“There is an agreement that any recovered funds will be paid to IFPI Sweden and IFPI London for use in future anti-piracy activities,” IFPI writes.

“They say that people who download give money to thieves – but if someone actually ends up paying (in this case: three individuals) then it’s been paid for. So who’s the thief when they don’t give the money to the artists?”

According to Sunde the news doesn’t come as a surprise.

“As far as I know, no money ever won in a lawsuit by IFPI or the RIAA has even gone to any actual artist,” Sunde says.

Perhaps what amazes me most is that the public backlash to this kind of behavior is as predictable as a grandfather clock. How can the copyright monopoly lobby’s lawyers live in so completely disconnected an ivory tower, that they thought it was a good idea to file lawsuit against a reputable professor for claiming they’re a monopoly, using monopolistic practices – when this fact is not only well-established to the point of being in dictionaries, but even legislated? What kind of survivability would such a parasitic misantropic business have in the wild, if it were not protected by obsolete laws?

“Google continues to fail to prioritize legal music sites over illegal sites in search results, claiming that its algorithm for search results is based on the relevance of sites to consumers,” the document states.

“With a view to addressing this failure, IFPI obtained a highly confidential and preliminary legal opinion in July 2011 on the possibility of bringing a competition law complaint against Google for abuse of its dominant position, given the distortion of the market for legitimate online music that is likely to result from Google’s prioritizing of illegal sites.”

Over the past two weeks, we have seen coordinated attacks on democratic institutions such as the European Parliament and national governments over ACTA. The signatories to this letter and their members stand against such attempts to silence the democratic process. Instead, we call for a calm and reasoned assessment of the facts rather than the misinformation circulating.

Does the Commission not see any problems in recruiting top civil servants from special interest organisations, especially when being put in charge of dossiers directly related to their former employers? If not, why not?

Does the Commission feel that such an appointment would help to build confidence with the European Parliament and the general public that the Commission can be trusted to handle copyright-related issues in a fair and balanced manner?

That woman always hated me.

In any case, I proceeded to corner my little brother as he held onto his sweet chocolate and pudding prize, and explained to him that it would be better for everyone if he just ignored Judge Mother's ruling and gave me the eclair instead.  All manner of good things would follow, I insisted.  And do you know what that little ginger-haired jerk did?  He smiled at me, patted me on the shoulder, and shoved every last ounce of that 8 inch eclair into his mouth, rolling his eyes in exaggerated pleasure as he did so.

Witness the collective music industry reacting to their sound defeat in Chinese Court while accusing Baidu and Sohu of copyright infringement for indexing links to MP3 files.  Now, there's been some likely fair concern that Baidu may be hiding some actual hosting of infringing files, but the music labels apparently didn't come close to proving that in court as it seems the main issue discussed in the trial was their linking to infringing files.  But the point is they lost.  The judge, like my tyrantess of a mother, raised Baidu's arm and pronounced them the victors.

And so the collective music industry has gone to the Financial Times (found via PaidContent.org) to basically ask Baidu to ignore the ruling and do what they ask anyway because of all the great and wonderful things that will come once they do.  They're basically pulling my routine after I lost my delicious eclair, but their letters offer up some wonderful doozies:

"This is a country with twice as many internet users as the US, but where legitimate music consumption is miniscule, with digital revenues per user at less than 1% of the US equivalent."

Damn Chinese people, always refusing to spend as much as Americans on music.  Nevermind the cultural differences that may be coming into play here.  Nevermind that the nominal GDP for the United States is some thirteen times that of China.  We want the Chinese to pay as much for their music as Americans, damn it, and the way to do that is to get Baidu to voluntarily limit their own search results.  And that's exactly what the Financial Times letter indicates:

 "Baidu is the biggest source of this problem, with its MP3 music search service estimated to be responsible for over 50% of infringing music distribution in China.  It has the means to bring immediate change by proactively filtering infringing works from this service."

So, you see, if Baidu would just filter out the infringing content, relatively poor Chinese citizens would suddenly spend big bucks for music.  And perhaps Ferraris.  Ooooh, and those sweet 100 ft. yachts I'm sure they'd all like to actually pay for if they had any damn money!

My brother didn't have any money either, but he had his chocolate eclair, so he told me shove my request in places that usually only pornstars put things.  I expect Baidu will respond in similar fashion.

Fewer new artists are breaking through globally. Total sales by debut artists in the global top 50 album chart in 2010 were just one quarter of the level they achieved in 2003

Traditionally vibrant music local industries, such as Spain and Mexico, are especially hard hit. In Spain, where music sales fell by an estimated 22 per cent in 2010, no new home-grown artist featured in the country's top 50 album chart, compared with 10 in 2003

In light of the serious violations of copyright facilitated by The Pirate Bay service, and in accordance with Google's policies (see http://www.google.com/dmca.html andhttps://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=58&ctx=sibling) we are asking for your immediate assistance in removing from your index, or otherwise disabling access to via your search engine, URLs linking to the website for The Pirate Bay including but not limited to the URLs specified in the attachment to this notice.

Our use of a notice in this form, as required by Google, is meant to facilitate Google's removal of search results linking directly to infringing web pages and we neither admit nor accept that Google is a 'service provider' for the purposes of the DMCA or that it is necessary to serve, or that Google is entitled to be served, a notice in compliance with the DMCA. IFPI itself and on behalf of the IFPI Represented Companies expressly reserves all rights in this regard.

Please note that we do not admit that we or the IFPI Represented Companies are responsible for detecting infringing material and notifying you of it.

"The publishing of this bill is only the beginning of a process, and some of its provisions must be amended in order to bring Canada in line with its international treaty obligations as well as evolving international norms. As it is, it simply does not go far enough to protect creators and producers in the digital environment."