One of the most closely-watched copyright infringement lawsuits brought by the RIAA appears to be coming to a screeching halt, much to the music industry's delight. A judge ruled Monday that a defendant had willfully and intentionally destroyed evidence of his P2P activities after being notified of pending legal action by the RIAA. Furthermore, since it was done in bad faith, it "therefore warrants appropriate sanctions"...

"What this really underscores is how difficult it is for individuals who can't afford counsel to defend themselves," EFF staff attorney Fred von Lohmann told Ars. "He never had an adequate opportunity to explain what happened on his PC, while the RIAA had forensics experts and lawyers to tell the story. I think if Howell had an expert and lawyer to speak for him, he would have told a different story."

The fate of technological innovation may once again be at stake in Arista v. LimeWire, the recording industry lawsuit that seeks to hold a technology company liable for the actions of its users. In an amicus brief submitted to the court, the EFF and a coalition of digital rights groups say that this case's outcome may be as important as the MGM v. Grokster case—perhaps even as important as the Sony Betamax ruling.

Jammie Thomas, who was ordered to pay $222,000 to a group of music labels for allegedly pirating songs using the Kazaa peer-to-peer service, has been granted a new trial...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which had filed briefs in the case, supported the judge's ruling. "EFF applauds Chief Judge Davis's thorough rejection of the RIAA's effort to rewrite copyright law and thereby avoid the trouble of actually proving any infringement has occurred," Corynne McSherry wrote in a blog post. "And we wholeheartedly endorse the court's call to amend the Copyright Act's oppressive damages provisions."

President George W. Bush signed into law on Monday a controversial bill that would stiffen penalties for movie and music piracy at the federal level.

The law creates an intellectual property czar who will report directly to the president on how to better protect copyrights both domestically and internationally. The Justice Department had argued that the creation of this position would undermine its authority.

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Richard Esguerra, spokesman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said he was relieved to see lawmakers had stripped out a measure to have the Justice Department file civil lawsuits against pirates, which would have made the attorneys "pro bono personal lawyers for the content industry."

James Cicconi, AT&T's senior vice president for external & legal affairs, set off a firestorm last week after The New York Times reported that he said his company was working with the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America to implement a digital-fingerprinting scheme and would detect and filter out copyrighted material from its network.

"Everyone who understands the technology agrees that most simple filtering efforts are doomed to fail, since all the file-sharing applications will simply encrypt the traffic, [thus] necessitating more complex deep-packet protocol analysis, at a minimum," says Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation "I'm told that 20% of Bit Torrent traffic is already encrypted."

College students are online pirates – stealing music-file booty on a daily basis – and renowned for being the scourge of the digital seas.

Normally the news is peppered with lawsuits brought by organizations against increasing numbers of file sharers, with the intent of sending reminders to the rest of the questionable legality of their practices. However, there’s someone on the pirates’ side: the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Danny O’Brien, international outreach coordinator for the EFF, visited campus Tuesday night to spread information about the EFF’s attempts to preserve digital rights for everyone. “We try to make sure the existing technical liberties you have don’t get chipped away,” he said.

In a move with potentially far-reaching implications for Web users and Internet companies alike, Time Warner Cable will test a new model for high-speed Internet access that charges users based on how much bandwidth they consume.

ISPs have long complained that certain uses gaining popularity on the Web are depleting their network resources. Last summer, Comcast was found to have rationed bandwidth when users were grabbing massive files from P2P site BitTorrent. In the wake of that revelation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation Latest News about Electronic Frontier Foundation suggested alternatives to all-you-can-consume monthly plans may be a way for ISPs to legitimately ration their network capacity.

"The availability of metered access alongside all-you-can-eat plans, combined with accurate advertising by ISPs, is one alternative that might solve the congestion issues raised by the downloading habits of a small number of users," EFF staff attorney Fred von Lohmann told the E-Commerce Times.

Can the act of file sharing take place "passively," without the users' direct involvement; and if so, can they no longer be held liable for copyright infringement? That's the question a US district court is preparing to consider.

Next week, an Arizona district court will hear arguments in the ongoing case of the Howell family of Scottsdale, who last August was found to be illegally distributing 2,329 MP3s in violation of copyright. At that time, the judge in the case ruled that the fact that those MP3s appeared in Mr. Howell's shared music folder for his Kazaa program was proof enough that he had intention to share them, and that no evidence needed to be uncovered of actual subsequent file transfers.

The digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation has gotten involved in a pending lawsuit by the recording industry, arguing that uploading music files isn't enough to constitute infringement unless there's also evidence that people downloaded those files. "An infringement of the distribution right requires the unauthorized, actual dissemination of copies of a copyrighted work," the EFF wrote in a brief filed Friday in federal district court in Arizona in the RIAA's lawsuit against part-time cab driver Jeffrey Howell and his wife Pamela.

The music labels' case against Jeffrey and Pamela Howell has taken on mythic dimensions over the last few weeks after the Washington Post went a little nuts and implied that the labels were suing the couple for making personal rips of their CDs (it later corrected the story). The truth is that Howells are being sued for having those rips in a shared KaZaA folder. But lost in the controversy over the RIAA's refusal to say that personal CD ripping is legal is the fact that the Howells aren't being sued for swapping songs with thousands of people around the world; instead, they are charged with making songs "available" for download. In a new amicus brief (PDF), the EFF argues that there's no such thing as "attempted copyright infringement." Yet.

Because the law specifically gives copyright owners the ability to control copies distributed "to the public," the music labels need to show that such distribution took place. The EFF points out that the copyright holder itself can hardly be considered "the public," and goes on to claim that "an authorized agent acting on behalf of the copyright owner also cannot infringe any rights held by that owner." Their conclusion is therefore that "where the only evidence of infringing distribution consists of distributions to authorized agents of the copyright owner, that evidence cannot, by itself, establish that other, unauthorized distributions have taken place."