A lawsuit recently filed against the RIAA asserts claims, under the "Computer Fraud and Abuse" and "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization" acts, detailing the RIAA's alleged use of "illegal and flawed" methods when investigating people for downloading or swapping copyrighted songs without paying for them.

Slashdot had this scoop, posted by xseedit: "The RIAA has moved their main Web site www.riaa.com from IIS on Win2003 to Apache 2.2.3 on Red Hat. It appears that the move did not go smoothly as it resulted in an 8-hour downtime starting yesterday around noon, according to Netcraft. And the RIAA is still showing a 'temporarily under construction' page."

In what will surely become a landmark case -- or at least a massive thorn in the MPAA and RIAA's clubbed, pygmy feet -- a judge has ruled that bypassing DRM via hacking, reverse engineering or any other means is not in itself illegal.

RIAA-fan Biden's influence in the Obama administration may be larger than anticipated, at least when it comes to file sharing: His good pals with RIAA and BSA connections keep getting Department of Justice's seats.

"Yesterday, while we were publishing our response to the RIAA's recent attack on the merit of organizations who represent the public's interest filing informative briefs in cases that threaten to negatively affect the public's interest, the RIAA was attacking us again.

RMS: « The RIAA is using a fraudulent accusation to threaten the main lawyer that defends the RIAA's victims. »

"As many of you know, a remarkable event took place the other day, when the technical community reached out its hand to the victims of the RIAA reign of terror, and the Free Software Foundation established a special fund to assist the victims of the RIAA's onslaught. I think this is a cataclysmic event in the history of the RIAA's litigation campaign.

here are a number of newcomers who migrate to Linux and then find themselves at ends with the confusion regarding restricted formats and codecs in the US. The laws regarding usage are confusing and all over the map, thus leaving many Linux distributions forced to mark them as possibly illegal to use in some countries, despite no solid evidence to actually support this outside of MPAA and RIAA rhetoric, which is hardly a court's decision. And in a recent article, I took this whole idea to task and examine how it may not actually be illegal to use libdvdcss after all.

"The Free Software Foundation has announced that it has established an Expert Witness Defense Fund to assist defendants in RIAA cases, in order "to help provide computer expert witnesses to combat RIAA's ongoing lawsuits, and to defend against the RIAA's attempt to redefine copyright law."

Contributions to the Fund are tax deductible and may be made at the following URL...