Hey guys. I had spicy turkey this weekend with people I didn’t know. Well, I knew this one guy, but he’s in his 80s. Kind of weird.
Anyway, in what has been a relatively quiet year in terms of file-sharing, the past month (and past week especially) has been hot. Let’s get our Foakleys on and get to work on Thanksgiving news:
COICA: Looks like a naughty word. The Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously passed the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), allowing the 11th-hour gambit of the RIAA/MPAA/ESA/various other acronyms to create a piracy blacklist to reach the Senate floor to vote. However, Senator Rob Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, placed a hold on the bill, comparing the bill to “a bunker-busting cluster bomb when what you really need is a precision-guided missile.” Given the priorities of the lame-duck session, the bill is dead for this session of Congress.
The Pirate Bay: After many politically-aligned delays, three of The Pirate Bay’s founders finally received a ruling in their appeal of their criminal court case. Unfortunately, it got worse: while all three received reduced jail sentences, the Swedish appellate court increased their collective fine to 46 million Swedish Kroner (about $6.5 million). In retaliation, the Anonymous-backed Operation Payback launched a mass DDoS attack on the IFPI website, shutting it down at the time of this writing (there were also reports that Warner Brothers was attacked, but no confirmation has been made). The three founders intend to appeal to the Högsta Domstolen (Supreme Court), and The Pirate Bay still remains operational.
ICE: Other sites did not fare so well. In a weird turn of events, a few torrent-related sites, including hip-hop tastemaking site RapGodfathers and torrent search engine Torrent-Finder had their domains seized by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement division, along with 75 other sites dedicated to counterfeits (Mr P’s supplier of hot replica watches, mydreamwatches.com, was sadly among them). The sites themselves were not shut down as a result of the seizures, and the two noted sites are operational under new domains. To make matters weirder, both sides maintained compliance with the law, in that RapGodfathers had been consistently cooperative with DMCA takedowns and Torrent-Finder did not actually host any torrents on their site. ICE has not explained the reasoning for the seizures, citing an “ongoing investigation.”
Bradford Cox: Over the past week, Bradford Cox posted four Atlas Sound demo albums (called “Bedroom Databank”) for free on Deerhunter’s blog. Over the past weekend, Sony Music invoked DMCA takedowns on three of the demo albums, claiming “unauthorized reproductions” as the reason. Bradford Cox finds this confusing, given the likely problem song (a cover of Bob Dylan’s “This Wheel’s on Fire”) was on the album that did not receive a takedown notice, and has since reposted the affected albums on another media sharing site. Given his misguided kvetching toward file-sharers a couple years back, consider this an odd case of reverse karmic retribution.
That’s all for now. Now, if someone could get me this for Christmas…
[Image: The Pirate Shack]
