Intellectual Property Rights Holders Association Blog

Boston University graduate student, Joel Tenenbaum, was ordered to pay $675,000 to four record labels. Tenenbaum admitted to downloading and sharing music online. The Providence, RI native admitted that he downloaded and distributed 30 songs. The jury’s only objective was to determine the monetary damages to be rewarded to the record labels.

Under federal law, recording companies are entitled to $750-$30,000 for each infringement; however, fines can be up to $150,000 if a jury finds that the infringement was “willful.” The maximum fine in the Tenenbaum case was $4.5 million.

The jurors ordered the defendant to pay $22,500 for each incidence of a copyright infringement. Tenenbaum’s lawyer pleaded with the jury to award the minimum damages to “send a message” to the record industry. Tenenbaum explained how he was thankful and, “That to me sends a message of ‘We considered your side with some legitimacy…$4.5 million would have been, ‘We don’t buy it at all.’”

Charles Nesson, Tenenbaum’s lawyer and Harvard Law School Professor, did not agree with the jury’s verdict and plans on appealing the decision.

Beginning in September, a new anti-filesharing initiative is going to be underway. Called “Share-Do not Steal,” has the support of 1,750 copyright holders and 36 groups which include the record, movie, TV, and game industries. Furthermore, nearly 2,000 artists, musicians, and other copyright holders are in support of the initiative.

The campaign, which begins in Norway, has the hopes to force Norway’s political parties to show their intentions on unauthorized file-sharing. In a statement from the organizers, beginning with, “Legal file sharing is good. Illegal file sharing is theft,” further goes on to say “Currently the systematic and organized piracy of digital media is carried out to the extent that the very existence of the basis for artists, composers, artists, filmmakers, writers and other rights holders are threatened.

Global Gaming Factory, set to take over the Pirate Bay, is seeking the approval from the entertainment industry by installing a torrent removal and approval system. BREIN, however, the Dutch anti-piracy group does not believe that this is a full-proof plan and wants something better if GGF plans on dodging any legality issues.

GGF has planned on giving copyright holders the chance to remove infringing torrents and approve other to be published in hopes of avoiding possible conflicts. Furthermore, users will have to pay to have access to the site.

BREIN issued a release stating that the plans for the new Pirate Bay are not sufficient to appease copyright holders. BREIN director, Tim Kuik, said, “In the proposed system the right holder must detect illegal content on the website and remove it. That is insufficient.” He further stated, “The point is that The Pirate Bay is responsible for what happens on the site. They must keep preventive supervision and take care that no illegal torrents become available on the site. The site provides access to content which to an important and even overwhelming extent is illegal.”

The Pirate Bay acquisition is supposed to take place next week; however, the board of Global Gaming Factory has laid out plans for its shareholders to the site. If the deal works out successfully for all parties involved, Global Gaming Factory has made plans to install a torrent management system for the right’s holders, allowing them to remove infringing files or, in other words, authorize them.

In June, Global Gaming Factory made its surprising announcement that it would obtain the Pirate Bay and make it a legal file-sharing site. As planned, everything is still on schedule and the only obstacle to now overcome is attaining the approval from the company’s shareholders.

Global Gaming Factory just laid out the plans with the shareholders, and next week the definitive decision will be made. The site has confirmed that the new Pirate Bay site will become a pay site. Additionally, to appease the entertainment industry, GGF will also install a system that allows the copyright holders to either authorize the illegal torrent or have it removed from the site. In the first option, the copyright holder will be compensated every single time a file is downloaded. The GGF board stated, “The holder will be able to leave the file and obtain compensation or ask for removal of the file. GGF will also pay any penalties that may arise.”

If the shareholders agree to these plans, GGF will acquire the Pirate Bay on August 27.

Five years after the administrator of the eDonkey link site ShareConnector was found innocent in a criminal trial that was lead by the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, the Department of Justice announced that it will appeal this verdict.

In 2004, when most of the BitTorrent sites only had regular visitors, ShareConnector was extremely popular as it served eDonkey links to millions of file-sharers every month. BREIN did not let this go unnoticed, however, which lead to a criminal investigation. This also headed into an investigation into the admin of ShareConnector and the people behind the site Release4U.

Both sites were eventually shut down with the assistance of BRIEN convincing the FIOD-ECD, a Fiscal Investigation Unit of the Dutch Police. The sites were not only shut down but the servers were placed under police custody for inspection in hopes of finding trace

BREIN had successfully convinced the FIOD-ECD – Fiscal Investigation Unit of the Dutch Police – to shut down both sites and take the servers into custody for a thorough inspection, hoping to discover criminal activities.

After the case went to court, the administrator of ShareConnector was found innocent and only handed a couple of small monetary fines. The ruling stated that FIOD-ECD did not provide evidence to support that ShareConnector was involved in copyright infringement or that the organizations were criminal in nature.

Although the Department did say in 2007 that it would appeal this verdict, nothing happened until this week when the Department finally filed the appeal.

The largest torrent site in the Asian country, Kyrgyzstan, Torrent.kg, was shut down on allegations of copyright infringement. The site’s servers were seized pending the investigation; however, the country now has a version of OpenBitTorrent so that torrents are able to keep flowing.

Although Kyrgyzstan is a rather small country of 5.5 million, it does have a flourishing torrent community, mostly smaller sites which in turn use the Torrent.kg. Last week, however, the inhabitants were discouraged to read a message in Russian which read on the site, “For reason beyond our control the site is temporarily suspended. The administration hopes for a speedy solution to all problems. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.” Later it was confirmed that the site was shut down by the authorities. A temporary forum is currently available for concerned users.

Tolkun Umaraliev, a blogger from Kyrgystan, said that the suspension of Torrent.kg would have little impact on the availability of pirated material. He explaind, “Piracy cannot be stopped in Kyrgyzstan, because people – consumers – do not really know what piracy is, and that it is illegal. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, our market has been filled with underground VHS cassettes of Hollywood movies poorly translated into Russian and underground audio cassettes of western singers. And their prices were reasonable – consumers could afford them,”

According to Wired, a federal jury found Jammie Thomas-Rasset liable in June in the nation’s only RIAA file-sharing case to go to trial. Thomas-Rasset is said have infringed upon 24 songs and has charged her almost nearly $2 million. Unfortunately for Thomas-Rasset, this trial occurs just two years after the judge claimed a mistrial; in this trial she was ordered to pay around $220,000. Nevertheless, Thomas-Rasset chose to have a new trial instead of settling like the thousands of other users the RIAA has sued or threatened to sue for copyright infringement. Problems were encountered when she testified; claiming that her children may have utilized her computer for the purpose of file-sharing on Kazaa. In her previous trial, she claimed a file-sharing hack hijacked her WiFi connection; although she did not own a WiFi router.

According to Commerce Times, Tim Reynolds, an attorney for the RIAA, explained to jurors that the record companies would prove that Thomas-Rasset, illegally shared songs on the Kazaa network. He claimed that because of women like Thomas-Rasset, this illegal downloading has cost the music industry not only billions of dollars but has also been responsible for thousands of lost jobs. Once again, Thomas-Rasset claims that she did not share files illegally. Her defense attorney, Kiwi Camara, counters that the record companies cannot prove that she shared files illegally. In fact, he called her “one of the industry’s best customers, with a collect of over 200 CDs.”

Earlier this month, the Recording Association of America (RIAA) won a copyright infringement suit against Usenet.com  The lawsuit, which was filed on October 12, 2007, had the RIAA claiming  that Usernet newsgroups contain “millions of copyrighted sound recordings.”   Although Usenet is currently named as the sole defendent, RIAA could in turn possibly sue hundreds of universities, Internet service providers, and other newsgroup archives.  Usenet is a site that lets newsgropus users share documents, music, and other files.  The site works differently than that of many file-sharing sites.  It stores content on servers and makes it available on-demand,  rather than the typical peer-to-peer architecture usually utilized.  According to the RIAA, the decision for the Association exemplifiesthe “courts recognizing the value of copyrighted music and taking action against companies and individuals who are engaging in wide-scale infringement.”  The ruling comes as the RIAA is shifting away from its longtime strategy of targeting individuals suspected of sharing music files online. Instead, the organization is going after companies that make such copyright violations possible.  The RIAA is initiating a new strategy which asks internet service providers to join a voluntary anti-piracy direction which would include the internet service providers passing along RIAA copyright infringement notices to subscribers.  If the notices are repeatedly ignored by the user, the user would therefore face having their service reduced or suspended before a possible lawsuit.

The founders of the Pirate Bay recently launched Video Bay, a video-sharing site.  The launch of this site came the same day when the controversial Pirate Bay site was sold to a Swedish software company.  Global Gaming Factory, located out of Sweden, purchased the Pirate Bay website for nearly $8 million.  This news comes recently after the Pirate Bay’s three founders and investor were found guilty of assisting in copyright infringement and ordered to pay a collective fine of nearly $4 million as well as being sentenced to a year in prison.  The founders appealed this judgment and were denied.  Pirate Bay has more than 20 million users and although does not store any copyrighted material, streams its content through its BitTorrent file-sharing technology.  
The new owner of the site is considering utilizing a new model by compensating content providers.  Global Gaming Factory said “We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for the content that is downloaded via the site.”  The Video Bay site is comparable to that of Google’s YouTube and comes with the warning “Don’t expect anything to work at all.”  The site offers a variety of music videos and television clips.

According to a BBC report in 2008, the digital file sharing company, Torrentspy was ordered to pay over $110 million dollars to the Motion Pictures Association of America only weeks after the site had been officially shut down. This ruling is one of the largest fines executed for copyright theft, and was handed down by U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper. The ruling also stated that TorrentSpy had to pay $30,000 for “each of the 3,699 infringements shown”. The MPAA first began its proceedings against torrent spy in early 2006. BBC News reported that Torrentspy was responsible for the facilitation of sharing copyright files illegally by hosting a compilation of links to films and music. Torrentspy used a legal file-sharing technology referred to as Bit-Torrent, a way of exchanging large files electronically without utilizing central servers. After the ruling took place, Dan Glickman, the chairman of MPAA explained, “This substantial money judgment sends a strong message about the illegality of these sites.” The MPAA’s actions although legitmate due to a study by the organization, billions of dollars are lost annually due to sites such as TorrentSpy. Nevertheless, TorrentSpy has appealed the current judgment according to Cnet News. Although the site was used for pirated films and television shows, Torrentspy claims the site was also used for legitimate purposes. According to Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy’s attorney, “We’re arguing the court was wrong in procedures and wrong in judgment. In a one-hour hearing regarding discovery issues, the court terminated the case and didn’t give TorrentSpy a trial. We believe the court was wrong and abused its discretion. We believe the court ordered TorrentSpy to do things that (were) in violation of the site’s privacy policy, and we believe that the tension between the court’s discovery orders and user privacy rights is an important issue on appeal.” However, the MPAA firmly still believes that TorrentSpy is responsible for mass copyright infringement. Further judgment on this case is believed to be settled in the coming months.