I am always impressed with the utter unwillingness of the Entertainment industry to acknowledge the world as it actually is, rather than the world as they want it to be. Perhaps it is a side effect of being in the business of ‘selling dreams.’ In any event, I could not help but marvel at Carey Sherman’s recent New York Times Op Ed “What Wikipedia Won’t Tell You.” Mr. Sherman, the CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and one of the chief lobbyists behind the push for PIPA and SOPA, just cannot believe that anyone could find flaws in the most perfect bill he and his fellow Hollywood lobbyists wrote – especially when they tried so hard to keep balanced and respect the opinions of others! Happily, Mr. Sherman knows who is really responsible for this travesty – that wicked pair of Internet troublemakers Google and Wikipedia!

In a blatant act of hypocrisy, Cary Sherman the chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), as well as his allies, are claiming that the public was misinformed about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP (PIPA) when they opposed those bills.  As Sherman said, “misinformation may be a dirty trick, but it works.”  His organization would know given that for more than a year the RIAA, Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and other pro-SOPA and pro-PIPA allies actively engaged in misinforming Congress on the implications of the SOPA and PIPA.  

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.

On this week's podcast we discuss increasing transparency at the FCC in light of Commissioner Baker's announced departure to Comcast, a proposed warrantless entry law for copyright violators in California, and how you can follow in Jonathan Coulton's successful footprints with the Creators Freedom Project co-sponsored Rock Your Net workshops.  We also discuss "nothing less than a frontal assault on academic fair use" with the Association of Research Libraries' Brandon Butler.

You can download the audio directly by clicking here (MP3) or stream it using the player below:

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Earlier today, word spread that Google, presumably bowing to pressure from Hollywood and the recording industry, had begun blocking certain "piracy-related terms" from its autocomplete search feature. As it turns out, the terms in question are "BitTorrent," "Rapidshare" and "Megaupload". There are plenty of reasons why this is a terrible idea but for brevity's sake, I will limit myself to three:

Among the thousands of documents revealed to the press through WikiLeaks are apparently a number that deal with copyright issues. The Spanish newspaper El País has published a number of cables from the U.S. embassy in Madrid regarding U.S. efforts on IP enforcement in Spain.

One of the most interesting is this one from February 2008, which recommended that the U.S. threatened to put Spain on the Special 301 "naughty list” unless the Spanish government announced it would adopt a three-strikes style copyright enforcement law that would cut users off from the Internet after allegations of copyright infringement.

Today we, along with EFF and the Open Technology Initiative, filed comments in the Department of Commerce’s Internet Policy Task Force Inquiry on Copyright Policy, Creativity, and Innovation in the Internet Economy.  The Task Force, run by the NTIA is the Department’s attempt to start thinking about Copyright issues and how they impact the economy.  Our filing might be interesting for you because it summarizes many of the major issues in copyright policy today.

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.

Yesterday, the MPAA and RIAA made a giant political misstep by refusing to participate in a debate about three strikes. In doing so, they exposed the public and a number of US policy makers to policy that would strip Internet subscribers of their constitutional due process rights.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, I attended this year's State of the Net Conference beautifully orchestrated by Tim Lordan and his crew at the Internet Caucus Advisory Committee.