file sharer

After going after thousands accused of sharing video games in the UK, lawyers Davenport Lyons are now branching out into other areas.

This week sees them start going after those it accuses of sharing the movie “Army Fuckers”, hardcore gay porn featuring ‘farm boys’ and Gestapo officers.

Accusing the wrong people this time could prove very costly indeed.

A federal judge on Wednesday set aside the nation's first and only federal jury verdict against a peer-to-peer file sharer for distributing copyrighted music on a peer-to-peer network without the labels' authorization.

In the ongoing saga of the Jammie Thomas trial, where the RIAA tried to get its first serious victory in court against an alleged file sharer, things may be looking a bit grim for the RIAA's argument.

It seems that every country around Europe has its own ways of dealing with file-sharers. In the UK these days it’s customary to send out educational warnings, but in the past borderline extortion letters seemed in order, depending on the mood of the day.

The bassist and vocalist of the band Biohazard says that people who ’steal’ media by downloading it are “scumbags” and you better know that if he catches you doing it, he will happily “kick the shit out of you”.

But the real problem, he says, are BitTorrent sites.

You get the impression that Biohazard frontman-turned-pornstar Evan Seinfeld isn’t going to be releasing any music for free on file-sharing networks in the near future.

We've seen over the past few months that the IFPI has started a world-wide strategy of suing ISPs for not stopping file sharing.

This is silly, of course. An ISP should not be responsible for what people do on its network, and forcing them to cut off a lot of perfectly legal activities just to protect an obsolete business model is especially troublesome.