Furthermore, it quickly became apparent that [IFPI lawyer Magnus Mårtensson's] evidence consisted only of screenshots. When asked if he had any network equipment logging exactly what was going on ‘behind the scenes’ of any of his sample downloads, he replied that he didn’t.

When asked if he verified in any way during the download process that he had any contact with The Pirate Bay’s tracker, again the answer was negative.

Defendant Gottfrid Svartholm questioned Mårtensson on his evidence gathering techniques. The following questions are particularly interesting as they show that the prosecution has no evidence that the Pirate Bay trackers were actually used.

What's in a name? Not much, when it comes to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. As Luc Devigne, the top EU negotiator on ACTA made clear today, he has no intention of limiting ACTA to, you know, its name.

A leading music industry figure has labelled attempts to thwart internet file-sharing as a "waste of time".

Peter Jenner, the former manager of Pink Floyd and now emeritus president of the International Music Managers' Forum (IMMF), launched a scathing attack on the music industry's tactics at a Westminster e-Forum.

The RIAA's "business plan" is even worse than I'd guessed it was.

The RIAA paid Holmes Roberts & Owen $9,364,901 in 2008, Jenner & Block more than $7,000,000, and Cravath Swain & Moore $1.25 million, to pursue its "copyright infringement" claims, in order to recover a mere $391,000.

...

As bad as it was, I guess it was better than the numbers for 2007, in which more than $21 million was spent on legal fees, and $3.5 million on "investigative operations" ... presumably MediaSentry. And the amount recovered was $515,929.

And 2006 was similar: they spent more than $19,000,000 in legal fees and more than $3,600,000 in "investigative operations" expenses to recover $455,000.

We recently had a fun post about Hollywood accounting, about how the movie industry makes sure even big hit movies "lose money" on paper. So how about the recording industry? Well, they're pretty famous for doing something quite similar. Reader Jay pointed out in the comments an article from The Root that goes through who gets paid what for music sales, and the basic answer is not the musician. That report suggests that for every $1,000 sold, the average musician gets $23.40.

...

And that explains why huge megastars like Lyle Lovett have pointed out that he sold 4.6 million records and never made a dime from album sales. It's why the band 30 Seconds to Mars went platinum and sold 2 million records and never made a dime from album sales. You hear these stories quite often.

Germany's top criminal court ruled Wednesday that Internet users need to secure their private wireless connections by password to prevent unauthorized people from using their Web access to illegally download data.

Internet users can be fined up to euro100 ($126) if a third party takes advantage of their unprotected WLAN connection to illegally download music or other files, the Karlsruhe-based court said in its verdict.

When the US entertainment industry looks at India, it sees one gigantic copyright problem. That's why it wants India to remain on the US government's "Priority Watch List" for intellectual property issues in 2010, and that's why it blasted the country's new copyright proposals for (among other things) having too many legal reasons to bypass DRM.

But what happens when you look at India from the perspective of culture and consumers? The country comes out number one.

In other words, the entertainment industry thinks consumers should voluntarily install software that constantly scans our computers and identifies (and perhaps deletes) files found to be "infringing." It's hard to believe the industry thinks savvy, security-conscious consumers would voluntarily do so. But those who remember the Sony BMG rootkit debacle know that the entertainment industry is all too willing to sacrifice consumers at the altar of copyright enforcement.

Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington yesterday, Murdoch reiterated his disgust at how search engines handle news and called on old media to rethink how their stories are distributed on the web.

“It’s produced a river of gold, but those words are being taken mostly from the newspapers,” he said, reports Bloomberg. “I think they ought to stop it, that the newspapers ought to stand up and let them do their own reporting.”

Murdoch, whose company publishes newspapers including The Times and the Wall Street Journal, wants to make only headlines and a few sentences available for free online, with an option for readers to subscribe to the service in order to view the full story. The Financial Times already has such a pay wall in place.

In today's brave New World, "the new economics of digital distribution mean that we no longer need to shape our copyright law in ways that disadvantage creators vis-à-vis distributors unless we want to," writes Litman.