What's Now: Recording industry wins big against Usenet file sharing service

Yesterday's WN|WN was singing the refrains of "Why Can't We Be Friends?" from the classic group "War." Apparently, we've got more readers in Australia these days (g'day mates!). Yesterday, the crew at Sydney-based digital advertising firm Amnesia Razorfish spent Wednesday trying to get Coke and Pepsi to friend each other on Twitter, and both companies did within 24 hours. "As long as we can live in ha-a-ar-mo-ny!" (We could have used these guys for Norm Coleman and Al Franken.)

Recording industry wins one against Usenet supplier

Afternoon of Wednesday, July 1, 2009 • One of the P2P proprietors' most successful self-defense arguments, when confronted in court by copyright holders, is what the legal profession now calls safe harbor. It's the idea that a P2P service only provides users with the technology to share files, and its up to the users to determine which files are shared -- at any one time, the service can't know what's shared, because it doesn't have a centralized index.

But that argument has now failed when transferred to another, older, more conventional style of file sharing: via Usenet. In a ruling yesterday that may set some legal precedent (at least prior to any appeal), a New York district court judge has granted summary judgment in favor of Recording Industry Association of America members against the owners of Usenet.com, a subscription service giving users access to files shared over the Internet's historical NNTP protocol (Usenet). Judge Harold Baer ruled that Usenet.com kept a service, knew what was on it, knew that its users knew what was on it, and knew that the purpose of that service was evidently to trade in unauthorized and copyrighted material.

Citing a phrase from the second Supreme Court ruling against P2P trader Grokster, Baer referred to Usenet.com's "staggering scale of infringement makes it more likely that [Defendants] condoned illegal use." The evidence of this was an independent study commissioned by the court that determined that some 94% of files available on Usenet.com were probably illicit.

The guilt-by-association factor didn't help the defendants' case much either. "Moreover, also similarly to Grokster, the undisputed facts in this case indicate that Defendants openly and affirmatively sought to attract former users of other notorious file-sharing services such as Napster and Kazaa," Judge Baer wrote.

One of the standards being tested here was whether Usenet.com simply contributed to the ongoing acts of copyright infringement made feasible through the Usenet system, or whether Usenet.com specifically used Usenet as a vehicle for profiting from illicit file-trading -- what the law calls vicarious infringement. The judge granted the RIAA the grand slam on this issue, writing, "Because the undisputed facts illustrate that Defendants garnered a direct financial benefit from copyright infringement and failed to exercise their right and ability to control or limit infringement on their servers, Plaintiffs' motion for summary judgment on their claim for vicarious copyright infringement is granted."

In keeping with its very public stance, the RIAA issued a statement late yesterday stating it hopes this ruling will set an example for all the others: "This decision is another example of courts recognizing the value of copyrighted music and taking action against companies and individuals who are engaging in wide scale infringement," stated Executive Vice President Stephen Marks. "We hope that other bad actors who are engaging in similar activity will take note of this decisive opinion."

Apple, NVIDIA rumored to be at loggerheads

Afternoon of July 1, 2009 • Sounds like contract negotiations between Apple and NVIDIA aren't going so well as rumors swirled yesterday that things had gotten nasty. The two companies have been known to be at odds for some time over Apple's need for Nehalem-based chipsets, not to mention the raft of problems users reported with the GeForce 8600 GT graphics chips in some MacBook Pros.

The news was originally reported by SemiAccurate and has been refracted around the blogosphere over the past few days. But since Apple is notoriously close-mouthed with the tech press, it's hard to say what's happening. Would Cupertino turn its back on the gains NVIDIA has made available for lower-end systems? Do the embarrassments of making good on those busted MacBooks outweigh the potential embarrassment of crawling back to Intel for the relevant chipsets? And what of Snow Leopard and its support for CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture)? These questions and many more will probably not be answered on the next episode of As The Chip Turns...

Facebook attempts to clarify new privacy thinking

Afternoon of July 1 • On a conference call yesterday, Facebook indicated that they're working toward a more granular view of privacy -- one that allows their users to share some pieces of information with the world, others with all one's Facebook-friends (including your boss and those people who vaguely remember meeting on vacation a few years back), and still others with just the people who know you really well. After all, says Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer & Head of Global Public Policy Chris Kelly, when people have better control over their information, they're more inclined to share it. New controls have been rolling out to selected users for several weeks; the call yesterday confirmed that a broader rollout is at hand. ReadWriteWeb liveblogged the call -- but didn't get any firm commitment to rollout dates, alas.

Linux kernel patch offers possible FAT workaround

Last week • The filesystem patents at the heart of Microsoft's suit against GPS maker Tom Tom are in extraordinarily wide use, especially in standalone devices and removable drives. While patent hounds scour for prior art, developers have been considering technical workarounds. One of those developers, Samba's Andrew Tridgell, has published a patch (his second addressing the problem) that may relieve the minds of anxious developers. Ars Technica's Ryan Paul has details.

WHAT'S NEXT? Lori Drew sentencing is at hand