New research today from market research company The NPD Group reveals that illegal downloading of music from P2P networks declined significantly in the wake of a court order shutting down LimeWire. The Recording Industry Association of America, which brought the suit against LimeWire, offers a thoughtful analysis of this research on its blog today.

Unlawful trafficking of copyrighted material accounts for almost one-fourth of Internet traffic worldwide, according a study released Monday. CNBC’s Julia Boorstin said it simply: the “stat on copyright infringement released today is shocking.” The research was conducted by trademark monitoring firm Envisional and commissioned by NBC Universal.  It is the first study to specifically estimate [...]

A Harvard Crimson editorial published today addressing unauthorized file-sharing on university networks is tagged “A Sensible Compromise.” The compromise itself? The university working with copyright owners and their agents such as the MPAA in reducing infringement on university networks. What else is “sensible” is the entire editorial, which gives lie to the notion that everyone [...]

How excited should I get when a company that has enabled more copyright infringement than any in the history of this planet says it plans to ease back somewhat on its enabling of that infringement? I had hoped to quote a full sentence or two from today’s post on Google’s policy blog about its new [...]

Attention songwriters and musicians — there’s a college student out there who actually respects your rights. Thanks to Dean Kay, I’ve come across an editorial written by a University of Illinois student named Charles Tabb. The title of his piece is “Respect musicians’ work: Put an end to illegal file sharing.” The title really says [...]

If you’re a regular follower of the Copyright Alliance, you’ll know of our Creators Across America video series that we launched this past Spring. Through these short video interviews, artists all across our country are speaking up for their rights. They tell a little bit about who they are, what their craft entails, and how [...]

LimeWire has been ordered to shut down permanently, a mere five-and-a-half months after the site was declared illegal, four years after it was first sued, and five years after the Grokster decision made clear that sites inducing copyright infringement were not in fact legal. It’s also been two years since LimeWire’s CEO basically acknowledged to [...]

When a consumer comes across a web site offering high-quality movie and music streams, books, videogames and other media, an ad for Netflix or CitiBank certainly lends an aura of legitimacy to the site. The companies advertising on those sites don’t choose to advertise there; they sign up with an online ad aggregator, like market [...]

While it will go without saying to readers of this blog that I feel there are many harms that can come from the hacking of a Blu-Ray disc, you can hear me make that case on television by following this link: http://bit.ly/dmpCRF In the interview I point out that it only takes one hacker to [...]

Independent filmmaker Ellen Seidler of Fast Girl Films used loans and credit cards to finance a $250,000 motion picture, And Then Came Lola. But as she explains on the film’s web site, her film has appeared all over the Internet on pirate sites profiting from her film through the use of online advertising: It seems [...]