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Democratic congressman: RIAA's $222,000 win is 'excessive'

The recording industry's victory Thursday in a trial involving a Minnesota woman accused of illegal file-sharing is already turning at least a few heads on Capitol Hill.

We caught up by phone on Friday afternoon with Rep. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat well known for his strongly held views on fair use and the need to defang stringent anti-copying laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (He's one of the Recording Industry Association of America's most ardent foes on copyright legislation.)

We wanted to know Boucher's answer to the obvious question: Will Congress lessen penalties for … Read more

RIAA wins key victory; accused file sharer must pay $220,000

UPDATE at 8:46 p.m. PDT: A Minnesota woman must pay $220,000 to six of the top music labels after a federal jury found on Thursday that she violated their copyright.

Accused of encouraging the illegal sharing of more than 1,700 songs, Jammie Thomas, 30, elected to fight it out with the recording industry instead of settling out of court for far less money. The ensuing legal battle marked the first time the recording industry has argued a file-sharing case before a jury.

Since 2003, many of the 26,000 persons sued by the Recording Industry Assoc. of America (RIAA) have avoided litigation by agreeing to pay a few thousand dollars. Thomas, who could not be reached for comment, has always maintained her innocence. Accused of sharing music through the use of peer-to-peer service, Kazaa, she told the jury that she didn't even own a Kazaa account.

The jury didn't buy her argument. Thomas was ordered to pay $9,250 for each of the 24 songs that the RIAA concentrated on. She was initially accused of sharing 1,702 songs. The decision is important in that it sends a message to file sharers that Internet anonymity won't protect them from lawsuits, said Chris Castle, a copyright attorney and longtime music industry executive.

Castle said the Web makes it simple to hide. Proving who was sitting at a computer at any given time is very difficult for copyright owners. What is precedent-setting about this case is that the jury decided it doesn't matter who was sharing music on Thomas' computer.

… Read more

Microsoft's pseudo-open source: open trap for open-source developers?

If you believe some of the headlines, Microsoft just open sourced a bunch of software related to its .Net libraries. Don't be fooled. The definition of open source is very clear. This is not open source. Not even a little bit. In fact, this may actually be an insidious trap (more on that below).

Will Hurley captures the move accurately:

Is .NET open source now?...The license indicates that developers can "see" the source code, but Microsoft's not providing any means of copying it. If a developer finds a bug in the code, rather than fixing it themselves and submitting a patch to the community they'll be encouraged to submit feedback via the product feedback center. They're showing us the man behind the curtain, but we're not allowed to speak to him in person just yet. We're still stuck with the giant, disembodied green head. And since community involvement is essential to most open source efforts, well....

In other words, it's not open source. But is it good for developers, anyway?… Read more

Episode 574: Ripping is stealing

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UC Berkeley first to post full lectures to YouTube

YouTube is now an important teaching tool at UC Berkeley.

The school announced on Wednesday that it has begun posting entire course lectures on the Web's No.1 video-sharing site.

Berkeley officials claimed in a statement that the university is the first to make full course lectures available on YouTube. The school said that over 300 hours of videotaped courses will be available at youtube.com/ucberkeley.

Berkeley said it will continue to expand the offering. The topics of study found on YouTube included chemistry, physics, biology and even a lecture on search-engine technology given in 2005 by Google cofounder Sergey Brin. … Read more

Microsoft, Adobe launch document sharing services

Microsoft and Adobe are announcing, at exactly the same time, competing services for sharing documents from your computer. Adobe's Share converts all shared documents to Flash, so you can embed them in any Web page. It's like Scribd but designed more to share files with workgroups than the world at large. In its current beta form it supports PDF and image files only. Adobe plans to open up the Share API so the service can be used as a virtual storage drive.

Share is a natural counterpart to Adobe's new BuzzWord word processor (news; review), which it … Read more

Nero 8: Sneak a peek at brand new features

What's better than Nero 7's suite of multimedia apps, which bursts with tools to record, edit, save, and distribute audio, video, and data CDs and DVDs in a dozen permutations?

The so-new-you-can't-buy-it release of Nero 8. Tune into the First Look video below, and watch this space on Monday for a full review.

Fastest Flickr uploading tool

Photo sharing sites like Flickr, Webshots (a CNET affiliate), Zoomr, SmugMug, and others provide a cheap (usually free) and easy way for users to share their digital pics with friends, family, or the site communities at large. There's always a slight delay, however, between downloading pictures from your camera or cell phone and actually getting them published to those sites. If you're a Flickr user, you can eliminate that delay completely with Foldr Monitr, a free utility that automatically uploads images from specified folders on your hard drive to your Flickr account.

Foldr Monitr works nearly as simply and effectively as its description promises. After installing and running the app, you'll need to "authenticate" Foldr Monitr with your Flickr account. Clicking the "Authenticate" button in the Foldr Monitr interface will load the Flickr authorization page, launching your default Web browser if it's not already running. After authenticating Foldr Monitr on the Flickr Web site, you're not finished. Click the "Finish Authentication" button in the Foldr Monitr interface to complete your login.… Read more

NBC Universal, Viacom CEOs to speak against piracy

Jeff Zucker, the outspoken chief of NBC Universal and Philippe Dauman, Viacom's CEO, are scheduled to speak out against piracy and counterfeiting next week in Washington D.C.

Starting Tuesday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is holding its annual two-day summit on piracy and among the subjects expected to be discussed is the government's plan to defend intellectual property overseas, according to a statement.

Media companies have for a long time lobbied Washington to do more to combat online file sharing and other copyright violations. Most experts agree that despite the government's efforts thus far, piracy … Read more