As the World Wages War on P2P

I've always downloaded music and movies, who the hell hasn’t? Well right now times suck because the legal system is blitzing my pastime. The inundation of Limewire with faux music files and porn viruses has forced me to turn to my BitTorrent client for even individual songs. I could always trust uTorrent to get the job done even if it took a few days, but now with Comcast throttling my bandwidth illegally and torrent sites being forced to shut down seemingly every month, methods of online distribution are under serious attack.

The legislation behind downloading music seems to change damn near everyday. The RIAA has been changing its stance on ripping cd’s sporadically throughout the past few years; one month ripping a cd is ok and the next its illegal. Unsuprisingly the RIAA didn’t even have a policy on ripping cd’s until years after it first became available as a means of copying your cd’s to your computer.

No governing body has ever seemed to care about a phenomenon until the mainstream skews it into moral panic, so this doesn’t surprise me.

During an interview with Fox News, el presidente Bush described how he had some Beetles songs on his iPod. At the time, the Beetles had refused to put their music online, meaning that even our president had attained music through a means that is NOT in accordance with the “fair use” policy outlined by the RIAA. The lawmaker becomes the lawbreaker. Every one citizen is treated equally under the law, right?

Unfortunately for most, they are not the president of the US and A. Mary Lindor, a single mother living on disability payments in Brooklyn N.Y. was sued by the RIAA for a minimum of $750 per song she supposedly downloaded.

The RIAA is known to have sued for up to $30,000 per song “distributed”, so I guess you could say she was lucky. In this ironic turn of events it would seem her disability payments from the government would now be spent paying off her legal fees, despite the fact she had absolutely no music on her computer. This situation is so full of win I simply can’t describe it.

Scott Hinds was sued for allegedly sharing a whopping total of five songs; some of which included "Don't Know Why" by Norah Jones and "Automobile" by NWA. He was told to pay $3,750 for the songs or be summoned to court.

So the gang that yelled “F*ck the police” are having the authorities track down fans downloading their music? I only wish it was this hilarious; sadly NWA likely has zero knowledge that Scott is being subpoenaed for sharing their music, oops I mean their labels music.

The “pay up or else” tactic is commonly used by the RIAA to intimidate their not so wealthy targets, namely college students. As listed in a previous article however, the RIAA CANNOT sue college students unless the University illegally divulges confidential information. It is simply a scare tactic to try and make college students voluntarily reveal their identity which then provide the RIAA with all it needs to promptly bankrupt you.

The RIAA has also sued a homeless man, a 12 year old, a 10 year old and a women inflicted with sever multiple sclerosis. Tell your grandpa to be on the lookout.

Of course these court happy millionaires are only doing what is best for the artist. I mean if the artists were ok with users downloading their music then the labels would all back off, right?

Tommy Wirkola, the director of a popular Kill Bill spoof named “Kill Buljo” found his movie circulating through torrent sites. He openly stated “it’s flattering that people are making copies of the movie and releasing it on the Internet. Besides, all movies today are released onto the web. It would have been worse if no one wanted to share the movie.”

Nonetheless the distributor of the movie, CCV and their lawyer Espen Tøndel, are taking legal action against the fans sharing the movie. Their going through all this despite the fact the movies director was not only complacent with, but honored by the fact that people are downloading his movie. Can you say conflict of interest? Sadly this is not the only case.

The EFPI, yet another music industry association claiming to uphold and champion the rights of artists, is in quite the arduous legal battle with one of the most notorious torrent sites, The Pirate Bay. The EFPI is suing the Pirate Bay to the tune of $2.5 million for allegedly assisting in copyright infringement and violating other laws that contain more holes then a pair of Abercrombie jeans.

One of the artists the EFPI claimed damages for is the Swedish Hip-Hop artist Max Peezay. Unfortunately the EFPI of Sweden CEO Lars Gustafsson didn’t ask Max if he wanted to be involved in the lawsuit beforehand and Max has since demanded that his name be removed and all involvement withdrawn. Unfortunately this will only bring down the $2.5 million asking price by $19,000.

The flippin sweet part about all this is that the EFPI doesn’t even own the rights to Max’s music. You gotta love how the creative geniuses don’t have control over their own creations.

So the RIAA sues the pants of everyone in sight, receives its wad of cash and redistributes it to the artists whose rights were supposedly infringed upon? No, they never gave back ANY of the $400 million they received from Kazaa, Napster and Bolt. This debacle is still raging between artists and their labels despite Napster having been shutdown hmmm let’s see, seven years ago.

After learning about all this bullshit it makes sense that torrent sites such as the Pirate Bay have moved all of their servers to private islands off Sweden and Egypt. Out there the laws surrounding file sharing are even less thorough then in America. Now if the RIAA wants to shut down the Pirate Bay they have to do so according to Swedish and Egyptian law, both of which have very lax to no laws surrounding online content distribution.

We shall see if these groups have the balls to come after these Pirates off the coast of their island in what may well become, a real life Pirate Bay.

BitTorrent is fast becoming the only remaining free peer-to-peer protocol left that isn’t oozing with viruses and malware. I recommend you take advantage of it before the laws become clear-cut in favor of ISP’s, record labels and movie studios.