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| | | February 22, 2004
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Sunday, February 22, 2004 |
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RIAA clashes with file-swappers again
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) launched yet another round of lawsuits against peer-to-peer users who allegedly shared copyrighted music without permission. 531 to-be-identified individuals from the United States were sued for massive copyright law violations. The so called 'John Doe' suits were filed in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Orlando, FL, and Trenton, NJ, bringing the total number of defendants to 1,063 this year alone. In January, the recording industry sued 532 peer-to-peer file-swappers for similar offenses.
"Legal online music services [...] shouldn't have to compete with businesses based on illegal downloading," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement. Last December, a U.S. court ruling declaring RIAA's subpoena process illegal offered a major setback to the trade group, but the recording industry seemingly stepped up its litigation campaign. 381 people so far have agreed to resolve the issue out of courts with average settlements of about $3,000.
But RIAA's settlement offers brought it another, this time quite unusual lawsuit. A New Jersey woman has countersued RIAA for racketeering. Michele Scimeca claims that by offering to settle for much less than sought in its lawsuits RIAA's actions amount to extortion. Scimeca, herself alleged in copyright violations, says that as an industry group representing multibillion dollar corporations RIAA uses its stature to intimidate ordinary Internet users. In a court filing, Scimeca's lawyer, Bart Lombardo, wrote: "This scare tactic has caused a vast amount of settlements from individuals who feared fighting such a large institution and feel victim to these actions and felt forced to provide funds to settle these actions instead of fighting." Legal experts, however, believe the allegations are far-fetched.
In the meantime, RIAA, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the U.S. Federal Bureau for Investigation (FBI) joined forces and issued new warning labels against Internet piracy. Intellectual property theft is currently FBI's third biggest priority after fighting terrorism and counter-intelligence.
More from: BBC News | CNET News.com 1 2 | E-Commerce Times | InfoWorld | InternetNews.com | TechNewsWorld | Wired News
Yahoo! turns the heat on Google
It's official. Yahoo! has finally begun replacing Google's top-notch search technology with its own. At midnight EST (0500 GMT) on Wednesday, Yahoo! dumped Google's technology which had been serving search results at its U.S. portal for years. The California-based Internet media giant is also expected to move to its in-house technology its non-U.S. properties in the coming days and weeks.
The widely expected change signals a growing competition in the Internet search business. The switch came merely a day after current leader Google announced its search index, which includes web pages, documents, images and Usenet messages, had surpassed 6 billion items, thus making it the undisputed leader in Internet search scope. Nevertheless, Google will likely face increased pressure as major players such as Yahoo! and Microsoft encroach on its turf. The latter is expected to roll out its own online search technology later this year. In recent years, Internet searching has turned into an extremely lucrative business as an increasing number of companies are seeing the benefit from targeted advertising in users' search results.
In the past two years, Yahoo! made unambiguous steps towards recapturing its one-time supremacy in the field. The company bought search technology developer Inktomi Corp. for $235 million and later acquired Overture Service Inc., a paid inclusion and targeted advertising provider, in a $1.63-billion deal.
More from: ClickZ | CNET News.com | Computerworld | InternetNews.com | The Mercury News | TechWeb
In Other News...
 Apple announced it has begun shipping the 'mini' version of the popular iPod digital music player that was first unveiled last month. The computer maker also said it had received more than 100,000 preorders for the $249 device which includes 4 GB of storage space and is the size of a half-inch thick business card.
A newly discovered variant of the MyDoom worm is targeting the web site of Microsoft as well as that of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Security experts are saying, however, that neither should be worried about a massive flood of data as the mutation has failed to spread in the wild.
Microsoft has started offering the Windows Security Update CD, a compact disk which includes all security updates released for various versions of Windows through October 2003. The CD is primarily aimed at Internet users with slow dial-up connections that make downloading large patches an onerous task. Still, Microsoft continues to urge customers to periodically check the Windows Update web site as the disk only includes fixes released prior to October 15, 2003.
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