In a series of five “facts,” the RIAA lays out what amounts to two primary complaints:
- Google “places artificial limits on the number of queries that can be made by a copyright owner to identify infringements.”
- Google “also limits the number of links we can ask them to remove per day.”
The RIAA says these limits keep it from finding and requesting removal of piracy-related web pages related to the Billboard Top 10 songs, let alone all pirated material on the web.
The RIAA had contends that LimeWire enabled potentially thousands and even millions of people to illegally download one or more of the 11,000 songs. As a result, the association said its members are entitled to statutory damages for every single illegal download.
An award based on the RIAA calculations would amount to “more money than the entire music industry has made since Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877,” Woodsaid in her ruling. The ‘absurdity’ of such a result requires the court to reject the music industry’s argument, she added.
The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a $675,000 file-sharing damages award that a jury levied against a college student for making 30 music tracks available on a peer-to-peer network.
San Francisco-based BitTorrent Inc. says its peer-based “branded products and services are used by hundreds of millions of people in the United States and internationally to find, share, and move digital media.” According to a trademark infringement and cybersquatting suit in San Francisco, it claims BitTorrent Marketing GmbH, a German company, is capitalizing on the BitTorrent name and duping users into thinking they are doing business with the real BitTorrent company.
Steal Like An Artist author Austin Kleon’s Ted Talk.
Federal authorities who seized a popular hip-hop music site based on assertions from the Recording Industry Association of America that it was linking to four “pre-release” music tracks gave it back more than a year later without filing civil or criminal charges because of apparent recording industry delays in confirming infringement, according to court records obtained by Wired.
