ReadWriteWeb

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.

Two weeks after the injunction against LimeWire in late October that forced the P2P filesharing site's closure, a "horde of piratical monkeys" revived the LimeWire codebase and moniker, launching the LimeWire Pirate Edition. This version operated on its own servers, but since it shares the LimeWire name, the RIAA now contends that this new site means that LimeWire has violated the court-ordered closure.

And now both the RIAA and LimeWire are the trail of "MetaPirate," the person responsible for the Pirate Edition.

Over the past few days, we've watched a battle unfold between two Internet giants. No, not Google and Facebook. 4chan and Tumblr. Members of the two sites have come to blows, so to speak, over who "owns" Internet memes, and some on the 4chan message board called for "Operation Overlord" - a DDoS attack targeted against the microblogging site. Tumblr users have threatened to respond by filling the 4chan boards with pictures of kittens. And both sites have taken turns over the past 24 hours being offline.

It's easy, perhaps, to dismiss this back-and-forth of bored and disgruntled teenagers. And because one of the call-to-arms on 4chan said "We are Anonymous" and involved a denial-of-service tactic, it may be easy to confuse 4chan v Tumblr with the more recent DDoS attacks undertaken by Anonymous.

Continuing its campaign against the defenders of copyright law, Anonymous orchestrated a denial-of-service attack against the website of the U.S. Copyright Office today, knocking the site offline for half an hour and rendering it slow to unusable for a couple of subsequent hours. (At the time of publishing, the home page is up, but none of the links on the site are operational.)

For the past month, Operation Payback, spearheaded by Anonymous, has targeted organizations like the RIAA, the MPAA, the UK Copyright Office, as well as KISS bassist Gene Simmons with DDoS attacks - either crashing their sites completely, grinding them to an unbearable halt, or in some cases, putting redirects in place so that visitors end up instead at the popular BitTorrent Pirate Bay website.

Less than a week since LimeWire was ordered to shut down its operations, almost all other major file-sharing applications are reporting a massive increase in downloads, arguably from those displaced LimeWire users.

A New York district judge last Tuesday issued a cease-and-desist order, demanding that LimeWire immediately close its doors. And while LimeWire has said it has plans to institute a redesigned service, based on legal and licensed music subscriptions, it seems like many of the site's users may have gone elsewhere for their torrents, rather than waiting for a revised version of what was once the most popular file-sharing app.

In a major victory for record labels and a major bummer for P2P file-sharers, the Gnutella-based download client LimeWire has been ordered to immediately stop distributing and supporting its software. U.S District Judge Kimba Wood handed down a 17-page permanent injunction today, and an announcement on the Limewire site shutters the site and the client no longer functions.

Judge Wood found earlier this year that Limewire had knowingly participated in copyright infringement "on a massive scale" after the RIAA, along with several major record labels, brought suit against the company. And while the RIAA wanted the site shut down then, Limewire was given a reprieve to build a new copyright-friendly technology.

The music and movie industries have been on a quest to place blame ever since they realized they were losing sales to Internet piracy. The RIAA in the United States went as far as to sue and fine individual users for downloading songs on peer-to-peer services like Napster and Limewire, or websites like The Pirate Bay or SendSpace. Others went after the services themselves, and in most cases were successful, though many others still exist. Now, BPI (British Recorded Music Industry), the U.K.'s version of the RIAA, is going after the middle man, Google, by serving the search giant with a DMCA take-down notice.

As reported in the LA Times' technology blog, the launch of Antigua-based media download site Zookz has raised the ire of the US trade commission as well as the RIAA and MPAA. However, according to the company, Zookz is permitted by the World Trade Organization under a loophole copyright sanction. You read that correctly. The US trade commission and the RIAA / MPAA is challenging Zookz the pirate with the WTO in its corner. Imagine the cage match.

As we reported earlier this week, the retrial of Jammie Thomas-Rasset, who was accused of illegally sharing 24 songs on Kazaa, was about to come to an end this week. In an earlier trial, Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay $220,000 to the music companies, but today, a different judge and a different jury came back with a new verdict that was surely not what Thomas-Rasset was looking for. A federal jury, clearly unconvinced by Thomas-Rasset's defense, awarded the recording companies $1.92 million - which comes out to $80,0000 per shared song.

Jammie Thomas vs. Capitol is probably the most infamous and longest running illegal file sharing case in the U.S., and while a judge declared a mistrial last September, the two parties met once again this week to begin Thomas' retrial. In almost every other file sharing case, the defendants settled with the RIAA out of court, but when Jammie Thomas was accused of illegally sharing 24 songs on the once incredibly popular Kazaa P2P network in February 2005, she decided to fight back. Since then, the two parties have gone through a trial, conviction, a mistrial, and now the retrial of Thomas is well under way and just entered its second day.