Items tagged with RIAA
It's been a while since we heard much out of the RIAA after the organization was frequently in the news during its hunt to force anyone who even thought about illegally downloading music to pay damages. At times, the RIAA filed suits against deceased people essentially making it look like the bad guy to many music...
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The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is showing no signs of slowing down when it comes to wiping the web of links that participate in or encourage piracy. Just the opposite, the RIAA is ramping up its efforts and has now surpassed 50 million pirate link takedown requests issued to Google, up from 25...
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Kim Dotcom has a history of bad behavior that runs the gamut from computer fraud to insider trading and embezzlement. More recently, Dotcom ran Megaupload, a now defunct website that was once a popular portal for hosting files, especially copyrighted material, which is why the U.S. government shut it down in 2012...
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Google has released a 26-page report detailing how it strives to balance the rights of copyright owners against fair use policies and individual users. The search giant has come under increasing fire from copyright owners over the past few years, and faced repeated accusations that it earns enormous amounts of money...
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On any given day in the United States you will find a number of really, really terrible ideas being floated as smart decisions. Flying to Hawaii to give birth in the ocean surrounded by dolphins. A drunk man repeatedly directing traffic in midtown Manhattan. And, today, from the USA Intellectual Property Theft...
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The RIAA isn't an entity that's looked fondly upon by many consumers, given that they've been pretty bent on making it difficult for consumers looking to purchase music legally in the digital age. Granted, we're (mostly) out of the DRM era, but those memories remain for many. Despite that, the RIAA is still an...
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While the country's biggest music labels all seek out a passing of a "six strikes" scheme - one that would result in your Internet being cut off after your sixth offense - BMG has found another way to both increase its revenue and instill fear in music downloaders. Typically, if a copyright holder detects an infringement on your IP address,...
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Yesterday, we covered comments from the RIAA on how it believes courts have weakened the DMCA to the point of uselessness and why the organization supports the highly controversial E-PARASITE Act. It's not the first time we've covered the controversial legislation, but the leader of the RIAA, Cary Sherman, has weighed in with his own personal...
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It's no surprise that the RIAA is unhappy with the DMCA, given how fervently the organization supports the beautifully named E-PARASITE Act. However, a lawyer from the organization has shed new light on exactly why the recording industry (and presumably the MPAA as well) thinks the Digital Millenium Copyright Act is...
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New sales data from the RIAA indicate that record sales are up 1 percent for the first half of 2011 as compared to 2010. Total album sales in the first half of 2011 totaled 155.5 million, up from 153.9 million in 2010. A one percent gain might seem meaningless in any other industry, but we're talking about music sales, which have been declining...
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Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold the boat a minute, young fella. We like to fancy ourselves an intelligent bunch, but something just isn't adding up. According to market research firm The Nielsen Company, music sales in the U.S. are up 1.6 percent in 2011. The reason, Nielsen says, has a lot to do with the explosive growth of digital album and track...
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Earlier this week, we covered Amazon's announcement of its new 5GB Cloud Drive service. Amazon is pushing the free service as a "upload once, access anywhere" option that allows users to play the music they want, wherever they are. When questions of licensing were raised, Amazon spokesperson Cat Griffin told Ars Technica: "Cloud Player is...
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It's been nearly a decade since the music industry declared war against file sharers via its controversial policy of suing individuals supposedly identified via their IP addresses. After all this time one would expect the various companies to present a consistent, united front. As a recent court filing against...
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Many are concerned about the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA, S.3804), which could potentially make it possible for the Justice Department to have sites removed from the DNS system for doing something as small as linking to a BitTorrent site such as The Pirate Bay, even in the context of an article. It appears that...
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Most of the major television networks—CBS, ABC, and NBC, as well as Hulu.com—have blocked Google TV's from accessing their online offerings, on the grounds that allowing users to watch videos at CBS.com damages the website's ability to earn revenue. The networks' stance almost guarantees that the question of what is and isn't blockable...
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In the United States, discussions of copyright protection and infringement inevitably revolve around the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. Since it passed twelve years ago, the DMCA has become the weapon of choice for US companies seeking to fairly protect their property as well as institutions attempting to unfairly silence criticism...
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Want to prosecute people who are downloading files illegally? Well, if you fine them, you might be taking money out of the hands of your best customers, a new survey shows. It's not the first such survey to come to this conclusion. However, it is the latest. The study, published on Sunday by U.K. think tank Demos, surveyed 1,008 people aged...
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You know what we haven't heard much about lately? Piracy. It used to be all the rage, but after iTunes (and pretty much every other online music store) went DRM-free, it seems those stormy waters have calmed. Or, on second thought, maybe no one was talking about it. New research from the University of Hertfordshire over in the UK has found...
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DRM, or Digital Rights Management, never did go over well in the court of public opinion. To the music industry at large, DRM was a mostly futile attempt to lock music down to certain players or systems, thus making it something harder--in theory, anyway--to freely distribute. In reality, however, those who were circumventing the rules in...
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For the defendant, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, she had to be thinking that perhaps a retrial was not such a good idea after all, after hearing the verdict.The trial, which began Monday, concluded Thursday with Thomas-Rasset found guilty of willful copyright infringement. She must now pay the recording industry $1.92 million.The jury imposed...
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Well, what have we here? Just days after officials in Sweden passed a new law that sought to crack down on online piracy and copyright infringement, Internet traffic in the nation has suddenly fallen off a cliff. Now, some may argue that Torrent hosting site The Pirate Bay is actually located in Sweden, though purists will undoubtedly argue...
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Last December, the RIAA announced it was giving up on file-sharing lawsuits, and would be working with ISPs in a three-strikes policy program which would eventually result in broadband being cut off for repeat offenders of illegal file-sharing. At a digital music conference in Nashville this week, AT&T's Jim Cicconi stated that the company...
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