A New York judge has ruled that the act of making files available for download does not constitute copyright theft. The ruling is likely to knobble thousands of pending cases brought against file sharing networks and individuals by the content Mafiaa.

The whole "making available" argument, which the RIAA has successfully used in a number of cases, one of which resulted in one poor geezer having to cough up $220,000, seems to have been shot down in flames.

Gottfried Svartholm Warg, one of four founders of The Pirate Bay, said Monday that "record companies can go screw themselves" in response to a music-industry demand for $2.5 million in damages.

However, Svartholm Warg (pictured) claims that the $2.5 million figure, which the labels most likely reached by multiplying the number of times the albums were traded by their retail price, is too high. He said that when presented with the claim, he and Pirate Bay's three other developers "mostly laughed at it."

In a brief filed earlier this month, the RIAA called the $298,995 figure "excessive" and said that it should be drastically slashed to something along the lines of $30,000.

The RIAA stands accused of racketeering, fraud, deceptive business practices, and a host of underhanded tactics such as seeking to directly contact Andersen's then-eight-year-old daughter under false pretenses.

"Defendants like Ms. Andersen... should be allowed to defend themselves as aggressively as the RIAA prosecutes claims against them," Lybeck counters.

The nation's four Internet provider organizations have agreed to forcibly cut the Internet connection of users found to repeatedly use Winny and other file-sharing programs to illegally copy gaming software and music, it was learned Friday.

Resorting to cutting off the Internet connection of copyright violators has been considered before but never resorted to over fears the practice might involve violations of privacy rights and the freedom of use of telecommunications.

A brief six-hour survey by a copyright organization monitoring the Internet found about 3.55 million examples of illegally copied gaming software, worth about 9.5 billion yen at regular software prices, and 610,000 examples of illegally copied music files, worth 440 million yen, that could be freely downloaded into personal computers using such software, the sources said.

In the US, several universities have banned filesharing applications such as BitTorrent, mostly under pressure from the RIAA. A university in the Netherlands has taken a different approach. They use uTorrent to distribute software and OS updates across 6500 workstations, and end up saving a lot of time, money and resources by doing so.

Before they decided to use BitTorrent, more than 20 servers were needed to distribute 25.6 TBs of data to the desktops, and even then it could take up to 4 days to update them all. Now, with BitTorrent, this process has speeded up significantly, and all computers are updated with the latest software in less than 4 hours.

A novel idea has been proposed to take the fight to the RIAA and the BPI. Since P2P filesharing has a discovery element which permits people to discover new music at no cost - why shouldn't filesharers be compensated for filesharing?

"Studies point to filesharing as a driver for *increased* music sales (among the heaviest downloaders). Possibly filesharers should start trying to recover promotional costs from the music industry?" asked anti-copyright campaigner Rob Myers.

Feargal's reaction?

"That's one of the most fanciful and non-practical ideas I've heard for quite some time. But God bless them for making me laugh and cheering me up today!"

A federal judge in Connecticut has rejected the RIAA's 'making available' theory, which is the basis of all of the RIAA's peer to peer file sharing cases. In Atlantic v. Brennan, in a 9-page opinion [PDF], Judge Janet Bond Arterton held that the RIAA needs to prove 'actual distribution of copies', and cannot rely - as it was permitted to do in Capitol v. Thomas - upon the mere fact that there are song files on the defendant's computer and that they were 'available'.

The RIAA apparently produced a new video, already available on a variety of torrent tracker sites, in conjunction with the National District Attorneys Association with the goal of instructing U.S. prosecutors on how to deal with music piracy cases.

The video apparently isn't as old as it seems, and pertains mostly to physical CD piracy, with ex-Maryland state trooper Frank Walters pointing to a CD burner tower and showing how prosecutors can identify a pirated CD (no printing on the CD).

Jim Dedman, National District Attorneys Association: "If I have my drug officers out there, and they see what seems like a nice music collection, this may be something you could help me out with."

Deborah Robinson, Regional Counsel, Anti-Piracy Div., RIAA: "Exactly, exactly. And sometimes drug officers call us and say, 'we know they're selling music, can you help us?... We're trying to arrest this drug dealer, what should I look for, what should I put in that affidavit?"

Several BitTorrent developers have joined forces to propose a new protocol extension with the ability to bypass the BitTorrent interfering techniques used by Comcast and other ISPs.

When the first ISPs started to throttle BitTorrent traffic most BitTorrent clients introduced a countermeasure, namely, protocol header encryption.

Unfortunately, protocol header encryption doesn’t help against more aggressive forms of BitTorrent interference, like the Sandvine application used by Comcast. A new extension to the BitTorrent protocol is needed to stay ahead of the ISPs, and that is exactly what is happening right now.

So, the new tracker peer obfuscation technique is especially designed to be a workaround for throttling devices, such as the Sandvine application that Comcast uses.

The IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) fired some of the first shots earlier this week in Denmark. One of Denmark's most prominent ISPs, Tele2, was forced by a court decision to block The Pirate Bay from their customers.

According to The Pirate Bay's new Court Blog, Danish traffic has not dropped since the implementation of the block.

"...the number of visits from Denmark has increased by 12% thanks to IFPI," the blog post reads. "Our site http://thejesperbay.org is growing more because of the media attention than people actually coming to learn how to bypass the filter - our guess is that alot of the users on the site now run OpenDNS instead of the censoring DNS at Tele2.dk."

The Jesper Bay, a spin off of The Pirate Bay, provides users with detailed instructions on how to bypass the block. Using the OpenDNS option has proven so far to be the most popular method.