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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

From The Register’s hardware site: the first commercial MP3 player was introduced in march 1998 by Saehan Information Systems, a South Korean company. The MPMan F10 had 32mb of RAM, a parallel port interface, and a numeric LCD display.

The Register has a photo of a later model, along with Creative’s Rio player. An RIAA lawsuit briefly halted MP3 hardware sales in October 1998.

Apple, of course, released its first iPod in October 2001, and ported iTunes software to Windows in April 2003. When iPods lost their FireWire connections and gained USB, consumer adoption began in earnest.

Ah, the memories. LowEndMac has an early timeline of the iPod for those who are interested.

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?

Tech: At least 20 US universities offer free or cheap online music to their students. Rhapsody has most of these schools, but Duke made a deal to distribute iPods to 1800 students, most of whom are incoming freshman. Duke upperclassmen are unhappy that they can’t get an iPod. Other students compain that the $500K in funds could have paid for something else, like student financial aid or better campus security. Schools usually tack on a student fee to cover the download service. The university lawyers see this as a way to keep the RIAA from suing the university and its students.

Tech: The American Library Association is distributing its own copyright materials to students, emphasizing policies like fair use that the MPAA, RIAA and BSA are omitting from their corporate-driven, big publisher propaganda. All of these groups are targeting 10 year old kids, who they belive are easy to influence. The EFF is also developing its own materials, thank goodness.