The recording and motion-picture industries have hounded broadband providers to police their pipes for file-sharing pirates. These advocacy groups want service providers to monitor and stop the illegal trafficking of files. AT&T has a filtering plan that Slate calls "baffling"; it would scan all emails and downloads for illicit content. But Time Warner Cable has found a much simpler way to deter film and music pirates — make them pay for bandwidth.

Starting a 12-step Scrabulous-recovery plan may be a lot easier than all you addicts think. Hasbro wants to make it impossible for the Facebook app's 2.3 million users to fall off the wagon by shutting down the Scrabble copycat. It sent a notice to Facebook two weeks ago. Jayant Agarwalla, half of the two-man team behind the Web and Facebook apps, says he doesn't get Hasbro's deal. It obviously wouldn't have anything to do with using its intellectual property to score "over $25,000 a month."

A constant thorn in copyright-holders's sides, The Pirate Bay is finally taking on water. Swedish authorities, aided by evidence gathered during a 2006 raid, are preparing legal battle against captains Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm for "conspiracy to breach copyrights." Although Pirate Bay doesn't actively host files, it indexes shared BitTorrent files, which in Hollywood's eyes makes it equally culpable. The founders are confident they'll win. The prosecutor, Hakan Roswell, is confident that even if they lose, it "wouldn't stop the service." Of course. If Sweden cracks down, the pirates will just seek less-hostile waters.

Can you legally create MP3s from your CD collection, or not? That's all we want to know. News has circulated since early December that the recording industry believes it is illegal to rip your music library . The genesis of this waas an RIAA lawsuit against a chap for tossing ripped files into his Kazaa sharing folder — not, mind you, for actually ripping the files off a CD. We ridiculed the Washington Post for making this mistake, and were prepared to laugh derisively when it ran a correction. But a Wired blogger argues, at length — 745 agonizing words — that the RIAA still thinks CD ripping is illegal. Here are the 100 most essential words.

Lane Hartwell, the photographer at the center of the "Here Comes Another Bubble" imbroglio, is on a panel discussing copyright tonight.

Sony may be prepared to throw away copy-protection software on some of its music in early 2008, but that doesn't mean it's freed all its tunes. That's why, in the meantime, it has supplied a helpful guide for any iPod owners who'd like to circumvent the restrictions on Sony's protected Windows Media song files. It's the age-old trick of burning a CD and ripping it. This has more to do with the ubiquitousness of Apple's iPod and Sony's complete lack of MP3 player market share than any actual regrets about using copy protection, we suspect.

The Washington Post has reported that the RIAA views the ripping of CDs to MP3s as illegal. Not quite so. The RIAA isn't thrilled with the practice, but that's not why they're suing Jeffrey Howell. His offense against the recording industry was "putting those ripped files into a shared Kazaa folder," notes Techdirt. You know, the sort of thing one would do if he would want to participate in file sharing.

Warner Music has struck a deal to bring its entire back catalog, free of copying restrictions, to the Amazon MP3 store. (New releases from artists like Josh Groban are not included.) This brings the total number of songs available on Amazon to 2.9 million, and strikes another blow at Steve Jobs's quest to remove digital rights management code, or DRM, from iTunes music. So far, only EMI and a number of independent labels allow Apple to sell music in the DRM-free MP3 format. The theory is that the other music labels are willing to allow Amazon.com to sell DRM-free music in an attempt to break Apple's stranglehold on the digital distribution of music. Of course, they're hardly hurting Jobs, since Apple's iPods can play Amazon-sold MP3 files. Did we mention that the music industry is run by self-defeating idiots?

Also in Apple's movie rental deal yesterday with Fox: Apple will license its FairPlay copy-protection technology to the studio for DVD movie releases. This will allow DVD purchasers to easily — and legally — copy movies to their computers for playback on iPods and iPhones.

In a $3 million lawsuit against eBay, Tiffany has called the online auction house a "rat's nest" of counterfeit goods. Maybe the blue-boxed retailer is grumpy because Tiffany had to send eBay 135,000 takedown notices in 2006. As Eric Goldman points out on his Technology & Marketing Law Blog, that's 370 notices per day, 15 an hour, or 1 every 4 minutes. The suit itself, by the way, basically comes down to who should pay for investigating counterfeiting claims; eBay says Tiffany could fix the problem by hiring one more paralegal.

A lump of coal for Hollywood executives who went slow on building legal online music and video stores over the past decade: The number of people helping themselves to content at file-sharing tracker Pirate Bay has doubled to 8 million over the past year. The site now indexes nearly twice as many BitTorrent files.

In a world where the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America are suing people left and right for copyright infringement, it was only a matter of time before copycats cropped up. An Australian advertising firm just settled a copyright lawsuit for ripping off a college lecture on quantum mechanics. [Sydney Morning Herald]

Google is cracking down on copyright-infringing videos uploaded to its site. Sort of. A copy of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" on YouTube has a yellow box which reads, "This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by all copyright holders. The audio has been disabled." This is bad news for Songza, the Web jukebox which rips the audio track from YouTube videos.

More details on Perez Hilton's YouTube woes: Apparently it was his posting of this video of Liza Minelli collapsing on stage that caused his account to be banned. Normally YouTube removes a video when it receives a DMCA message and that's the end of it. This time though, says our tipster, Idolator editor Maura Johnston, it "was a 'repeat offender' thing". No surprise there. Hilton has built his entire site on images of questionable legality. Our timeline after the jump.

Self-proclaimed "queen of all media" Perez Hilton no longer reigns on YouTube. Girlfriend managed to get not one but two accounts banned from the Google-owned video site after he "posted a very critical video about their practices." Naturally, Hilton reacted with calm and reason unconstrained diva fury. Here's Hilton's rant:

I don't compare Creative Commons licenses to the Codex Seraphinianus just to be cruel. True, cruelty is part of the fun, but I'm honestly confused. It comes down to one word I don't grok. Here's your chance to explain it to us idiots.

It's always the coverup, never the crime. The popular BitTorrent-indexing site TorrentSpy.com, which helps users find shared "torrent" files to download, sabotaged its chances of escaping from a legal tangle with the Motion Picture Association of America. TorrentSpy had been sued by the MPAA in February 2006 for copyright infringement. The Los Angeles District Court asked it to start tracking its users. TorrentSpy did the most idiotic thing it could: Destroy evidence.

Why is it so hard to figure out Creative Commons? A paranoid explains:

PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak's blog proudly displays an image labeled as "used without permission." Is Dvorak bragging about the copyright violation? Nope. He's just pulled a boneheaded move known in the blogging world as "hotlinking," and the altered image shows that he got caught at it.

Aza Raskin, son of late, irascible Macintosh interface designer Jef Raskin, is taking after his dad. A source tells us Google's lawyers are all twisted up over Songza, an online jukebox which pulls its music selection from YouTube video soundtracks. "I've heard that YouTube's engineering staff loves Songza," our source says. "But apparently the legal department has been saying things like they "revoke" Songza's rights to use YouTube." Which of course makes sense, considering YouTube signed deals with record labels to split ad revenues. Songza, by just playing the soundtrack, and not displaying hte video where YouTube is starting to embed ads, threatens those deals. It's always cute when YouTube gets upset about copyright and all that, isn't it? Anyway, check out what's got the Googlers crying evil.