3 Count: Time Warp

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1: Appeals Court Raises Damages Award in Music Piracy Case

First off today, Reuters is reporting that the music industry scored a major win against Jammie Thomas-Rasset as the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has unanimously reinstated a $222,000 jury verdict against her. Thomas-Rasset, who was sued by the organization in 2006 for illegal file sharing has been fighting the RIAA in court ever since. Though she was found liable the first jury award of $222,000 was thrown out due to faulty jury instruction. A second jury awarded the RIAA $1.92 million but the judge reduced that amount to $54,000, calling it excessive. Rather than accepting the new damages, the RIAA retried the case and a third jury awarded $1.5 million in damages, only to have the amount reduced again, prompting the appeal and the Appeals Court to restore the first jury verdict. Thomas-Rasset’s attorney has said they will appeal the matter to the Supreme Court.

2: After Deportation, Pirate Bay Co-Founder Arrested in Sweden

Next up today, Chloe Albaneslus of PC Magazine reports that, as was widely expected, Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Swartholm Warg has been arrested in his native Sweden after being deported from Cambodia, where he was staying. Warg was arrested in Cambodia last week and deported two days ago. Warg and three others had been tried on criminal copyright infringement charges in Sweden and found guilty. He and the others were sentenced to up to one year in jail and ordered to pay millions in fines and damages. However, Warg missed the appeal, citing health issues that prevented him from leaving Cambodia and he also missed the start date of his sentence, prompting an international warrant for him to be issued. That resulted in Cambodian authorities and deporting him on immigration violations.

3: Google Adds Pirate Bay Domains to Censorship List

Finally today, in other Pirate Bay news, Google has updated its list of censored search phrases to include The Pirate Bay’s domains, preventing them from coming as autocomplete suggestions for users searching for content. Google had previously done the same to the term “The Pirate Bay” but had not done so for the site’s domains, which routinely came up in autocomplete. Google has taken similar action against words such as BitTorrent, Mediafire, and Megaupload, all of which caused the number of searches to those sites to drop drastically. The move comes shortly after Google announced a “Pirate Penalty” for sites that receive a large volume of DMCA notices though the effects of that penalty is unclear.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

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