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RIAA's Cary Sherman says lawsuits were the only option

Cary Sherman offers no apologies and won't for a second concede that filing lawsuits against people who pilfered digital music from artists was ineffective. On the contrary, the president of the Recording Industry Association of America makes a case that chasing file sharers into court was the only option in 2003, one of the darkest periods in the music industry's history.

"If you can go back to that time in your mind and remember that file sharing was growing at logarithmic pace," Sherman said referring to 2003, not long after file-sharing service Napster had triggered a … Read more

RIAA president: No talk of blacklisting file sharers

At this point, there are still many more questions than answers regarding how those Internet service providers that have agreed to help the music industry thwart illegal file sharing will actually weed out accused pirates.

In an interview Friday morning, Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), said many of the details have yet to be hammered out. The music industry, he said, which also announced that it would no longer pursue a "broad-based legal strategy against individuals for file sharing," has drawn up a new antipiracy plan whereby ISPs would send notifications to … Read more

Copy of RIAA's new enforcement notice to ISPs

The recording industry dropped some big news Friday, announcing that it will no longer take a broad approach to litigating against alleged filed sharers. The Recording Industry Association of America has enlisted the help of internet service providers to act as a sentry and help discourage customers from pirating music.

Below is a copy of the form letter the RIAA will send to ISPs to inform them one of their customers is accused of file sharing. The notification is similar to those the group has sent to college campuses for years and shows very clearly that the group retains the … Read more

The music industry looks to ISPs instead of lawsuits

As reported in Friday's Wall Street Journal, the music industry has apparently given up on suing 13-year olds and dead people in its quest to stem music piracy. Instead, it plans to work with ISPs to identify and notify copyright infringers of the need to come clean:

[T]he Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers. The trade group said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider's customers … Read more

RIAA drops lawsuits; ISPs to battle file sharing

Updated at 9:05 a.m. PST To include quotes from the Electronic Frontier Foundation about questions of whether ISPs could blacklist and to clarify that no ISP has agreed to throttle service. Also, see a copy of the RIAA's new enforcement notice to ISPs here.

The music industry's highly controversial strategy of suing customers for file sharing has mostly ended.

The Recording Industry Association of America said Friday that it no longer plans to wage a legal assault against people who it suspects of pirating digital music files. What the RIAA should have said, though, is that … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 867: Of peanut butter and shotguns

It is a tale told down throughout the ages. Google's Internet access is a large jar of peanut butter, and As Natali reminds us, you don't kill bugs with a shotgun. Even if it is fun. If you take nothing else away from this show, at least remember that. Listen now: Download today's podcast Episode 867

UK ISPs switch on mass Wikipedia censorship http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,10009938o-2000331777b,00.htm http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10116543-93.html http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/07/how-the-great-firewa.html

Technology start-ups to be given £1B fund … Read more

Taxing music at the ISP level: Good idea or bad?

Warner Music Group has a proposition for U.S. universities, according to Techdirt: buy a blanket license to music downloads through file-sharing services, or be sued.

Techdirt thinks that this is a bad idea, and I disagree.

Techdirt's criticisms are clear:

It's basically a music tax--allowing the record industry to be lazy. Someone else gets to go out and collect all this money, and hand it over to the industry to distribute (or, actually, not distribute). It effectively sets the business model of the recording industry in stone, and harms better, more innovative business models by inserting the … Read more

Spam increasing again after shutdown of hosting company

Spammers knocked offline two weeks ago when their hosting company, McColo Corp., was shut down are finally coming back online, security researchers said on Wednesday.

San Jose, Calif.-based McColo was believed to be responsible for up to 75 percent of all spam, according to Brian Krebs of The Washington Post, who broke the initial story.

Spam volumes, which dropped about 80 percent when McColo was shut down on November 11, remained relatively flat since then until a few days ago when they started climbing up, said Matt Sergeant, senior antispam technologist at MessageLabs, now owned by Symantec.

Since Sunday, … Read more

Microsoft ranked fifth worst spam service ISP

Microsoft is listed fifth in the Top 10 list of the worst spam service ISPs compiled by Spamhaus.org.

Spammers are advertising links to sites that "peddle fake pharmacy products, porn, and Nigerian 419 scams" on Microsoft's Live.com and Livefilestore.com sites because they know that the Microsoft sites won't get blocked by antispam groups, writes Brian Krebs on his Security Fix Blog at the Washington Post.

Spamhaus has been alerting Microsoft to the problem for some time, but to no avail, Richard Cox, Spamhaus' chief information officer, told Krebs. Other security companies, including McAfee … Read more