three forms of Internet traffic, according to the survey, are P2P filesharing (43.5%), Web browsing (27.3%) and streaming media (14.8%). We wonder where watching porn fits into those figures.
Apparently, P2P filesharing accounts for an even larger slice of the upstream traffic, eating up about twice as much bandwidth as all other traffic combined. In the face of such a statistic, which must surely be representative of a lot of countries, is there any way that the music industry can continue to ignore filesharing? Surely the logical step is to introduce paid filesharing services.
Ah. Just when we thought that the world’s most famous filesharing advocate, Jammie Thomas (who also has the world’s weirdest name), was a bout to get a retrial, her hopes have been scuppered. The motion for a new trial for Jammie Thomas has been thrown out on the basis that current laws grant copyright owners the exclusive rights to make material available.
What this means is that Jammie Thomas, who made a number of songs available over filesharing net Kazaa, did not have the right to do so. There was a lot of speculation whether Jammie Thomas would get a retrial after the enormous amount of publicity her particular case has received.
Jammie Thomas, who even has her own Wikipedia page, hit the filesharing headlines last October when she was ordered to pay $222,000 after sharing a bunch of Green Day and Aerosmith songs. The single mother hasn’t had a lot of luck and she doesn’t have very good taste in music.
We recently brought you news that Vigrin Media is teaming up with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) to send out letters to people who use filesharing services. The letters will “educate” people about legal ways to get legal music downloads.
Any doubters that Virgin would actually do this have now been silenced after the first batch of letters was sent out to Virgin subscribers warning them of the evils of filesharing. Virgin is the first ISP in the UK to take such action, although criminal charges will not be brought against people who receive the letters — yet.
Virgin has also vowed that it won’t be disconnecting any of its customers if they use filesharing services. This whole thing is really just a PR stunt for Virgin — and a damn good one it is, too.
Part of the letter Virgin is sending out reads as follows:
We understand you may be concerned about this, and you might be unsure how it happened. One possible answer is that other people in your household have used your computer and/or internet connection, and they might have shared these files with others by using unauthorised ‘peer-to-peer/P2P’ filesharing networks like ‘BitTorrent’ or ‘Limewire’
It seems that bands and artists all over the world are into free music downloads. This news comes from Thailand, where Bangkok-based indie artist Bear-Garden has come up with the novel idea of releasing each of the 11 tracks from her new album as a free music download, one track per month, from January until November this year.
This is proof, as if it were needed, that the impact Radiohead have had on world music is being felt everywhere. Artists are continually turning to the Internet and free music downloads to get their music out to fans.
Coldplay did it recently when they released their new single as a free music download.
Perhaps one area of puzzlement in Bear-Garden’s case is that once a particular month is over, the respective track is no long available for download, meaning that if you miss a month, then you miss a track from the album. Find out more about the artists and download the latest track over at the Panda Records website.
Coldplay have been making all the right headlines recently after they released the first single from their new album, Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends, as a free music download. The track caused a stir and was enormous success, leading to presales of the album, which is released tomorrow, reaching record levels on iTunes.
There were two million free music downloads of the single “Violet Hill”, and HMV has said that it is ordering near record numbers of CDs to put on shelves for the big launch.
The real test for the album will be whether it can sustain this level of interest after the hype of free music downloads and snazzy marketing campaigns dies out. Industry experts are skeptical about how long the buzz will be around this new album, but we suspect that the cynics will be proved wrong in this case.
There probably aren’t many bands who could launch an album in this way, but for established industry artists, free music downloads can lead to increased sales.
Coinciding with the BPI teaming up with Virgin Media to educate people about how to get legal music downloads, the music industry in Great Britain is allegedly voicing its concern that its negotiations with ISPS with regards to filesharing are being hampered by government plans to delay its consultation in anticipation of legislation in the new year.
Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Andy Burnham spoke at the PPL AGM recently and made some references to several factors facing the music industry, including copyright infringement and filesharing. He also spoke of the sequencing of the ongoing ISP consultation, which caused a number of people to prick their ears.
It’s unclear exactly what implications these comments have, but it has a few people in a stir with regards to filesharing.
Filesharing hit the headlines in Great Britain recently after Virgin and BPI accounted that letters will be sent to people who use filesharing services to download copyrighted material. The letters will contain links to legal sites for music downloads.
