UPDATE: Added mention of the $35 appeal fee in the "Appeals" section below.

Today, major ISPs joined the RIAA and MPAA in announcing a joint program to deal with file-sharing. The document governing this agreement, a "Copyright Alert System," is hosted here. Public Knowledge and the Center for Democracy and Technology issued a joint statement on the CAS, available here.

Beyond that, what does this agreement represent? It extends some of the characteristics of some ISPs' existing voluntary notice-forwarding agreements, while stopping short of a three-strikes-and-you're-out procedure.

This past Friday, Judge Nancy Gertner of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts ruled that the jury award of $675,000 in punitive damages in Sony BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum was unconstitutional because it violated due process. Judge Gertner’s decision showed a commendable sense of proportion. Like her fellow federal Judge Michael Davis’s decision to reduce damages in the similar Jammie Thomas-Rasset file-sharing case, Gertner’s decision also suggests that judges might start to curb punitive damages in copyright infringement cases as they’ve done in other types of civil suits. The judge didn’t find Tenenbaum to be the most sympathetic of defendants. Thankfully, that didn’t inspire her to let a disproportionate award stand or treat copyright infringement awards like they’re exempt from due process analysis.  

Today, a federal district court in New York found LimeWire liable for inducing copyright infringement and vicarious copyright infringement. The court’s decision, at least on those aspects of the case, may not be terribly surprising, given the precedent set in earlier cases like Grokster, Aimster, and Napster. But a few details of the court’s ruling deserve further mention.

Background:  Earlier today, the U.S. District Court, New York City, ruled that the file-sharing service LimeWire was liable for copyright infringement.  The decision is here.

The following statement is attributed to Sherwin Siy, deputy legal director of Public Knowledge:

“While, we believe the court’s decision is, on the whole, not unreasonable given the circumstances of the case, there are some troubling aspects to the court’s reasoning.

When the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals called into question the FCC's ability to protect broadband users earlier this month, the ongoing debate about the legal classification of broadband services took on a new urgency. While we've argued that the Commission should waste no time in reclassifying broadband as a "telecommunications" (Title II) service, others have suggested that no action from the Commission is necessary, seeing how Comcast's blocking of BitTorrent was an isolated act that no other ISP is likely to emulate. As if on cue, cable provider RCN has provided us with a timely reminder that Comcast isn't the only ISP that has stood accused of blocking its users' traffic. In a proposed settlement for a suit brought against the ISP for throttling its users' peer-to-peer traffic, RCN is not only not held accountable for its actions, it's also not prohibited from using similar network management techniques in the future. As this series of events demonstrates, if we're going to rely on the ISPs to self-regulate, we might as well kiss the open Internet goodbye.  

Just as it has sought to offset slower CD sales with its digital music store, Walmart--the nation's largest DVD retailer--is looking to insure against lower DVD sales by purchasing the online video company Vudu.

But Vudu isn't just another Internet video company with a loopy name offering a pure over-the-top video service. Like Sezmi, its delivery method is an interesting hybrid. While Sezmi leverages free over-the-air TV, leased spectrum, and broadband (with ample local storage as a force multiplier), Vudu uses a hybrid peer-to-peer model. Content is both delivered to a Vudu device through a standard client/server model, as well as peer-to-peer between different Vudu devices. Additionally, content is pre-positioned at the edge of the network to increase the number of peers.

Although overshadowed by Joe Biden's big party for his Copyright buddies, the good folks at the House Judiciary Committee staged their own holiday party for Hollywood. Since "p2p" is now passe, the Judiciary's Secret Santa brought Hollywood a whole new villain to attack in the name of piracy, streaming media. (Hey everyone, remember when 'streaming media' was the good way to get content online because it could be protected unlike that evil peer-2-peer stuff so Hollywood pretended they loved streaming media so they could outlaw peer-2-peer? Boy, we were so young back then . .

On the eve of the FCC's upcoming Network Neutrality rulemaking, Canada has now settled its definition of "reasonable network management" and set rules for traffic throttling. Amazingly, the rules the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) settled on for "reasonable network management" look a lot like the standard our own FCC settled on in the Comcast/BitTorrent Order, but even stronger on the notice and transparency side. Hopefully, the FCC is paying attention here as it considers its own rulemaking on the definition of "reasonable network management."

You can read the CRTC press release here and the detailed order here.

When last we spoke to you, back in May, about HR 1319, it had recently been introduced and was just having a hearing. The bill's sponsors want you, the consumer, to be protected from software that can share the private and valuable files on your computer with others via the network. The original bill, in name only, focussed on P2P file sharing software, but the language of the bill actually did very little to limit its scope. Today, Public Knowledge has obtained the bill's new language and tomorrow the bill will be marked up in full Committee, likely with little complaint.

Except for ours.