BREIN, a Dutch anti-piracy group best known for nailing people dealing in counterfeit software, CDs and movies, has now turned its attentions to file sharers.

"BREIN is the Dutch acronym for 'Protection Rights Entertainment Industry Netherlands' and also the Dutch word for brain," it points out on its web page.

Brain, huh?

OK.

It also works with the IFPI (International Association of Music Producers) and, "maintains regular contact with the Business Software Alliance," among other entertainment industry organizations.

Now it's, "going after individual music files swappers and will bill or prosecute people who offer large amount of files through services as KaZaA, Gnutella and Grokster," says Jan Libbenga in a The Register story here.

And as Jan points out, "By hunting individual file swappers, BREIN is following the lead of the Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA), which recently started an unparalleled campaign to track down the identities of alleged file-swappers in the US," adding:

"Some believe the threat is only intended as a deterrent. In recent months anti-piracy groups in Germany, Switzerland, Denmark and Italy have already attempted to bill file traders, but they are faced with strong opposition from ISPs who are worried they are being forced to police the Internet for illegal song copying. BREIN also largely depends on voluntary notice and take down procedures.

"In the future this may change. In June a majority of Euro MPs signed a declaration that calls for a more concerted action against alarming levels of piracy in the Member States."

For more on the above, see DMCA on steroids.

I know an europe DCMA (even worst than the american one) will be voted in during next weeks.

And in France (don't know for Europa) when you buy some CDR you pay a tax on it, which go to the SACEM (the equivalent of the RIAA in France). So you already pay for p2p piracy when you buy CDR !!

"BREIN"!!!!Sounds like a concentration camp out of an old WW2 movie!

It just goes to show that greed is a very, very contagous disease.

As usual America is the precedent that other countries follow. Hopefully the court systems will come to their senses and realize that laws must be written to echoe the sentiments of the people otherwise you have a situation like prohibition where people loose all respect for the law and organized crime fills the vacuum.

In an unrelated thought, I was thinking about Codewarriors post about violation of user agreements with relation to Kazaa under another article and have come to the conclusion that the victims of the RIAA subpoena could motion the court to have all evidence collected through Kazaa to be thrown out since it was collected improperly.

Superninerfan

ISP-PRIVACY, reminds me of the sign that hung over the gate of one of the Nazi concentration camps..."Arbeit Macht Frei" or "work makes you free".
Guess some nazi "brein" thought that one up!
On the Kazaa TOS violations...
Ya know, that was my thinking. if it was a criminal trial, probably would be case that you could move to have all evidence improperly attained to be tossed (no pun intended). The main thing that HAS to happen is that all these people demand their constitutional right of a trial by a jury of their peers...THEIR PEER TO PEER PEERS
Superninerfan great post !
~code

I know this has been brought up before....what do you do if you find out someone has been using space on your computer to store mp3's that were downloaded from Kazaa. Does the file show up as your files or is there a way to identify the persons IP so you don't get caught up in the dragnet? Also as far as subpoena's i'm sure its just a bump in the road, as far as cost goes for them to recover added expenses. They will just sue for more on the next poor soul! that seems to be there way of thinking. Did they ever get that money from congress to cover their expenses or did they increase the price of the cd's again?

isp-privacy:

If the MP3s are on your computer, you're responsible, I believe. You could try it as a defense though. You would probably have to say that you didn't know the files were there.

superninerfan:

There are different standards for civil and criminal cases. Evidence obtained by violating a TOS might be considered tainted for the purposes of a criminal trial, but possibly not for a civil trial in which only the preponderance of the evidence is sufficient for winning a case.

The IFPI usually avoids internet-related piracy for the RIAA, instead concentrateing on counterfit CDs. Never heard of brein through. I remember reading a couple of months ago about dutch people running ed2k servers (indexing servers, not file servers) being harassed by the local copyright holders group, but I dont think it was brein doing the harassing.

I got my first Trojan Horse attack from Amsterdam today. Seems like all of a sudden... but Helicopters??? Oh yeah, I forgot I live in Malibu, California. Kind of reminds me of the ranch now... When my husband was killed I wouldn't sell his land for any price, so they played various war games on me for about 10 years until a swat team came and made me leave. This RIAA fight is also about our Freedom as was the war on drugs ~they just have a different website designer! Watch out for the HYDRA!!!!!

In a way, this is a test of our legal system. Will it side with the big money corporate interests, or with common sense? I know, the cynic in each of us says that the money wins. But the will of the people cannot be ignored. They can only shove so many laws down our throats before people will just ignore them. Remember maximum 55 mph speed limits and Prohibition? The entertainment industry tried to ban tape recorders and VCRs and then came to realize they weren't the terrible threat they had thought. Maybe in a few years will look back on this as much ado about nothing. On the other hand, maybe it will be "the day the music died".

I agree with IFeelFree.

This is a little different, however. I don't think P2P is the threat they think it is. But unlike tape recorders and VCR's, it has the potential to be their demise. All a new artist has to do is sign up with a Kazaa username rather than sell his soul to the RIAA.

99% of the music is still RIAA, but they can sense the change, and so can we. And this time it's up to us and the artists. We don't need the RIAA anymore. We never did, but now they are simply obsolete. In a way, the RIAA's own paranoia will be what kills them. Their sales were never down for any reason other than crappier music, fewer releases (believe it or not), and less consumer spending in general. They have feared P2P from day one. Their sales slump was their chance to acuse it, and kill it before it killed them.

P2P's here to stay.

Hey check tis out
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5063402.html?tag=fd_lede1_hed

amen

TheSherminator:

Even without P2P, technology advances are making the RIAA increasingly innessential to artists. Now artists can much more easily record and burn CDs, and set up their own web pages and distribute CDs/music files on their own. So, producton and distribution can be done by the artists themselves (or people they hire privately). About the only thing they still might want the recording industry for is promotion. They probably don't even need that since performing, and having a website, might be sufficient exposure for many bands.

As Code said, it is important that people don't settle with the RIAA. By demanding jury trials, the RIAA will be forced to spend a fortune on lawyers and they might lose anyway. Despite what the law says, commonsense arguments and sympathy might well win over a jury.

the recording industry ASS. of america? hahaha, how appropriate.

I can't wait til the RIAA stormtroopers kick my door down and haul my 12 year daughters computer off. I will sue the shit out of them all for causing her such mental anguish and emotional trauma.

P2P does have the potential to destroy the RIAA and its industry. It is unlikely to actually kill it, but it will certinly make a noticeable dent in sales. The biggest danger to them is the change in consumer attitudes caused by computers and p2p. You cant sell data to people who use computers, they understand its value too well. Zero. No scarcity, no value.

Ok, this is a country whose military is unionized and doesn't have to get haircuts, where prostitution and hash is legal in some areas...and they're going to stomp all over file-sharers??? God help us.

Lobbying power. For a type of crime to attract the money needed for enforecement it must be either sufficiently hated to be stoped for political reasons or sufficiently annoying for a few rich people to get some strings pulled.

I remember reading a proposal for legaliseing prostitution somewhere. Looked like a good idea. Legalise and regulate, and you can force regular checks for STDs and they can form a union The writer pointed out corretly however that the public would never stand for it.

A similar artical pointed out the strange way in which almost every recreational drug is banned, except tobacco. The reason is obvious enough. By the time the health risks of tobacco were recognised he tobacco industry had a lof of money and influence.

Hair is a aspect of the human body we would all be better off without. All it does is collect dirt and parasites, and it needs constant maintinance to keep tidy. Its not usful at all, except for stoping your head getting sunburnt.

I wonder how it would work if you stored all your mp3s on an external server through a webspace service. Upload all of your mp3s onto your webspace, delete all of the mp3s on your computer, and only download enough songs to fill up your mp3 player when needed. While not any guarantee against RIAA legal action, this could have legal implications that may go against the RIAA in court, as they would have to deal with a major company that offers the webspace AND they would have to deal with the P2P file sharer. Could be a good, albeit pain in the ass way of protecting ones self from the RIAA.

On a different note, as I have pointed out in another thread, how can the RIAA possibly know where your MP3 on your hard drive came from? Mp3s get on the networks originally by people ripping cds into mp3 format and putting them in their shared folder under a P2P program.
Hence, while the MP3 is on their hard drive, technically it could be a legal copy. My opinion is that the only way the RIAA can target you for legal action is for SHARING those files that belong to you, not for HAVING them. You are distributing copies that you have made-while not selling them, you are distributing them, which could be a legal problem.

To be quite honest, I think this radical seeming action on the RIAA's part is just a huge scare tactic and will ultimately not stand up in court. However, this tactic is already working as many of you know already- P2P file sharing is down- for now.

Is CodeWarrior still embarrased for what he said about Asians? Please don't be, come back, we enjoy your comments. I least I do.

tuuktalus: Shareing copyrighted music is illegal enough for the RIAA to set the lawyers on you. If you just keep MP3s in a folder which is not publicly accessible they cant touch you

Locateing MP3s on a webserver wouldn't be that effective, because a DMCA threat usually gets webservers emptied very quickly. Perhaps if you were to locate the server in a country with little or no copyright law it might work, but that would be awkward.

The RIAAs sue 'em all campaign is a scare tactic. It will stand up in court, easily, but the expense would make it impossible for even the RIAA to go after a significent number of file sharers that way. Its the psycological effect. I keep thinking of the old lottery adverts, with a giant hand of the RIAA appearing next to a person at a computer and raiseing one finger while an evil-sounding voice says "It could be you..." The idea is to scare people into either leaveing p2p or leeching. Its working. I frequently say all future p2p systems should make shareing unavoidable, ed2k-style, as well as impliment effective systems to reward sharers.

tuuktalus: Shareing copyrighted music is illegal enough for the RIAA to set the lawyers on you. If you just keep MP3s in a folder which is not publicly accessible they cant touch you

Locateing MP3s on a webserver wouldn't be that effective, because a DMCA threat usually gets webservers emptied very quickly. Perhaps if you were to locate the server in a country with little or no copyright law it might work, but that would be awkward.

The RIAAs sue 'em all campaign is a scare tactic. It will stand up in court, easily, but the expense would make it impossible for even the RIAA to go after a significent number of file sharers that way. Its the psycological effect. I keep thinking of the old lottery adverts, with a giant hand of the RIAA appearing next to a person at a computer and raiseing one finger while an evil-sounding voice says "It could be you..." The idea is to scare people into either leaveing p2p or leeching. Its working. I frequently say all future p2p systems should make shareing unavoidable, ed2k-style, as well as impliment effective systems to reward sharers.