Lawyer Ray Beckerman is pointing to the defense used by someone in Texas accused by the RIAA of sharing unauthorized music files. While the defendant is making the same claim as others that the $750/song amount is unconstitutional, they've also made a different, but interesting defense, saying that they should be covered by Kazaa's settlement with the recording industry.

They ended up paying about $115 million to settle the claims. Since the accused person was using Kazaa, they feel that Kazaa's payment covers their activity, and to be forced to pay again would be double counting on the part of the recording industry.

A draft study commissioned by the Australian Attorney General's office finds that the music and software industries attributes sales losses to piracy without any evidence to back their claims, The Australian reports.

According to a draft report by the Australian Institute of Criminology, the music industry can't explain how it arrives at its statistics for staggering losses through piracy. The Business Software Association's claim of $361m per year in lost sales is "unverified and epistemologically unreliable", the report says.

According to The Australian, the study is due to be revised after the institute's senior members disagreed with its conclusions. "We have an extensive quality control system in the institute, so that drafts are read by most senior staff," principal criminologist Russell Smith told the paper.

It will be interesting to compare the final revision with the current draft to learn if the language is merely softened or if the aforementioned "quality control system" should involve reaching conclusions that the report's purchasers would prefer.

A few years ago, when the recording industry filed a bunch of lawsuits against those accused of file sharing in Spain, we noted that the country's laws required "an intent to profit" for their to be copyright violations. Of course, the recording industry responded by saying that "the intent to save money" is the equivalent of "the intent to profit" but that's a pretty slippery slope. Apparently, at least one judge in Spain isn't buying it. Ben S writes in to let us know that a judge in Spain has dismissed the case against one man accused of file sharing (not sure what's happened with all the others). Even more interesting is the judge's choice of words in his decision, saying that to have ruled otherwise "would imply the criminalization of socially accepted and widely practiced behavior in which the aim is in no way to make money illicitly, but rather to obtain copies for private use."

The 23 year old Grant Stanley has been sentenced to five months in prison, followed by five months of home detention, and a $3000 fine for the work he put in the private BitTorrent tracker Elitetorrents.

This ruling is the first BitTorrent related conviction in the US. Stanley pleaded guilty earlier this year to "conspiracy to commit copyright infringement" and "criminal copyright infringement". He is one of the three defendants in the Elitetorrents operation better known as "Operation D-Elite".

Operation D-Elite (they love word tricks) was orchestrated by the FBI with a little help from the MPAA in May 2005, and resulted in the shutdown of one of the largest private BitTorrent trackers at that time.

In a response to the present case US Attorney John Brownlee said:

"This is the first criminal enforcement action against copyright infringement on a P2P network using BitTorrent technology. We hope this case sends the message that cyberspace will not provide a shield of anonymity for those who choose to break our copyright laws."

The music, movie and software cartels claim so-called 'piracy' is a Number One problem not only for themselves, but for the world as a whole.

The industries have fabricated a multi-headed monster by turning a simple commercial concept - copyright infringement which in truth, affects only them - into a huge, international conspiracy involving millions of their own innocent customers around the world, and genuine criminal counterfeiters.

However, the cartels are also frequently accused of fabricating statistics upon which they base their claims and according to the Havocscope global index of illicit markets, far from being at the top of the pile, movie and music piracy are way, way down the list, ranking 16th and 20th, respectively.

And even those positions are highly questionable given that in both instances, to reach them, Havocscope relies on statistics tainted more than somewhat by the industries concerned.

Lime Wire's case is that the RIAA is an anti-trust operation out to destroy any online music distribution service they did not own or control, or force such services to do business with them.

The countersuit charges that the RIAA is carrying out antitrust violations, consumer fraud, and other misconduct.

Its big idea was to limit and ultimately control the distribution and pricing of digital music, all to the detriment of consumers.

Lime Wire claims that the case against it is part of a much larger modern conspiracy to destroy all innovation that content owners cannot control and that disrupts their historical business models.

Lime Wire is so far the only P2P outfit that is going to court to fight the RIAA, which is confident that a Supreme Court ruling backs it up.

Harbored by a country where 1.2 million out of 9 million citizens tell the census that they engage in file sharing, the Pirate Bay is as much a national symbol as it is a website. Protected by weak Swedish copyright laws, the Bay survived and grew as movie studio lawyers felled competing BitTorrent trackers one-by-one. Today it boasts an international user base and easily clears 1 million unique visitors a day. New movies sometimes appear at the top of the site's most-popular list before flickering onto a single theater screen.

So when, on May 31, Swedish police finally arrived with a search warrant and carted off enough servers to fill three rental trucks, the entertainment industry was quick to proclaim victory. The Motion Picture Association of America issued a press release announcing a milestone.

So fast was the Bay's rebound that some news articles reporting the site's demise went to print after it was back up, recalls Peter. The resuscitated site had a few glitches, but the resurrection was remarkable in that it had never really happened before; when the major American rights holders take a website down, it stays down. The pirates delivered a victory message to the MPAA, and the Swedish equivalent, APB, through the site's reverse-DNS, which now read: hey.mpaa.and.apb.bite.my.shiny.metal.ass.thepiratebay.org.

CacheLogic and BitTorrent introduce an open-source Cache Discovery Protocol (CDP) that allows ISP's to cache and seed Bittorrent traffic. Currently, Bittorrent traffic is suffering from bandwidth throttling ISP's that claim that Bittorrent traffic is cluttering their pipes. This motivated the developers of the most popular Bittorrent clients implement protocol encryption to protect bittorrent users from being slowed down by their ISP's. However, Bram Cohen, the founder of Bittorrent doubted that encryption was the solution, and found (together with CacheLogic) a more ISP friendly alternative.

I had the misfortune of seeing the new Miami Vice movie Thursday night, but the experience wasn't all wasted, I stumbled upon the newest stealth rights removal reeducation campaign from the people that brought you DRM. Yes, the MPAA, RIAA or BSA, I am not sure which are behind this new tact, stealth infection of modern culture.

To use the Disco Steve method of rating movies, a scale from 1 to infinity of how many miles he would walk to avoid the movie, I would give this an 8. It was a B grade drug movie with only the most tenuous ties to the original TV show.

There was a scene in Miami Vice where they were discussing the big bad drug dealers, and how international they were. The good guys listed all the thing the bad guys were capable of bringing into the US, Cocaine, Heroin, etc etc. They listed it as coke from Coumbia, heroin from Afganistan, X from Y and A from B. Pretty normal stuff. At the end, they added 'pirated software from China'.

A Dutch appeals court has thwarted attempts by the Dutch anti-piracy organisation BREIN to get the identities of file-sharers from five ISPs, including Wanadoo and Tiscali.

The court found that the manner in which IP addresses were collected and processed by US company MediaSentry had no lawful basis under European privacy laws. A lower court in Utrecht had reached a similar conclusion last year.

Last year, expert witnesses at Delft University of Technology criticised MediaSentry's software for being too limited and simplistic. For instance, MediaSentry took filenames in Kazaa at face value. More importantly, the software scans all the content of the shared folder on the suspect's hard disk. In that process, it breached privacy laws.