According to a decision by the Frankfurt Court of Appeal the victims of WiFi theft can’t be held responsible for the thieves’ copyright infringement. The same court that previously ruled parents can’t be held responsible for the flle sharing activities of their children overturned a lower court’s decision, and potentially dealt a blow to the campaign being waged by a UK lawfirm against several hundred people for alleged copyright infringement.

Lawyers at Davenport Lyons have been sending out letters to alleged UK file sharers pointing out the German court ruling making individuals whose WiFi connection is used by others without authorization responsible for any infringement. They went on to point out that it was likely that decision would be echoed by UK courts. Don’t expect to see a similar claim about this new decision.

With the possible implications of the ruling don’t be surprised to see yet another round of arguments before things are decided for sure. Christian Solmecke, a lawyer currently defending around 500 file-sharers said “The future will show us what the highest court in Germany - the Bundesgerichtshof - says to this difficult question.”

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The IFPI and Italy’s Guardia di Finanza have announced the shutdown of the alleged file-sharing forum Downrevolution.net for thousands of instances of copyright infringement.

In connection with the site, four people have been arrested and each will face a “criminal investigation.”

Reports claim that only one of the men arrested was over the age of 18 meaning the rest are minors. There was no word on whether they will prosecuted as minors however. 17 computers, three external hard drives, and hundreds of counterfeit CDs and DVDs were also seized from a house in Sesto San Giovanni.

If found guilty, the men arrested could face 4 years in jail and large fines.

Downrevolution.net, like many other “warez” forums, posted Rapidshare.com and Megaupload.com links, allowing over 30,000 users to share copyrighted movies, music and more. The site stayed in business by selling banner ads and accepting donations in exchange for VIP status.

Jeremy Banks, IFPI’s Head of Internet Anti-Piracy Unit, added: “This shows a real commitment by the authorities to stopping online copyright theft, and it also highlights that forums like these are anything but immune from the law.”

The Guardia di Finanzia usually looks into intellectual property investigations for the Ministry of Finance.

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As we reported 2 weeks ago, Universal Music Group (UMG) wants to dismiss a long-running file sharing lawsuit against Marie Lindor. UMG’s lawyers are trying to get the lawsuit dismissed without prejudice, which would mean they make no admission of being wrong, and are therefore not liable for Ms. Lindor’s legal expenses. This is based largely on the claim of “false statements and misdirection” by the defendant and her lawyer, Ray Beckerman. They’ve even gone so far as to request that Ms. Lindor pay their legal costs.

Mr. Beckerman is well known for his blog detailing lawsuits filed in the RIAA’s war against their customers. Not surprisingly he’s written a response to the judge hearing the case in which he rebuts UMG’s claims of victimization at the hands of the defendant.

He denies their assertion that he’s attempted to block legitimate discovery attempts, saying his client made it clear to the plaintiffs from the beginning that she was available to be deposed at any time, and also that they instructed her children to cooperate as well.

There are a number of problems with UMG’s claims about Ms. Lindor’s supposed attempts to impede their investigation. The most important is simply that early on in the case it was established that the defendant hadn’t engaged in any file sharing, and probably wasn’t capable of doing so even if she wanted to. Given that knowledge they surely had a responsibility to drop their case against her unless they already had proof she was somehow responsible for helping the responsible party.

Instead they decided to continue pursuing the case in order to get access to information about other people who might have been responsible for the alleged copyright infringement. Had they dismissed instead there would have been no legal claim for them to depose her children or request that they turn over their own computers to be inspected by RIAA investigators.

Essentially the RIAA’s position seems to be that once a defendant has shown the case against them to be without merit its that person’s responsibility to assist investigators in figuring out who’s really to blame. The law or legal principle that such a theory would be based on has yet to be identified.

If you don’t have evidence that the defendant did what you claim it’s generally accepted your case is done. It’s your own responsibility to develop a different case against a different defendant.

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the MPAA is arguing in legal brief that plaintiffs should be allowed to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages with no proof that anyone has actually downloaded from a defendant’s shared folder. The brief was filed by MPAA lawyers threw in in Jammie Thomas’ appeal of the $222,000 judgement against her for copyright infringement. Judge Michael Davis asked for public comments on whether simply making files available is a violation of The Copyright Act and the MPAA took the opportunity to put in their 2 cents worth. Actually 2 cents may be a little generous for the MPAA’s contribution. Their argument basically goes something like this, it’s difficult, or maybe impossible, to prove that people are actually downloading files from someone’s shared folder so the courts should just assume files are shared with the intention of distributing them illegally and rule in favor of the plaintiff. The real problem with the MPAA’s position isn’t necessarily the idea that sharing files is infringement. Even some legal scholars who disagree with the “making available” as infringement argument have pointed out that copying a song to your computer for the purpose of sharing it illegally might be infringement. But that’s not the same thing as no proof. It would still require the RIAA to show a defendant’s intent. Their lawyers don’t stop there either. They also make the claim that because of a judicial principle that US laws be interpretted in a way that conforms to international treaties “making available” automatically became infringement with the signing of 2 WIPO copyright treaties in the 1990s. As is typical for the entertainment industry, the MPAA filed their brief on the last day arguments were to be accepted. This effectively presents any counter-arguments to be entered into the record to point out the flaws in their reasoning.

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YouTomb, a site focused on tracking all the videos that have been removed from YouTube for copyright violation, is a research project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The people who created the site are the MIT Free Culture student group. YouTomb says it,”Continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown.” “The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm.” YouTomb records the title of each video that is removed from YouTube along with a description of the video, who uploaded it, when it was taken down and a few screen shots. There are no actual videos that visitors to the site can watch. The site is currently monitoring 223,246 videos and has flagged 4,396 videos that have been taken down for alleged copyright violation. The companies that have removed the most videos include, TV Tokyo Corporation, Viacom International Inc, Warner Bros. Entertainment, and World Wrestling Entertainment. YouTomb says its initial focus is on videos hosted by YouTube, but it is also interested in other video collections. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Web sites are protected from legal action if they remove infringing content after receiving a takedown notice from the copyright holder.

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A New York Times article purporting that Microsoft is working with NBC Universal to create a “copyright cop” — or anti-piracy filter — for the Zune that will prevent playback of unauthorized videos, was refuted by Microsoft today.

In the article which appeared on a Times blog, Saul Hansell, a Times reporter, quotes J.B. Perrette, president of digital distribution for the movie studio, as saying there are two reasons why NBC chose Microsoft’s Zune over Apple’s iTunes for content distribution.
One reason given by Perrette is that Apple insists on paying the same wholesale price for all videos, so that Apple can charge $1.99 for each film. The other is that Apple presented NBC with a flat out refusal on a request to include filters in the iPod.”Microsoft, by contrast, will accept NBC’s pricing scheme and will work with it to try to develop a copyright ‘cop’ to be installed on its devices,” according to Hansell’s story.

Hansell also said that Adam Sohn, a spokesman for Microsoft, declined comment on the issue except to say that the software company is exploring anti-piracy measures with NBC.

But in a blog post on the Zune site yesterday, Cesar Menendez, a member of Microsoft’s Zune team, responded by denying that content filtering is part of its content distribution deal with NBC.

“We have no plans or commitments to implement any new type of content filtering in the Zune devices as part of our content distribution deal with NBC,” Menendez wrote. “We think some folks in the industry were expressing hopes for how the entire industry, not just Microsoft, would come to look at content distribution, and some speculation has ensued. Again, no plans are in place toward this end.”

This morning, Hansell updated his NYT article with a link to Microsoft’s blog post, along with some new commentary of his own.

“It’s worth noting that Mr. Perrette told me that Microsoft committed to explore filtering; he didn’t say it committed to implementing those filters,” according to Hansell’s update.

“Here is what Mr. Sohn, the Microsoft spokesman, told me yesterday when I asked him about what Mr. Perrette said: ‘I don’t think they are wrong, but we are not going to characterize those discussions.’ Later he added, ‘We have agreed to work with NBC across a range of topics, and protection of copyrighted material is certainly one of them,’” Hansell wrote.

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CC is a special license that allows anyone to download, share and mix other people’s music as long as they give proper credit. Recently, Nine Inch Nails released their album under a Creative Commons license, and it has been a great success!

Charles Manson of the Tate and LaBianca murders and leader of the infamous Manson Family, has released the digital album One Mind over the Web.

One Mind is licensed under the Creative Commons license witch allows anyone to share it with others, remix it and use it for non-commercial uses. The exact legal details are here.

It should be mentioned that one of the reasons that Manson sent his minions to Tate’s house to kill everybody in it was that he thought it was occupied by a record producer who had rejected his music.

The album can be downloaded from here (68.6 MB)

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The Washington Post reports:

the latest RIAA lawsuit against a P2P file sharer, some new, disturbing facts have come to light. It turns out the RIAA wants to make CD ripping, the act of copying music from a legally purchased CD to your PC, illegal.

Jeffrey Howell, an Arizona man accused of keeping a 2000 song collection on his computer, is accused of keeping “unauthorized copies of copyrighted recordings”, music he ripped from legal, store-bought CDs…

Yeah folks, that’s what it came down too, even ripping music on your OWN computer, from your OWN CD, that you purchased with your OWN money is unauthorized, according to the RIAA.

Jeffrey Howell is being sued placing his “unauthorized copies” (ripped mp3s) in a shared folder. While it’s not actually suing against “riping” audio CDs as early reports claimed, it’s still important to notice the terminology used in the complaint, referring to the ripped files as “unauthorized copies”.

The implication of the RIAA winning this case and setting precedent, witch at this moment is very unlikely to happen, is that you (American citizen) no longer have the right to rip CDs to your computer, meaning that you’ll might have to bye the same CD over and over again, and have to limit your iPODs content to files bought-off the Internet.

Here’s a little recap on some of the action taken before by the RIAA:

Working on increasing the royalty rates for music broadcast on Internet radio, killing Internet Radio slowly - Read More - Do Something

Tried to have a mother depose her child - Read More

Pushed TorrentSpy to stop US Activity - Read More

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