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County politicians in Los Angeles have passed legislation championed by the RIAA and MPAA that lets authorities confiscate property from anyone convicted of IP theft or piracy. See Wired for more information.

The RIAA uses automated methods for collecting information fom LimeWire and other peer-to-peer programs. Data including the IP address and the files offered for trade are collected. The trade organization also has an automated takedown notice and settlement system that targets universities and students. The RIAA uses a manual process when investigating commercial ISPs. This article from the Chronicle of Higher Education has some details.

Meanwhile, BoingBoing reports that the US House of Representatives has passed a similar measure (HR 4279, PRO-IP (Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008). The bill may not get through the US Senate this year.

See Ars Technica and TechDirt for more information on this ridiculous piece of legislation.

Related posts on

billso.com

• 11 May 2008: Qtrax makes a free music download deal with Universal
• 15 March 2008: 10 years of MP3 players
• 21 February 2008: Copyright and fair use
• 4 February 2008: Better than free
• 13 November 2007: File sharing and campus security
• 5 October 2007: What’s wrong with copyright?
• 17 July 2007: A quick explanation of copyright law
• 29 September 2006: US copyright law in verse
• 15 August 2004: American Library Association promotes fair use
• 27 June 2003: Sue your best customers

Legislation in a US House committee would require universities to control, monitor and report illegal file-sharing, according to a report in today’s New York Times:

“You have the federal government requiring a nonprofit educational institution to develop plans to help a for-profit industry to earn more revenue from their students,” said Matt Owens, assistant director of federal relations at the Association of American Universities. “It makes no sense. That’s not what we’re in the business of doing.”

File sharing has come under attack from several sources. According to Reuters, The Pirate Bay, one of the best-known sites for finding torrent seeds of video games, movies, audio and comic books, has thrown its support behind a project to replace BitTorrent with a more secure protocol that is difficult to trace.

BusinessWeek reported that AT&T will deploy a network monitoring system that can detect and interrupt illegal file transfers. The Associated Press investigated Comcast’s filtering technology last month, only to find that Comcast filters blocked several types of legal file downloads in certain areas of the US.

One common thread in these developments is copyright law. Each of these organizations has been involved in lawsuits by industry organizations like the MPAA, and by media publishers.

Meanwhile, a recent research report gave US universities an average or C grade on information security. One major point of concern was illegal downloading of files. Trade associations have targeted universities, based upon the widespread use of file-sharing software in campus residential networks.

Curiously, 93 percent of the campus IT professionals who responded to the survey claimed their network infrastructure was safe. The report indicated that network intrusions from outside the university, through sources like hacking and malware, accounted for the majority of IT security incidents. Campus IT professionals generally felt that their organization’s managers ignored or underplayed concerns about IT security.

One university learned its lessons about information security the hard way. Ohio University received more Digital Millennium Copyright Notices than any other university in the first half of 2007. Five OU students face court dates. But that’s not the worst part, according to Campus Technology:

In 2005, the medical records of 60,000 people who had been treated at a campus health center and personal information of 300,000 university donors, including thousands of Social Security numbers, were exposed to hackers who breached university servers.

OU has since hired an information security manager and staff, but the damage has already been done. There’s nothing like violating your donors’ privacy to get the administration’s attention.

Nilay Patel has posted his latest installment of Know Your Rights on Engadget. Today’s subject: why copyright law is so complicated.

Patel discusses the judgment in the RIAA peer-to-peer lawsuit against Jammie Thomas of Brainerd Minnesota. Thomas was “found liable for copyright infringment for sharing music online”, and was ordered to pay US$220,000 in damages, as reported yesterday in Engadget , the New York Times , the Register, Wired and CNET. Thomas claims she will try to pay the award herself, and she will not ask for financial help. Then again, she won’t refuse donations, either. Declan McCullagh posted his comments on CNET, and claimed that the judgment was far too high.

Settle with the RIAA… or else

Thomas had refused an earlier settlement offer from the RIAA. Several defendants have paid the industry organization an average of US$4,000 to avoid a trial.

Federal District Court Judge Michael J. Davis issued a key ruling in the case that tipped the scales towards the music industry. Davis ruled that the record companies and the RIAA did not have to prove that any songs had been transmitted from Thomas’ computer. Thomas had made 24 music files available for sharing, and that act qualified as infringement.

Thomas didn’t help her own case when she gave different answers about her computer’s hard drive. It was obvious that she had replaced her hard drive. The industry lawyers claimed Thomas knowingly wiped out evidence of her file-sharing activities.

The defendant also denied that she had a Kazaa account. Kazaa is a popular file-sharing service. Lawyers presented evidence that a Kazaa username was linked to the IP address of Thomas’ computer.

I do get questions from students about how to download free music and video from the Internet. My usual answer is to find a legal source. There are plenty of sites like LegalTorrents that offer free, licensed music for download. Many artists post free downloads. There’s an unending stream of giveaways and promotions that give users a few free downloads.

Rip your CDs

There are also services that will rip or convert a user’s music CDs to music files. If you bought the CD, you do have the right to convert the songs to digital files, as long as you do not share the files.

I’ve used one service, MusicShifter, to convert most of my CD collection to FLAC files. It took about 2 weeks from start to finish, using USPS Priority Mail. That’s much quicker than ripping the CDs one-at-a-time into iTunes on my own computer.

I could have ordered MP3 files, but FLAC files use a lossless open source encoding standard. This page on etree.org has a good discussion of how FLAC works. It’s trivial to convert a FLAC file to MP3 or another format.

While the Thomas judgment may be overturned or modified, it’s more expensive to download unlicensed music today than it was last week.

Related posts:

• 17 July 2007: A quick explanation of copyright law
• 2 April 2007: EMI to sell DRM-free music on iTunes
• 24 January 2007: More thoughts on cheating, copyright and paraphrasing
• 23 January 2007: Cheating is copyright infringement?

It’s 19 September, and that means it’s International Talk-Like-A-Pirate Day. Time to break out your iPatch, wish me a happy birthday, shiver your timbers, and really tick off those pesky ninjas.

Here’s a Wikipedia article about the day, with no mention of me at all. I’m not famous enough for Wikipedia, and that’s probably a good thing!

Seriously, TLAP Day is one of several Internet-fueled holidays that have gained popularity through social networking, blogs, and word-of-mouth marketing. Another favorite of mine is Yuri’s Night on 12 April. It’s a series of small global parties to honor the first manned orbital spaceflight. Of course, the Soviet Union was celebrating Cosmonautics Day long before there was a World Wide Web. I wish Yuri’s Night was more like a Cinco de Mayo for space. Maybe next year!

In the meantime, let’s party like it’s 1807.

Tech: Microsoft has done it again. What were they thinking? According to Gartner, Windows XP Starter Edition is a non-starter, and will actually encourage customers to get a pirated copy of Windows. XP SE is the version that MS developed for the Asian market, as a response to Linux and software piracy. What a bargain! XP SE can’t run more than 3 programs at a time. It has no user accounts, so everyone runs as root. Worst of all, the OS can’t handle hardware upgrades. If you add more RAM, the OS won’t recognize the new memory. I got better performance running DOS in 1989.