CNet targetted in LimeWire suit

Alki David, a filmmaker with more beef than a Texan rancher, has launched a class action lawsuit against CNet. He's looking for musicians and other filmmakers to join in to claim damages after CNet distributed Limewire software.

I know what you're thinking - aren't any damages already being pursued through the lawsuit against Limewire? Yes.

There's a plodding twenty minute video in which David churns slowly through his case, like a man who assumes his audience might not be actually awake, but the key bit is his claim that there's "many billions of dollars" to be shared. (Presumably Alki is expecting CBS to bankrupt itself in any judgement?)

David is convinced, or has convinced himself, that CNet's distribution of LimeWire was with "malicious intent". He drags in a lot of other irrelevances to his case, straighfacedly suggesting that showing someone how to strip DRM from a track is "teaching people to steal".

In a bid to perk up the video, he's cut in some images of angry skeletons - it doesn't really perk the video up.

By about 12 minutes, he's on to Bittorrent, and claiming "the liability in this is into the many trillions of dollars". Yes, you'll recall that the music industry used to be worth several trillions before filesharing was invented.

About 16 minutes in, he's trying again to liven up his video by doing what appears to be a parody of the Victor Kiam adverts. That's okay, though - that's covered by fair use.

After that, though, comes the real reason for this: David's long-running argument with CBS over his Film.On service. It's all quite extraordinary.

RIAA get to double-dip on Limewire files

Obviously, copyright law has little in common with natural justice, but the ruling this week that the RIAA can get paid twice for the same infringement seems to take the idea to a whole new level.

Paidcontent explains:

As part of a massive litigation campaign began in 2003, the RIAA sued tens of thousands of individual downloaders who used Limewire and other services. Those include relatively small settlements of several thousand dollars each for 104 songs that were downloaded by individuals from Limewire, and are also in the RIAA’s big list of tracks it wants the service to pay damages for. Defense lawyers for Limewire argued that such “double dipping” shouldn’t be allowed. Even though copyright law allows statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work, those can only be collected for each work once, the file-sharing service said. But the judge rejected that argument and RIAA lawyers will be able to get statutory damages for all infringed tracks, even ones it has already collected for from individuals.

The RIAA really do see Limewire as the gift that keeps on giving. Isn't getting repeated payments off the back of a transgression closer to what a blackmailer does, rather than a justice system?

Judge gently points out to music industry it isn't worth all the music in the world, ever

Judge Kimba Wood, who is hearing the claims for damages against LimeWire for unlicensed filesharing through its network, has told the music industry it needs to be realistic. The Register explains:

In an opinion published ahead of the damages hearings, Judge Kimba Wood revealed that the record companies, seeking statutory damages against the music-sharing service, are seeking damages predicated on the “number of direct infringers per work” – leading to a damages claim of as much as $75 trillion dollars (according to Wikipedia, total global GDP is around $69 trillion”).

“The absurdity of this result is one of the factors that has motivated other courts to reject Plaintiffs’ damages theory”, the judge wrote.

If only everyone took the time to work through the figures and spot that record companies seriosuly oversetimate their losses. Might stop bad laws being made to plug these trillion-pound crimes.

Limewire closed in famous victory for record labels

So, Wednesday's decision from a US court that Limewire must be closed down. How's that working out, then?

No word yet on how much money the record labels have poured in to getting the closure of a service from which the world has moved on - it's a bit like environmentalists concentrating their fire on two-stroke petrol engines.

How insignificant was this expensive victory? Billboard, house journal of the US music industry, bunged the closure news in a collection of News Briefs, tucked between the possibility that Justin Timberlake might be cheating on Jessica Biel and forty year-old news about John Lennon ranting at a dry cleaners.

Marginally less important than someone kissing Olivia Munn. The RIAA must be thrilled. They've climbed a mountain and come down a molehill. Oh, but still facing bills for the action - 4chan are launching a denial of service attack on the RIAA today.

Although, really, closing down the RIAA is a bit like closing down Limewire - just hastening the end for a declining property.

RIAA defeat LimeWire

After just four years, the RIAA looks likely to secure victory in closing down LimeWire, the filesharing service your grandpa used to use back in the past. Last week, a judge in New York granted a summary judgement in the major label's favour.

The RIAA is planning to seek damages of $150,000 per instance of unlicensed downloading, which will run into silly money that Limewire simply don't have.

There were still people using LimeWire, so it's not totally a Pyrrhic Victory. But it's probably not as significant as the RIAA are spinning it, and it certainly wasn't worth the money they've spent on it.

LimeWire are trying to continue to engage with the music industry, to leverage their brand into a legal service (because that worked out well for Napster, right?).

Gamekeeper turns poacher

How seriously those music executives take their jobs fighting against peer-to-peer networks.

About as seriously as they need to to get by, it turns out. Because when it comes down to their own careers, they can cut a deal. Take Jason Herskowitz.

Herskowitz was an executive at Total Music, Sony & Universal's lamentable attempt to create a Hulu For Music, and as such was part of the vanguard against unlicensed listening.

Now that Total Music has gone souffle-in-the-oven, though, Herskowitz has taken a job with LimeWire instead.

Twittergem: Ruskin147

"Great line from friends' teenage daughter while discussing "free" music: "I'm really old school - I still use Limewire." - Rory Cellan-Jones

Limewire makes RIAA life even more wretched

There's been darknets hiding around for ages - closed little cliques where files get shared, away from the prying eyes of copyright holders or the people they overpay to watch peer-to-peer networks. The one piece of soothing balm for the record labels has been the faff-factor of setting them up: offsetting the 'free' was a 'lack of convenience'.

Now, though: Limewire have made setting up a private darknet so much simpler.

RIAA big fans of Limewire

Who's that on the Limewire network there, then? Could it be the RIAA? An RIAA rep who wanted to remain anonymous for fear of nasty emails (from the music industry or fans, it's not clear) has admitted that the RIAA is busy on Limewire, tracking what's going on.

The rep claims that they don't download tracks, just "check the watermark", but surely they'd have to listen to at least bit of the file to make sure, wouldn't they? And if the RIAA are downloading even a portion of a supposed illegal file, what would the legal position on that actually be?

Limewire tries its hand at legit business

Like Arthur Daley opening a proper shop, Limewire is attempting to clean up its image by opening a properly licensed store selling proper, DRM-free, MP3s.

Going straight! Just like Jeffrey Archer. It warms your heart, doesn't it? The store has half a million songs to choose from - including the new Dolly Parton album - and looks to be charging 99 cents. It's only available to those in the US, though - hey, this is Limewire, remember, they're not the sort of guys to laugh in the face of tightly-worded licensing agreement, are they?

There doesn't seem to be anything much to turn the Limewire store into an iTunes killer, though. It's a basic, no-frills store, only with the same prices everywhere else on the street.

Spinning sales according to the wind

Doing the rounds of the news outlets yesterday, BPI experts attempted to do the impossible, and try to blame the fall in sales of singles last year on piracy, while acknowledging that album sales, erm, actually rose.

This in itself is curious - the BPI spokesperson kept saying "ah, but people will download a single, but not an album." The sense contained in that statement could be fed to a gnat and the gnat would still starve - how exactly would that work? "I have my highspeed dial up and Limewire is running, but what would be the point of downloading an entire album when I could go and purchase it from town, not thirty miles away; more importantly, the only real revenue-threatening piracy, that of blokes selling copies of Top 40 records from the back of white vans at car boot sales and most council offices near you deals exclusively in albums, so if the problem of loss of sales to shady operators was as great as we're told, you'd expect the singles market to hold up, and the albums to be in collapse.

But the sales figures themselves are more curious still, as the BPI admits that, while they fell, singles sales fell less sharply in the last quarter of 2002 than in "the seven previous quarters." In other words, with the number of files being shared and swapped over the various systems still increasing, the singles market is steadying. Indeed, although the number of singles sold last year did drop, they're only now at the same level as in 1992, when they were much, much cheaper in real terms.

Soundslip

Doubtless Hillary Rosen has already drawn a huge pie chart to prove the ten percent slump in album sales in the US was down to that evil peer to peer networking, but we, naturally, beg to differ.

The biggest seller of the year - Eminem's Eminem Show - was one of the highest profile albums bounced onto the line prior to release, and doesn't seem to have had its performance hurt. The more telling statistics lay in that two of the biggest sellers in the US - Missundaztood and O Brother - actually came out the previous year, and two titles (8 Mile and, again, O Brother) were soundtrack albums.

In short, hardly any albums came out to inspire people to get their asses down to Best Buy. The admission by the US Record Industry that they'd been operating a price-fixing cartel and as such pissing on consumers for years can't have helped, either. Oh, and up til the 28th December, album sales in the UK had experienced a year on year growth of nearly three and a half percent. Since we're just as good with the Morpheus and the Limewire and the download and burn, the American Industry might like to prepare a brief informal but informative lecture as to why we've not had a similar slump.

Oh, and however cycnical we might be about the whole Fame Stars thing, you can't deny the effect: The Girls versus Boys chart battle before Christmas bumped the singles market sales up by fifty percent on the previous week.