To add to this NBC Universal has taken sides with Viacom over a piracy lawsuit against YouTube, according to Reuters.
The case was the first piracy lawsuit brought against a distributor of file-sharing software since a Supreme Court ruling in 2005 against Grokster.
(That laissez-faire reaction, it should be noted, comes from a company whose corporate parent has a $1 billion piracy lawsuit pending against Google, the owner of YouTube).
After battling a suburban family for four years over music downloads, the recording industry has agreed to accept $7,000 to settle a federal music piracy lawsuit.
At first, the RIAA's strategy to sue individual users of peer-to-peer networks generated a stir (see "Grandmother Piracy Lawsuit Dropped" and "12-year-old Settles Music Swap Lawsuit"), but, since last fall, most cases have quietly disappeared in private settlement agreements for sums averaging $3000 (see "RIAA Files 493 More Lawsuits").
The Motion Picture Association of America, the trade group of the big movie studios, and the Recording Industry Association of America, the trade group of the major music labels, continue to wage an expensive and sometimes unpopular campaign of education and enforcement against piracy, including lawsuits against individuals.
The verdict against Jammie Thomas of Brainerd, Minn., brought an end to the first jury trial in the music industry's protracted effort to rein in piracy with lawsuits against individual computer users.
While the public and the media have been distracted by the story of Napster, warnings about the evils of "piracy," and lawsuits by the recording and film industries, the enforcement of copyright law in the digital world has quietly shifted from regulating copying to regulating the design of technology.
Accusing the four of having "taken a network created for higher learning and academic pursuits and converted it into an emporium of music piracy," the lawsuits ask for $150,000 for each of the recordings listed on the students' Web sites, but recording industry officials acknowledge that having made their point, they expect to settle out of court.
