Internet & Media

UPDATE 8:40 a.m. PT: Click here for e-mail correspondence between Jerry Scroggin and copyright owners such as Warner Bros and the family of Frank Zappa.

Jerry Scroggin, owner-operator of Bayou Internet and Communications, wants the music and film industries to know that he's not a cop and he doesn't work for free.

Scroggin, who sells Internet access to between 10,000 and 12,000 customers in Louisiana, heard the news on Friday that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has opted out of suing individuals for pirating music. Instead, the group representing the four largest … Read more

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

We may be about to see the latest frontier of viral marketing--fake students starting groups for the incoming class of 2013 in the name of data collection.

Brad Ward, a recruitment specialist at Butler University, outlined the details on his blog. He became suspicious after talking to a colleague at Winthrop University. Here are the common links:

Class of 2013 groups are being started at a bunch of universities. The people that start the groups aren't registered at those schools. Those same names--Patrick Kelly, Justin Gaither, James Gaither among … Read more

It will surprise no one that Google accounts for a lion's share of the ad server market. However, it may come as a shock that Microsoft holds only the equivalent of a lion's paw.

Attributor, a content-tracking company, analyzed ad server calls across 75 million domains in October. According to the data Attributor released this week, Google--through DoubleClick and AdSense--accounts for 56.5 percent market share.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's equivalent figure hovers at 3.8 percent. Yahoo came in behind Google with 9.7 percent. If Microsoft and Yahoo ever end up combining forces, they still wouldn't … Read more

One day after Virginia Tech released thousands of documents solely to families of victims in last year's massacre, the university's student newspaper made them public.

On Thursday, the Collegiate Times posted the documents, which include e-mails sent from the account of gunman Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 fellow students and faculty members and then killed himself on April 16, 2007.

The nearly 14,000 pages also include the police report on the massacre, e-mails from faculty sent to fellow professors and to Cho, a 2005 harassment complaint against Cho, post-massacre clean-up plans, administration plans on how to present … Read more

Negotiations between Warner Music Group and YouTube over renewing the licensing agreement for the record label's music videos broke down Friday. Early Saturday, Warner, the third largest record label, removed videos from the Google-owned video site.

The impasse comes at a time when all four major labels, including Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and EMI, are renegotiating their licensing deals with YouTube.

"We are working actively to find a resolution with YouTube that would enable the return of our artists' content to the site," Warner said in a statement. "Until then, we simply cannot accept terms … Read more

Cary Sherman offers no apologies and won't for a second concede that filing lawsuits against people who pilfered digital music from artists was ineffective. On the contrary, the president of the Recording Industry Association of America makes a case that chasing file sharers into court was the only option in 2003, one of the darkest periods in the music industry's history.

"If you can go back to that time in your mind and remember that file sharing was growing at logarithmic pace," Sherman said referring to 2003, not long after file-sharing service Napster had triggered a … Read more

Correction at 5:50 a.m. Monday: This story had an incorrect total for U.S. searches in November. The total was 12.3 billion.

Google grabbed a chunk of market share from rival search engines in the United States in November, new figures from ComScore show.

Google's share increased 0.4 percentage points to 63.5 percent from October to November, while Yahoo dropped 0.1 percentage points to 20.4 percent and Microsoft dropped 0.2 percentage points to 8.3 percent.

Further down the pecking order, Ask.com dropped 0.2 percentage points to 4.0 … Read more

At this point, there are still many more questions than answers regarding how those Internet service providers that have agreed to help the music industry thwart illegal file sharing will actually weed out accused pirates.

In an interview Friday morning, Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), said many of the details have yet to be hammered out. The music industry, he said, which also announced that it would no longer pursue a "broad-based legal strategy against individuals for file sharing," has drawn up a new antipiracy plan whereby ISPs would send notifications to … Read more

The recording industry dropped some big news Friday, announcing that it will no longer take a broad approach to litigating against alleged filed sharers. The Recording Industry Association of America has enlisted the help of internet service providers to act as a sentry and help discourage customers from pirating music.

Below is a copy of the form letter the RIAA will send to ISPs to inform them one of their customers is accused of file sharing. The notification is similar to those the group has sent to college campuses for years and shows very clearly that the group retains the … Read more