The RIAA has hired the Nation’s top hired gun to fight music piracy.
Apparently, the recording industry doesn’t realize yet that it’s fighting a losing battle. Looks like we’re in for another ridiculous fight this coming year.

ATF Director to Head Music Industry’s Anti-Piracy Efforts
By the Associated Press for Fox News.

The director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives (search) is leaving his post next month to lead the recording
industry’s efforts to stop music piracy.
Bradley A. Buckles, who served ATF for 30 years and was named director in
1999, will come head of the Anti-Piracy Unit of the Recording Industry
Association of America (search), the trade group announced Tuesday.
“Brad’s appointment should signal to everyone that we continue to take
piracy (search), here and throughout the world, very seriously,” said Mitch Bainwol, RIAA’s chairman and chief executive officer.

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C-notes for Brianna
Outpouring of donations in download suit
By Helen Kennedy for the NY Daily News.

Furious music lovers nationwide flooded 12-year-old Brianna LaHara of Manhattan with donations yesterday to help pay off her debt to the recording business.
From $3 pledges for the Help Brianna fund to $1,000 offers, hundreds of people wanted to help pay the $2,000 settlement between Brianna and the Recording Industry Association of America.
“The whole deal with going after the actual consumer – and the fact that it’s a 12-year-old girl with a single mother who lives in the projects – well, these people have no decency,” said Taylor Finley, a California film student who started the Help Brianna fund.

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Activity on Song – Swapping Networks Steady
By Reuters.

Activity on file-sharing networks has not missed a beat this week despite the record industry’s high-profile lawsuits against individual song-swappers, industry trackers and executives said on Thursday.
“There’s no mass exodus, that’s safe to say. Ironically, usage this week and this month is up,” said Eric Garland, a spokesman for BigChampagne, a research firm that tracks peer-to-peer networks that enable file-swapping between different computers.
“We’ve been looking at dramatic increases on the FastTrack Network. The number of people using these file sharing services in the first 10 days of September is up more than 20 percent from the August average,” he said…
Greg Bildson, chief technology officer for LimeWire, said traffic on the Gnutella network, the underlying network that LimeWire, BearShare, Morpheus tap into, has not been affected.
Peer-to-peer officials said people would likely improve ways to conceal their identities to avoid lawsuits.
“If you’re smart, and most file-sharers are, you can insulate yourself,” said Wayne Rosso, president of Grokster, which is involved in a suit of its own against the industry.
Rosso said the lawsuits only wasted money, alienated music fans and will have less of a shock value in the future.
“The next time, the suits won’t get this kind of media coverage. They’re a desperate and dying industry,” he said.

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Librarians to P2P critics: Shhh!
By Declan McCullagh for CNET.

In a hotly contested lawsuit before a federal appeals court, two peer-to-peer companies are about to gain a vast army of allies: America’s librarians.
The five major U.S. library associations are planning to file a legal brief Friday siding with Streamcast Networks and Grokster in the California suit, brought by the major record labels and Hollywood studios. The development could complicate the Recording Industry Association of America’s efforts to portray file-swapping services as rife with spam and illegal pornography.
According to an attorney who has seen the document, the brief argues that Streamcast–distributor of the Morpheus software–and Grokster should not be shut down. It asks the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the April decision by a Los Angeles judge that dismissed much of the entertainment industry’s suit against the two peer-to-peer companies.
Among the groups signing the brief are the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of Research Libraries, the American Association of Law Libraries, the Medical Library Association and the Special Libraries Association. The American Civil Liberties Union, in one of the group’s first forays into copyright law, has drafted the brief opposing the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
A central argument of the brief is that the district court got it right when applying a 1984 Supreme Court decision to the Internet. That decision, Sony v. Universal City, said Sony could continue to manufacture its Betamax VCR because a company “cannot be a contributory (copyright) infringer if, as is true in this case, it has had no direct involvement with any infringing activity.”
“The amicus brief will make the point that we are not supporting the wrongful sharing of copyrighted materials,” ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels wrote in an internal e-mail seen by CNET News.com. An amicus brief is one filed by a third, uninvolved party that comments on a particular matter of law. “Instead, we believe the Supreme Court ruled correctly in the Sony/Betamax case. The court in that case created fair and practical rules which, if overturned, would as a practical matter give the entertainment industry a veto power over the development of innovative products and services.”…
The ACLU said Thursday that the brief argues that peer-to-peer networks are speech-promoting technologies that have many noninfringing uses. If the MPAA and the RIAA succeed in shutting down peer-to-peer networks or making them more centralized, the precedent could create undesirable choke points that could be used to monitor Internet users, the ACLU said.

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A.C.L.U. Challenges Music Industry in Court
By John Schwartz for the NY Times.
(Thanks, Jason.)

The civil liberties group argues that the constitutional rights of its client, referred to as Jane Doe, would be violated if her college, which is also her Internet service provider, were forced to reveal her name. The industry subpoena “seeks to strip Jane Doe of her fundamental right to anonymity,” according to the group’s court filings.
The industry subpoena is one of many recently filed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law that gives copyright holders broad powers to get the names of suspected infringers from Internet service providers.
But the civil liberties suit claims that the subpoenas, which can be issued with little judicial oversight or involvement, go beyond even what the law allows. The group also claims that the law itself is unconstitutional, because it does not provide for the judicial review of requests or notification of the target of the investigation.
“We’re not saying that they can’t ever get her identity,” said Christopher A. Hansen, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. “We’re only saying if the industry wants her identity, then they have to do it in a fair way.”…
Also today, a group that opposes the suits, Downhill Battle, is expected to announce the creation of a legal defense fund for those caught up in the file-trading suits. “If we make noise for all those who’ve been sued and give the people who want to fight in court the resources to do so, we can make these lawsuits fail,” the group said on its Web site, downhillbattle.org.

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This is beautiful.

(Thanks, Joseph.)

She Says She’s No Music Pirate. No Snoop Fan, Either.
By John Schwartz for the NY Times.

Mrs. Ward, a 66-year-old sculptor and retired schoolteacher, received notice on Sept. 11 from the Recording Industry Association of America that she was being accused of engaging in millions of dollars worth of copyright infringement, downloading thousands of songs and sharing them with the world through a popular file-sharing program called KaZaA.
Mrs. Ward was deeply confused by the accusations, which have disrupted her gentle life in the suburbs of Boston. She does not trade music, she says, does not have any younger music-loving relatives living with her, and does not use her computer for much more than sending e-mail and checking the tides. Even then, her husband does the typing…
On Friday, the industry group dropped its suit against Mrs. Ward, but reserved the right to sue again. An industry spokeswoman denied that any mistake had been made…
But those opposed to the recording industry’s legal tactics say that the case suggests that the methods used to track down music pirates are flawed. They argue that Mrs. Ward is probably not the only mistaken case in the recording industry dragnet.
Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group concerned with civil liberties in the digital age, said that her organization was talking with dozens of people who say they have been sued but do not trade files.
In a number of the 261 lawsuits the industry has filed so far, members of the household other than the named defendant might have had access to the machines, she said. But some of those being sued, she added, are contending that their cases are purely ones of mistaken identity.
That is exactly what Mrs. Ward says happened to her. Not only does nobody else use her computer in more than a passing way, the computer, an Apple Macintosh, is not even capable of running the KaZaA file-swapping program. And though the lawsuit against her said that she was heavily into the works of hip-hop artists like Snoop Dogg, Ms. Ward says her musical tastes run to Celtic and folk.

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