Rapidshare is a service that makes it easy for users to upload and share files with a large number of people. It can come in handy whether you want to send a large file to a friend who has an email service with file attachment size limits or you want to share files with visitors to your website without paying a hefty web hosting bill.

But Rapidshare has never gained the respect that sites like YouSendIt have. YouSendIt provided a similar service, but it's aimed at sending files to just a handful of users. RapidShare, on the other hand, has become popular with users who upload copyrighted software, music, and movies. And today the company could be paying the price of allowing users to get away with those activities.

A German court is ordering Rapidshare to remove about 5,000 songs from its servers. The lawsuit was brought by GEMA, a group representing copyright holders. The court has ruled that Rapidshare must begin filtering content to prevent users from sharing any songs from artists covered by GEMA. The court estimates the value of those songs at about 24 million Euros (roughly $34 million).

Of course, it's pretty difficult to filter content on a site like Rapidshare, where users can easily ZIP files, change file names, or make other small changes to trick any filtering software that's put in place. I guess we'll have to see if Rapidshare ties to take any steps toward implementing content filters, and if the court decides that a good faith effort is good enough. Or maybe Rapidshare will just appeal the ruling.

[via TechCrunch]

YouTube has been removing videos that violate copyright for a while. But now it looks like Google is taking a new approach toward some videos by removing only the audio tracks. I guess the idea is that some people upload fan-made videos featuring copyrighted music tracks. The company can leave the videos online while removing the music that was uploaded without the content owner's permission.

But it means that there are now a fair number of music videos as well as fan made videos on YouTube that are video-only. If you've ever wondered how well Seal's Kiss From a Rose video holds up without the actual song,now's your chance to find out. Or you can check out an alternate version of the video, also sans music.

Fortunately there's still music accompanying Rick Astley's dance moves.

The decision to remove just the music from the unofficially uploaded videos makes sense in the case of fan made movies. But for music videos, it seems like an odd move, since the music studios own the rights to the video and not just the music.

[via Mashable]

For the last few years the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has taken a rather aggressive stance on copyright protection by suing individuals who shared songs over the internet using file sharing software.

The Wall Street Journal reports that's all about to change. Well, somewhat anyway. After filing suits against 35,000 individuals the RIAA plans to give up on mass lawsuits. That doesn't mean it won't file any lawsuits against people who illegally upload and share music. But for the most part the group now plans to work with internet service providers instead. The goal is to hunt down customers who are violating copyright. Under the agreements, the ISP will give users a few warnings and then may terminate their accounts.

On the bright side, this means that ISPs don't have to fork over any personal data on customers. The RIAA can submit a list of IP addresses and the ISP can decide whether to go after the users based on that information.

It's not entirely clear whether the RIAA's efforts over the past 5 years have done more to alert people that file-sharing is against the law or to let them know that file sharing software exists and is a cool way to find free music. Now it's time to see if warning letters from ISPs do the trick. Considering how many people say they find internet access to be more valuable than sex, it just might.

Every now and again an idea comes along that's so brilliant and simple that you wonder why you didn't think of it first. And then there's bopaboo. The idea behind the site is that it's perfectly legal to buy a CD and then turn around and sell it on eBay or in a used record shop. So why not do the same thing with unencrypted MP3 files?

The answer, of course, is that there's little to prevent you from purchasing a single MP3 for 99 cents and then selling it a few hundred times for 50 cents, thus making a pretty hefty profit while at least theoretically depriving the people who own the original rights to that song of potential revenue.

Bopaboo says it has a way around that problem. The web site allows users to create their own web stores and set prices for song downloads. But users are only allowed to sell each song once. Bopaboo uses digital fingerprinting technology to make sure you don't upload the same song twice.

If it actually works, that technology could ensure that the site is protected by the first sale doctrine, which is the same rule that allows you to sell a CD or video game after you've purchased it. But I can think of a few dozen ways that users could quickly get around that technology, by doing things like inserting some extra silence into audio tracks or using audio editing software to slightly change the pitch of a song.

If you're interested in purchasing music for as little sa 25 cents a track you might want to register for the beta today. Because it's not at all clear that the service will still be around tomorrow.

[via CNet and TorrentFreak]

Mygazines made a splash a few months ago by launching a service that lets you read your favorite magazines online - without paying. The plan might have worked if the company had, I don't know, partnered with magazine publishers to make free ad-supported versions of the magazine available. But that's not what happened. Instead, Mygazines encouraged users to scan their own magazines and upload them to share with others.

Flash forward a few months and Mygazines is no more. A visit to the company's homepage shows a message saying that the service has gone under due to "monetary reasons and the state of the global economy." Because that's what did it in. The global economy. Not a flawed business model that was incurring the wrath of publishers.

[via Wired]

As DownloadSquad gears up for "Download Like a Pirate Day" this Friday, it appears as though our friends from the MPAA and the boys on Capitol Hill are also hard at work. The U.S. Senate appears ready to give Bill S. 3325 - the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Act of 2008 - the green light as early as today.

A quick look at this article by Alex Curtis and this open letter from twelve different advocacy groups will provide some insight into the proposed bill.

Why should you care? Well, for starters, S. 3325 would allow the Department of Justice to sue offenders in civil court. That's a bad thing. A really bad thing.

First, it means taxpayers are footing the bill while the DOJ does MPAA dirty work. Not good. Second, defendants are guaranteed free legal representation. Third, there only has to be a "preponderance of evidence," which is not nearly the same as "beyond a reasonable doubt." As a kicker, it looks as though fines for violation would be doubled.

Over at OpenCongress there appears to be a lot of buzz about this one (64 blog posts and growing), and rightfully so.

Holy crap. The MPAA has filed 30,000 suits over the past five years. Do you really want to pick up the tab?

For the truly interested, you can view the bill's text here. Read up, and then call your Senator. You can use Cause Caller to contact members of the Senate Judiciary, find and call your own senator, or send a fax.

[via BoingBoing]

The age-old battle of copyright and artist freedom keeps clanging away in the distance, and are we any better off than we were when DAT machines were castrated in the 80's? I read a report this morning about a UK band called "Show of Hands" who claims they are dependent upon so-called pirates who download their music and share it with friends. This isn't much different than Trent Reznor making his music freely available online (and my wife reports the show here in town didn't look any smaller than the ones in the 90's -- possibly even bigger since Reznor has a new legion of fans younger than us). But the music industry sticks by the mantra "a download is a lost sale, and that is theft." Or, as TorrentFreak puts it, "there is no such animal as 'piracy as promotion.'"

Oh really? This sad, antiquated logic continues to do one thing and one thing only: bolster sales of the top-paid performers while creating a chilling effect on artists who would love innovative promotion but fear free samples will incur the wrath of the mighty RIAA, or worse. It's one thing to send the FBI after some poor schlub who leaks some Guns N' Roses tracks, or sue the bejeebes out of hundreds of college kids, but it's quite another to threaten fair trade when artists (who own their own content, thank you) decide to market in ways they see fit.

The only ray of sunshine could be recent rulings regarding Creative Commons which might allow savvy artists to provide music in the manner they see fit, without the RIAA calling fans of the artists a bunch of pirates. Arrr, matey. At the end of the day there has to be some middle ground, but it's a pity the RIAA and other enforcement agencies see the world in black and white and tend to pull their concepts of ownership from the days when TV's were also monochromatic.

There's good news today for user generated video sites like YouTube, DailyMotion, and MetaCafe. A federal court in California has ruled that Veoh did not violate the copyright of a pornography company by automatically transcoding video uploaded by a user.

Let's back up a second here. If you upload copyrighted material to an online video site to share with others without the copyright holder's permission, you may be breaking the law. But the question of whether the video site itself is violating the law is a bit murkier. The IO Group, which owned the video in question filed a suit agains Veoh in 2006 claiming that the video service could not hide behind safe harbor laws by saying that the user, not the video site was responsible because Veoh took the action of transcoding the video into Flash for online viewing.

Of course, the process of transcoding a video is pretty much automatic, and the judge in this case seemed to understand that Veoh's action in transcoding the video were about as deliberate breathing. The ruling basically states that as long as a video site can demonstrate that it warns users that they should not upload copyrighted video without permission, removes copyrighted videos promptly when faced with a DMCA takedown notice, and at least makes some effort at sniffing out illegally uploaded videos, the company is lawsuit-proof. Or at least lawsuit-resistant up to a few meters.

[via TechCrunch]

Over the past few years, we've seen a number of artists, software developers and others release their work under non-traditional copyright licenses. Historically, copyright laws have been used to prevent others from redistributing your work. But Creative Commons and the GNU General Public License allow content makers to distribute their work for free -- while insisting upon certain conditions.

For example, there are Creative Commons licenses that would let you write a poem and allow anyone to publish that poem on their web site as long as they provide proper attribution. Or you can use the GNU GPL to release a piece of software that others can distribute for free, or even charge a fee for -- as long as they continue to make the source code available for free.

Up until now, the validity of these licenses hasn't really been put to the test. But on Wednesday, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit overturned a San Francisco court ruling dealing with just these issues. Basically, a software developer who published model train software was using code that had been released for free. But he did not give credit to the developers of the original software, despite the fact that the license required him to do so.

When the guy who developed the open original application filed suit, the San Fransisco court ruled that the terms of the license were too broad to be enforceable. But this week's ruling overturns that decision which means that software developers, musicians, artists, and others who release their work under an "open source" license have a reasonable expectation that the terms of the license will be enforceable -- at least until some schmuck comes along and takes the case to the Supreme Court.

Google is known for its quick reactions to copyright claims, taking down videos from YouTube and Google video at the request of original copyright holders -- especially big players like TV networks. Recently, Paulo Ordoveza found one of his videos was the victim of one of these claims, and it was taken down from Google Video. The strange thing is that he had recorded his piece -- a time-lapse of some clouds -- back in 2006, way before it was used by Arianna Huffington's 23/6 Media as part of the infamous "Anonymous Message to Scientology" video.

Paulo says the video is coming back up, but this incident still raises a bigger issue about the effectiveness of Google's automated copyright enforcement scheme, which uses "a program that analyzes similarities in audio or video between user videos and a library of reference content provided to us by copyright owners. When a video matches a reference file, that video is automatically disabled." Is a system like this adequate when it comes to independent authors who want to make a video freely available for use, avoiding any kind of aggressive copyright enforcement?

For the record, Paulo never had a problem with 23/6's use of the video, and he's a fan of Anonymous. 23/6 also never asked that the original video come down. You can compare the two videos for yourself: here's the original, and here's the Anonymous Message.

CORRECTION: Paulo writes in to correct a few things here. The original Anonymous Message was not done by 23/6, who actually made a later parody of that video. Also, the correct link for the clouds from 2006 is here. Thanks, Paulo!

[via BoingBoing]

Any time a copyright holder asks Google to remove a YouTube video, a funny thing happens: Google complies. But the company also adds a bit of metadata to let you know why the video has been pulled down. YouTomb is a site that scans YouTube for that metadata and shows you a list of recently removed videos.

You can't actually watch any videos on YouTomb. But you can find out who asked for them to be removed. You can also check out the site's stats page to see which copyright holders have requested the most takedowns. Currently TV Tokyo, Viacom, Warner Brothers, WWE, and NBC are near the top of the list. When we checked, YouTomb said it was monitoring 223280 videos, and had identified 4396 videos that had been removed for alleged copyright violations and 13363 videos that had been removed for other reasons.

YouTomb was put together by the folks at MIT Free Culture.

[via Google Operating System]

YouTube has been linking copyrighted videos uploaded by third parties to their respective content owners. This occurred with a Modest Mouse video, which YouTube linked to the official Modest Mouse page. The link says "Contains Content From: Sony BMG," and it may be YouTube's way of preventing content owners from removing videos uploaded by fans.

Up until now, YouTube has said it shouldn't be held responsible for the copyright violations performed by its members, but it has also been very cooperative in removing copyrighted material when asked. Last year Google announced a video identification system, permitting content owners to identify (and choose how to share or remove) their content, so it seems this is what's at play here.

We're sure YouTube doesn't like to remove member videos. It's bad for business: a site with unhappy members typically means a site that eventually has no members. But if YouTube's just linking videos instead of removing them, it must be a positive step for consumers in the ongoing Copyright war.

[via Valleywag]

BitTorrent tracker TorrentSpy may have shut down last month, but that wasn't enough to prevent a federal judge from slapping the site with a $111 million fine yesterday. While BitTorrent didn't host any copyrighted materials on their own servers, the service did make it easy for users to illegally trade files. And the judge ruled that TorrentSpy's operators should pay $30,000 for each of the 3,699 instances of copyright infringement shown in the case.

Anyone familiar with sites like TorrentSpy knows that it's possible the site got off easy, as there were probably far more than 3699 copyrighted files made available through the site. On the other hand, TorrentSpy has already declared bankrupty and is incapable of paying the high fine. If the site hadn't already shut down, this ruling would most certainly have forced it to do so. A lawyer for TorrentSpy says the company plans to appeal.

This case was the first major test of the legality of BitTorrent sites in the US. Something tells us it won't be the last.

A federal judge in New york has ruled that the RIAA cannot sue people for simply making copyrighted music available for download. Rather, the recording industry needs to demonstrate that someone has actually downloaded the file. Otherwise, it's not clear that a crime actually took place.

It's much trickier to demonstrate that someone actually downloaded the files you made available. And when we say you, we mean the figurative you. We're quite confident that no Download Squad readers are actually violating the law. This particular case isn't over yet, since the RIAA feels it can demonstrate that the defendent actually distributed copyrighted files, and didn't just make them available.

The judge in the case also found that while making files available might not be enough to justify a lawsuit, an "offer to distribute" copyrighted works is. What's the difference? If you don't password protect your WiFi router, your neighbors might be able to download files from your computer, which you've "made available." But if you designate a folder on your PC that has files you're willing to share with other Limewire users, that might be construed as an "offer to distribute."

While many of the files you can download using BitTorrent are illegal, copyrighted works such as Hollywood movies, music from major labels, or commercial software, there's nothing inherently illegal about BitTorrent. It's just an internet protocol, much like FTP or HTTP.

So it stands to reason that if you want to avoid illegal downloads, there should be a go-to location for legal torrents, perhaps with an easy to remember name like LegalTorrents. Hey, what do you know? There is. LegalTorrents actually launched way back in 2003 when BitTorrent was still pretty new. This week the site has relaunched with a nice, clean interface and a grand total of 44 files you can download without guilt. That includes 9 songs, 9 movies, and 3 video games. We'd complain that there's no way to search for torrents, but the rather tiny selection kind of makes the point moot right now.

Anyone can download files, but you'll need to register for an account to upload torrents of Creative Commons licensed media. Hopefully the selection will grow soon, as LegalTorrents is really a great idea. But could someone please add a search feature before the content library grows too large?

[via NewTeeVee]