davidNeedham

Article 1

LimeWire Now Found on One-Third of All PCs Worldwide

http://www.mmmdesignz.com/MM450/ - ARTICLE 1, WEEK 3

http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2007/12/emw576418.htm

What do you use to illegally download your music? Probably limewire, according to this report by Maddy and Digital Music News. Considering how many people that I know personally that use limewire, I'm surprised the market share of 34.1% is not higher. I'm not surprised, however, that their rate of increase in share is slowly decreasing. With more and more companies offering legal music downloads (iTunes, and soon Amazon.com) and radio stations (Pandora.com, last.fm) people are turning away from their illegal practices (for more information on this, read the next article below).

Limewire keeps the end user from having to "dirty their hands" by circumventing the protection on the media. The RIAA is currently involved in a very long, drawn out lawsuit with Limewire. It will be interesting to see this case as one of the cases future classes will have to report on. Will they become another Napster? Only time will tell.

Article 2

Music Biz Pushes Piracy Blame To ISPs; Digital Sales Up 40 Percent

http://www.crimsonhaven.com/mm450/w1.html - ARTICLE 3, WEEK 1

http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-music-biz-pushes-piracy-blame-to-isps-digital-sales-up-40-percent/

As the last article stated, limewire's share is starting to taper off. The RIAA doesn't want to admit it, but they're not doing as bad as they were. According to the article reviewed by Mike, the online music departments of the major record labels have experienced increases in sales by about 40 percent. Despite the apparent decline in illegal US downloads, there still seems to be a consistent increase in illegal downloads from other countries (but we'll get more into that when we cover international copyright law in a few weeks).

The RIAA blames ISPs for allowing this downloading to occur and demands that they release information about the infringers and block the offending material. However, as we talked about in class today, ISPs and content heavy websites like YouTube refuse as much as they can under the law - demanding that the RIAA lists the specific locations and type of content before anything will be done about it. What happens if they give in and help the RIAA? Read the next article for more information.

Article 3

Comcast Sued for Blocking P2P Sites

http://www.agirlcalleduntouchable.com/school/mm450/w3.html - ARTICLE 1, WEEK 3

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2217866,00.asp

Jon Hart, and other Comcast subscribers, have entered in a class action lawsuit against Comcast for restricting access to websites - specifically those that are used for peer to peer (P2P) downloading. Comcast denies blocking access to any websites, but admits to putting bandwidth restrictions on certain users doing certain things (downloading excessively). Hart has asked that this class action lawsuit make Comcast apologize as well as stop their restrictions and offer restitution to all customers.

They are not required by law to do this, so why are they? Are they trying to suck up to the RIAA? I understand why they would want to restrict bandwidth for certain offenders (just as Bradley does according to our talks today), but that doesn't make it right. They should deliver what they claim to provide - period. If they do want to add restrictions, they should be open and clear about that.