Music Industry’s Battle Against File Sharing (aka Piracy) Heats Up

A few key events from the last few months:

• LimeWire shuts down – LimeWire shutdown its P2P file-sharing service in October due to a court-ordered injunction. Within days, it was resurrected as LimeWire Pirate Edition (LPE) by a ‘secret dev team’. Predictably, LimeWire claimed that it had nothing to do with LPE. PCMag, very thoughtfully, informed its readers of the various LimeWire alternatives. RIAA, one of the entities whose suit against LimeWire led to the shutdown injunction, blasted PCMag for promoting music piracy. PCMag responded that it was only covering news and that the music execs should accept that the “industry has changed” (my interpretation, “music piracy is here to stay”) and that they should adjust their business model to account for it.
• Pirate Bay administrators convicted for violating copyright law – Last April, 4 individuals associated with Pirate Bay, another P2P file sharing service, were convicted by a Swedish court. After many months of legal imbroglio, an appeals court upheld the conviction but reduced their jail time and increased their fine. Stung by the verdict, a hacking group called The Anonymous launched attacks on the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and Warner Bros websites and brought them down. Meanwhile, the Pirate Bay website is still up, apparently being run out of Seychelles.
• The US Government shuts down 82 websites involved in copyright infringement – In response, a Pirate Bay co-founder is mobilizing support to create a peer-to-peer domain name system (P2P DNS) which will not depend on ICANN, and therefore immune to shutdowns of this kind.
• And in India, execs of guruji.com were arrested for alleged copyright infringement – The only news update since the arrest in January is that the execs were eventually released. Guruji.com continues to be operational and still allows search and download of mp3 files, with this disclaimer – “Guruji.com indexes third-party websites and does not have control over, nor any liability for the content of such third-party websites. If you believe that any of the search results below, link to content that infringes your copyright, please contact us.”

With the high-profile arrests and shutdowns, the music industry thinks it is winning the battle against piracy. The New York Times reported a lawyer representing the companies suing the Pirate Bay admins saying this “My assessment is that in two years this type of piracy activity will be completely dead”.

My take – in the next post.