Jammie Thomas, who recently was found guilty of "making available" copyrighted music in the first Recording Industry Association of America lawsuit to go to trial, says she plans to appeal the $220,000 verdict. Unfortunately, there's quite a lot of evidence stacked against her. [Ars Technica]

Jammie Thomas, the woman who file-sharers and legitimate music purchasers alike hoped would end the tirades of the Recording Industry Association of America was found guilty of copyright infringement and slapped with a $222,000 fine. Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas, the first file-sharing case to actually go to trial, was a rallying point for anyone wishing to listen to music without automatically being deemed a criminal. The case revealed that the industry's lawsuits were, for the most part, a big, costly, unsubstantiated waste of time. But, alas for Thomas, not in this case. The victory will no doubt help the RIAA scare more people it accuses of file sharing into settling out of court. (Photo by Martin Belam)

All-male porn peddler Titan Media has sued to shut down an "online gay porn piracy ring." Titan is suing 22 defendants working on a half-dozen blogs. In this arena, for a change, the porn world is behind the curve, not on the cutting edge of tech. While the RIAA and MPAA have huge budgets and companies like MediaDefender and BayTSP to do their antipiracy dirty work, those companies don't "want to be known in the porn space," according to the CEO of BayTSP. As a result, sex sites must do their own dirty work.

The record industry, according to a Sony executive testifying in the court case of Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas, is losing millions taking alleged file sharers to court for crimes whose damage it can't assess. So, let's review: The record industry can't identify who's sharing files, can't account for how much an incident of piracy costs them, and can't explain to its customers why it's suing them. Is this any way to run a business — by bluffing?(Photo by P.B. Rage)

The Motion Picture Association of America has, for years, attempted to stop rampant piracy through cheesy, guilt-inducing public service announcements. "You're not just stealing from the rich, you're stealing from the janitors too" — that sort of thing. Well, the Brits have decided its film industry can only tackle its $18 billion piracy problem by targeting the young. Film Education, as the project is called, infiltrates classrooms to convince kids that piracy is evil by preying on their future hopes and dreams. The message: All those small, independent films that might launch your career in show biz won't get made because of your thieving ways.

All the record-label kevetching that the Internet is killing their livelihood may actually be true. But it's not college kids sharing files in broadband-equipped dorms that they need to worry about. Radiohead is releasing its new album sans label. Novel, but the interesting bit is that the band is giving a choice to consumers: Pay $82 for a super-fancy, boxed edition of In Rainbows, or download the album — for whatever you think it's worth. This follows a similar campaign by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails who says once his band's label obligations are completed, it will release digital albums for about $4. Of course it's not just the music industry that should be concerned.

Porn industry insiders disagree on how they feel about The Pirate Bay. Some would like American authorities to go after the file-sharing site to protect their copyrights. Others are uneasy about the idea of one country's laws reaching across borders, since many countries aren't as permissive about adult entertainment as the U.S. [TorrentFreak]

Amidst all the hubbub about MediaDefender — the file-sharing policing agency whose private email files were recently spewed across the Internet, revealing unsavory antipiracy plans — one particularly interesting tidbit has bubbled to the surface. The Pirate Bay, a major file-sharing site, says it now has proof from those files that the music and movie industries have been paying hackers to attack the site. It is now taking this information to the police and charging the Swedish arms of Fox, EMI Music, Universal, Paramount, Atari, Activision, Ubisoft and Sony with technical sabotage, denial-of-service attacks, hacking, and spamming.

Apparently digital-music piracy isn't as prevalent as we thought. Canada's Royal Mounted Police simply made up the fact that the country loses $30 billion to software piracy. We thought only gossip blogs did that kind of thing. The figure, a jumble of Internet research and corporate propaganda from the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition (members include the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, and the Software & Information Industry Association), has helped shore up Canada's anti-piracy laws. Let this be a lesson to you kids: Don't always believe what you read on the Internet. Even if the Mounties wrote it.

Be careful what you ask for. You may get it. MediaDefender had hoped to lure file sharers using a fake site. It's certainly drawn the attention of sophisticated hackers. The antipriacy organization has been hit twice by hackers since an initial breach spilled 6,000 of the company's emails onto the Web. As Wired News reports, hackers hit the database that holds the dummy files that MediaDefender floods file-sharing networks with — a tactic meant to discourage use of those networks to download music and videos. The second managed to scoop up a recorded phone conversation in which MediaDefender assures the New York attorney general's office of its security. (Photo by aussiegall)

A group of hackers banned together to hack an antipiracy group's email == and uncovered a dastardly plan to entrap file sharers. MediaDefender, the antipiracy organization, spends its days devising new means to thwart BitTorrent networks, the current, most sophisticated generation of file-sharing technology. Recently it's taken to seeding them with fake files. Among the 6,000 captured messages were emails detailing the planned creation of MiiVi, a faux BitTorrent site that would track all IP addresses that accessed the site. MediaDefender executives were also considering hacker tactics like a hostile takeover of computers, transforming them into bots that would spread fake files among peer-to-peer networks. That's a vile technique perfected by spammers, of course.

The Recording Industry Association of America — known throughout college campuses for blanket accusations of music piracy and legal scare tactics — will have to curb its wanton copyright-infringement lawsuit-slapping ways. The RIAA uses a "making available" clause in copyright law that allows it to quickly target anyone it suspects of copyright infringement. If you have a file-sharing client and copyrighted media on your machine, you've helped spread illegal files, the RIAA's lawyers reasoned. But last month, a federal judge from the southern district of California threw out this legal theory — and put the music industry's strategy in jeopardy.

LimeWire, the file-sharing software maker that's attempting to go legit, is starting a "Better Know A Blogger" series on its corporate blog. The first victim is Anthony Volodkin, founder of the music blog aggregator The Hype Machine. Never mind that the Hype Machine was cool, like, a year ago. Volodkin briefly discusses his inspiration for the site, which gathers up links to currently popular MP3 files on music blogs, as well as plans to roll out some social media features. Heads up: volodkin is the guy with the long hair in the Firefox shirt. his interviewer fails at introductions 101.

After the Motion Picture Association of America sued BitTorrent search engine TorrentSpy for copyright infringement, a federal court ordered the file-sharing searcher to log all user IP addresses and file traffic. To avoid violating its own privacy policy, TorrentSpy has instead opted to ban all US-based IP addresses. [TorrentFreak]

Update below. Cable-TV and Internet provider Comcast is fighting back against customers who are rampant file sharers, TorrentFreak says. Reportedly the broadband Internet service provider has slowly ramped up monitoring of peer-to-peer network traffic, and now, using traffic-management services, it's preventing BitTorrent users from connecting to anyone outside the Comcast network. This would almost be commendable if its motivation was to crack down on piracy, but TorrentFreak suggests that Comcast is just being cheap. One anonymous Internet engineer says that just because you pay for a connection, doesn't mean you actually get to abuse it. Or, some might say, actually get to use it. What's next? Policing online-video sites, or bandwidth-intensive real-time videogames? You get what you pay for — except when you don't.

The Recording Industry Association of America just sent out a batch of letters to universities offering to let their students admit to music piracy and settle claims before record labels start suing them. But the RIAA's not the only one capable of mass legal action. A former defendant in a music-copyright lawsuit is hoping to turn her case into a class action lawsuit for all wrongly sued or threatened by the RIAA, claiming that it "conducts illegal, flawed and negligent investigations." [Ars Technica]

Ad-supported music download siteQTrax plans to launch its services by the end of this year — possibly as early as the rapidly fading summer. It's one of several services attempting to redefine digital music and aspiring to move past all these sticky legal wickets with the RIAA. Along with rival Spiral Frog, it also will have to contend with sharing sites like Lala, which subsidizes file sharing in the hopes that users will wind up purchasing music. But for QTrax users, there's a slight caveat.

Patricia Santangelo made headlines as the first person to go to court with the RIAA instead of timidly settling charges of copyright infringement. In April, her lawsuit was dismissed. But instead of quietly forgetting the entanglement, the RIAA decided to go after Patricia's children, Michelle and Robert, for alleged illegal file-sharing. Now for the fun twist. The Santangelos are looking to name Kazaa operator Sharman Networks and AOL, the family's Internet service provider, as third-party defendants in the case Elektra v. Santangelo.

A file-sharing network claims to go legitimate, offering only properly licensed files. Does anyone not see through this tired old ruse, which surely dates back almost a decade to the first incarnation of Napster? For LimeWire, one of the last networks to still keep going, it's a measure to keep the RIAA's legal hounds at bay. How? By launching a LimeWire store that will offer legal music downloads. No doubt this show of good faith is an attempt to sidestep its current legal dispute with the record industry, which is seeking $150,000 for every song downloaded over the network. Scott Gilbertstein of Wired News points out that this "is probably more money than the U.S. GDP." But think of all those starving recording artists!

TorrentFreak reports that scanned copies of the new Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the new book about everyone's favorite teenage wizard, have hit BitTorrent file-sharing networks. If you don't want to find out the ending, log off now. Or download the copies anyway: Apparently the quality is so bad that you can only read some pages by using Photoshop to enhance the images.