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The Recording Industry Association of America is mad. This time, the ire of the RIAA is not directed at Blogger-hosted sites pointing to zip files of new albums on Megaupload. Nor is it directed at the college students who would dare to click the "download" button on such sites.

Instead, the RIAA is lashing out at Google, whose search engine is the gateway to the Web for hundreds of millions of people. Over the last year or so, Google has been making it a bigger priority to discourage copyright infringement among people who use its various Web services. Those measures, the RIAA has argued, are not enough.

Comedian Louis C.K. was tired of seeing his fans pay marked-up prices to enjoy his work. The bloated costs of show tickets and add-on fees for myriad middlemen had become "f---ing brutal" for consumers, C.K. told Rolling Stone recently. Thankfully, we're no longer trapped in the 20th century with its top-heavy, restricted, one-way model of content distribution. So C.K. took to the Web.

His experiment, as he called it, was to see if he could self-release one of his stand-up comedy specials on the Internet without paying for others to produce, edit and distribute the material, all of which drive up the cost paid by fans. It was a somewhat bold gamble, even if the model had been tested successfully by a few big name bands and musicians. Would it work for stand-up comedy?

Ever since peer-to-peer file-sharing technology became popularized, it has been a thorn in the side of the companies who have traditionally profited from the distribution of entertainment-related content. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) succeeded in killing off Napster, but has waged war against BitTorrent and others ever since. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has waged a similar battle, reportedly costing the film industry more than piracy itself does.

As vilified as file-sharing has historically been, the practice has been gaining favor in somewhat unexpected places lately. The Songwriter's Association of Canada recently threw its support behind the idea of legalizing file-sharing and finding ways to monetize the practice, rather than cracking down on it through legal means.

Once upon a time, Google had a pretty nasty reputation among traditional media companies, many of whom lampooned the search giant for promoting piracy and even "stealing" content outright. Much of the criticism was overblown, but it remains true that there is copyright-infringing content on the Internet and Google is may people's gateway to the Internet.

Google is still not exactly adored by many media companies and rights holders, but they've gone to great lengths to appease those that have traditionally created and sold content to the masses. In late August, Eric Schmidt spoke to a gathering of UK television executives and laid out a list of accomplishments Google has made in the fight against online piracy.

Joining their counterparts in the film industry, large book publishing houses are the latest to take aim at users of the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol. John Wiley and Sons, the publisher of the popular "For Dummies" how-to book series, is suing 27 Bit Torrent users for downloading PDF files of the books, thereby infringing on Wiley's copyrights.

How extensive is the alleged book piracy? Demonoid.me users are said to have swapped copies of Photoshop CS5 All-In-One For Dummies more than 74,000 times, according to the lawsuit.

Sixteen months after a federal judge threw out Viacom's $1 billion copyright lawsuit against Google, the two companies are back in court. Specifically, Viacom is asking an appeals court to revisit its case against YouTube, which they say is guilty of a whole lot of deliberate copyright infringement.

The original case was thrown out last year when a U.S. District Court judge ruled that YouTube was protected by the "safe harbor" provision of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), which essentially argues that site owners are immune from the legal implications of what the site's users do, such as uploading copyrighted material.

It might be a decade late, but it appears as though the music industry may have found the antidote to the digital piracy it claims has ravaged its revenues for so long.

New research into Swedish music consumption indicates that the public launch of Spotify in that country has led to a 25% reduction in the illegal downloading of songs and albums. In the second quarter of 2011, music piracy had dropped 9% from the same period last year.

In a sign of how strongly Internet-related issues can affect real-world politics, the German branch of the Pirate Party has won 15 seats in Berlin's regional parliament.

The Pirate Party, which was was originally founded in Sweden in 2006, is a political party whose platform is built around issues like reforming copyright and patent law, digital privacy and radical government transparency. The organization "promotes in particular an enhanced transparency of government by implementing open source governance and providing for APIs to allow for electronic inspection and monitoring of government operations by the citizen," according to its Wikipedia entry.

Seeking to disassociate itself with copyright infringement in the eyes of potential business partners, Google says it's made progress in its effort to combat online piracy this year.

The company's four-pronged approach to reeling in the amount of copyright-infringing content found on its sites was announced in December in response to years of criticism from media outlets and rights holders over the ease with which users have been able to publish and find such content via Google's properties, including YouTube and Blog Search.

A federal judge in New York ruled today in the defendant's favor on a copyright infringement case brought EMI and 14 record companies against cloud music locker service MP3tunes. Judge William H. Pauley III found that cloud-based music lockers are, for the most part, legally in the clear. The judge found that "MP3tunes did not promote infringement" by offering an open cloud storage service for music, meaning that it, as well as big-name services like Google Music and Amazon Cloud Drive, are on the right side of the law.

The record companies claimed that services like these duplicate files in ways that violate copyrights, that they don't do enough to stop repeat infringers, and that playing back songs from a locker constitute a "public performance," which would require a license for the material. The judge rejected all these claims, finding that MP3tunes is protected as a service provider under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The plaintiffs also argued that works recorded prior to 1972 were not protected by the DMCA, but the judge overturned this charge as well.