Sony Music Entertainment Canada Inc., EMI Music Canada Inc., Universal Music Canada Inc. and Warner Music Canada Co. have agreed to pay songwriters and music publishers $47.5 million in damages for copyright infringement and overdue royalties to settle a class action lawsuit.

A lawsuit recently filed against the RIAA asserts claims, under the "Computer Fraud and Abuse" and "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization" acts, detailing the RIAA's alleged use of "illegal and flawed" methods when investigating people for downloading or swapping copyrighted songs without paying for them.

URD is a program to download binaries from usenet (newsgroups) through a web interface.

Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It was founded in 1980 to enable users to read and post public messages to various newsgroups. As such, it predates forums, blogs, instant messaging and P2P networks.

"As we've pointed out before, the RIAA's attempts to sue college students for file-sharing have not gone as smoothly as it would like. The latest evidence comes from the US District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma, where the record labels are looking for more time to respond to a motion from a group of Oklahoma State University students to quash a subpoena issued to the school..."

I’ve already done an article called Usenet for Dummies, where you can learn about what exactly Usenet is. Go read that article if you haven’t already. If you have, then this article will go over a variety of tools you need to get up and running with Usenet on Linux.

RIAA-fan Biden's influence in the Obama administration may be larger than anticipated, at least when it comes to file sharing: His good pals with RIAA and BSA connections keep getting Department of Justice's seats.

Slashdot had this scoop, posted by xseedit: "The RIAA has moved their main Web site www.riaa.com from IIS on Win2003 to Apache 2.2.3 on Red Hat. It appears that the move did not go smoothly as it resulted in an 8-hour downtime starting yesterday around noon, according to Netcraft. And the RIAA is still showing a 'temporarily under construction' page."

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement seized a website based on RIAA claims of copyright infringement. They held it for a year before giving it back due to lack of evidence.The RIAA has declined to comment. These MAFIAA powertrips must end!