EmusicList.com

A federal judge is handing a Louisiana man a year in prison for pirating thousands of DVDs and CDs in a case highlighting the Motion Picture Association of America’s wildly varying valuation of pirated discs.

Whoa… WTF is this?! MPAA is making universities do work the industry should have been doing all along? That is the fvcking problem, the MPAA is unwilling to make an alternative available. It is not the university's responsibility to sell…

Pandora is an internet radio service that allows you to create your own radio station based on songs and artists that you like. Pandora on the iPhone is one of the best applications for streaming music and finding new tunes. So, what will the service’s 1 million plus users do if Pandora pulls its own plug?

I hate to be the voice of dissent but they've been saying they're about to go under for at least a year. It's partly their own fault though. They refuse to consider any options apart from getting the record industry to see reason….

A federal judge has capped damages at less than a third of what the RIAA wanted in a file-sharing case because the teenaged girl sued by the RIAA was an “innocent infringer.” She’s still looking at $7,400 in damages, but it could have been $1 million worse.

With the possibility of being forced to pay up to $30,000 in damages for each song (Jammie Thomas was ordered to pay $9,250 per song after being found liable for infringement; that case looks headed for a retrial), $200 per song…

A judge has blocked a copyright infringement suit filed by Universal against an individual who sold promotional CDs on eBay. The ruling says that sale of promotional CDs is protected by the first sale doctrine.

"Looking to the economic realities of the transaction, UMG's distribution of Promo CDs provides the recipient with many critical rights of ownership, including the right to perpetual possession and the freedom from obligations to…

Ars has the details on an RIAA strategy to double the cost of settling copyright infringement suits for students who try to quash the group’s subpoenas in court. In a nutshell: settle early, pay $3,000; try to quash the subpoena and the settlement cost rises to $8,000.

McSherry points to recent court decisions that cast doubt on the idea that simply making a file available is the same as actually distributing it to the public, and she points out that the MPAA has been wildly misguided in its own analysis of…

The RIAA has two weapons in its arsenal when it comes to illicit P2P use on college campuses: DMCA takedowns and pre-litigation letters. Only one requires an actual download.

The distinction between the two letters is important to understand because certain P2P mitigation regimes will only affect one type of letter. EDUCAUSE notes that Audible Magic's music-matching gear only scans files actually…

The Chronicle of Higher Ed got a briefing at RIAA headquarters on how the group catches pirates. They just use LimeWire and other software that pirates use, except that they’ve set up scripts to search for songs, grab IP numbers, and send out notices to college officials. They claim they don’t target specific colleges, though many feel that they do

The LimeWire software allows users who right-click on any song entry and choose “browse host” to see all of the songs that a given file sharer is offering to others for download. The software also lists the IP address of active file…

As the House Committee on Energy and Commerce considers the Internet Freedom Preservation Act, testimony from the interested parties reveals that opinions on ‘Net neutrality may tell us more about those doing the testifying than what a neutral ‘Net entails. For the ISPs, at least, it appears that neutrality is a threat to their ability to innovate

Telcos, not surprisingly, beg to differ. Kyle McSlarrow, president of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, was one of the witnesses testifying, and his past testimony regarding a similar Senate bill reveal that he's…

In 2000, the group was behind the lawsuit that killed Napster and became one of the loudest critics of file sharing. The band has had a change of heart, apprently, after seeing the huge wads of cash Radiohead and, err, Cliff Richard, made out of sticking albums online.

At the time of the Napster lawsuit, pretentious Metallica shed builder Lars Ulrich said: "We take our craft - whether it be the music, the lyrics, or the photos and artwork - very seriously, as do most artists. It is therefore…

All groups lobbying Congress and the executive branch are required to disclose how much they spent on the task each year. During 2007, the RIAA spent $2.08 million lobbying lawmakers for tougher copyright laws, among other things.

As a private trade group funded by the record labels, the RIAA's budget is an unknown quantity, and it's impossible to say what percentage of its budget the RIAA spends on lobbying (or P2P litigation, for that matter). The…