Consumer content

Usenet.com ruling, a 'whittling down' of Betamax defense

Usenet.com lawyers lost their copyright infringement case to the music industry on Tuesday and are now preparing for a federal court to assess damages. The judgment could be hundreds of millions of dollars.

In the long list of copyright cases brought by the Recording Industry Association of America, this one stands out for all the drama it provided, and depending on which side you talk to, the amount of precedent-setting decisions involved. Usenet.com lawyers argue the presiding judge diluted the power of the landmark 1984 Betamax case. RIAA attorneys sigh, and say their opponents are just trying to … Read more

RIAA triumphs in Usenet copyright case

Note: See Usenet.com's reaction at "Usenet.com says RIAA 'whittling down' Betamax case."

The Recording Industry Association of America has prevailed in its copyright fight against Usenet.com, according to court documents.

In a decision that hands the RIAA an overwhelming victory, U.S. District Judge Harold Baer of the Southern District of New York ruled in favor of the music industry on all its main theories: that Usenet.com is guilty of direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement. In addition, and perhaps most important for future cases, Baer said that Usenet.com can't claim protection … Read more

Road to Pandora now goes through Amazon

Pandora is a great music-discovery service, so it's only natural that independent bands would hope to get their music placed on it. Unfortunately for them, Pandora just made that a little harder--and a little more expensive.

As I first saw on the Digital Audio Insider blog a couple weeks ago, Pandora recently changed its music submission process, and is now accepting solicitations only from bands who have a physical CD for sale through Amazon.com. That requires the artist to manufacture a CD with proper album art and bar code, which is much more expensive than creating a bunch … Read more

Joost bows to YouTube, gives up consumer video

The peer-to-peer magic that helped Kazaa and Skype dazzle consumers and disrupt the music and telecom industries has failed to produce the same kind of success with Web video.

Joost, the third major creation by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the duo that also founded Kazaa and Skype, announced Tuesday that it will dump its consumer-video service and will now focus on building "white label" video platforms for "cable and satellite providers, broadcasters and video aggregators."

The move marks the end of Joost as a YouTube and Hulu competitor and also closes the book … Read more

Hackers blamed for wave of fake death tweets

It seemed like celebrity deaths were contagious last week. After the sad news about Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Ed McMahon dying, a wave of viral death notices went out on Twitter for Britney Spears, Ellen DeGeneres, Jeff Goldblum, and P. Diddy. But all are safe and sound.

"Britney has passed today," the bogus tweet announced on Sunday. "It is a sad day for everyone. More news to come."

The message was immediately taken down and Spears' staff tweeted that her account was hacked into and that, "She is fine and dandy spending a quiet … Read more

RIAA: Jammie Thomas snubbed our settlement 'overture'

Jammie Thomas-Rasset's attorneys have rejected the music industry's "overture" at settling her case.

Just a couple days after Thomas-Rasset was found guilty of willful copyright infringement and ordered by a jury to pay $1.9 million, attorneys with the Recording Industry Association of America called to ask whether Thomas-Rasset was willing to discuss a settlement, a spokesman for the RIAA said Monday.

Thomas-Rasset's lawyers responded that she wasn't interested in any deal that required her to pay any money or admit any guilt, according to the RIAA's spokesman. That was the same response … Read more

Unclear how badly news sites fared after Jackson's death

This story has been updated. See below for details.

Keynote Systems, a company that measures Web site performance, created some confusion on Friday by acknowledging that it released easily misunderstood data on how Web news services fared following the death of Michael Jackson.

Keynote follows a multitude of Web sites and monitors their performance with the help of 3,000 servers in 59 countries. On Thursday, the company said the online units of major news services became nearly inaccessible for long periods of time, as people rushed online to learn about Jackson's condition.

However, site accessibility wasn't necessarily … Read more

Debate: Can the Internet handle big breaking news?

It happens time and time again: when news breaks, the Internet slows.

It's quite obvious at this point that the Internet has muscled its way into the lives of anyone who needs information. And Michael Jackson's death Thursday had as great an impact on the Internet as anything in the history of the medium that didn't involve the World Trade Center.

The statistics are amazing: Akamai said worldwide Internet traffic was 11 percent higher than normal during the peak hours between 3 p.m. PDT and 4 p.m., when news of Jackson's death was breaking. … Read more

Michael Jackson dominating iTunes, YouTube

Michael Jackson, who along with four of his brothers recorded his first hit songs as a child, continues to be a chart topper a day after his death.

On Friday, Jackson's music was attracting huge audiences at Apple's iTunes and Amazon.com. On iTunes, the Web's largest music service, 8 out of the top-10-selling albums for download were from Jackson, with a compilation album, "The Essential Michael Jackson" in the No. 1 spot.

Jackson held the same number of top-10 positions among iTunes music videos. Jackson's "Thriller" music video, one of the … Read more