EU Public Affairs Monitor - 27/08/08

Feds arrest man accused of posting unreleased Guns N' Roses songs August 27, 2008
"How he got his hands on the goods, we don't yet know. But today, police visited the home of a Culver City man and arrested him on suspicion of violating federal copyright law by posting nine previously unreleased Guns N' Roses songs on a website, Scott Glover reports in this L.A. Times story.

In June, the nine songs, from the band's upcoming album "Chinese Democracy," ended up on the website Antiquiet, which drew the attention of the feds. The site received so much traffic that it crashed.

Kevin Cogill, 27, told the FBI that he had posted the songs, according to an arrest affidavit. (In other stories, Cogill has been quoted as Kevin Skwerl, who, according to Rolling Stone, operates Antiquiet and used to work in the distribution office of Universal Music. The Recording Industry Assn. of America says it's the same person.) "Leak or no leak, I said that the only way the album would be a net success would be if the music was good enough to move units for years to come," he wrote at the time on his blog." [LATimes]

Co-regulation for “illicit P2P” August 5th, 2008
"The Department for Business (BERR) is consulting on a co-regulatory approach that it is considering adopting to tackle the use of peer-to-peer filesharing networks (P2P) for copyright infringement.

The six largest consumer broadband access providers by market share have agreed to a Code of Practice that would see them writing to customers instructing them to stop infringing activity when they receive a complaints from rightsholder bodies. They would also pass on copies of the rightsholder’s complaint. This plan has been criticised by both rightsholder and ISP sympathisers: the latter see “nasty-grams” as harming the ISP’s relationship with their customer, and conceding the dangerous principle that the ISP is responsible for their customers’ use of the network, while the copyright activists say that the scheme doesn’t go far enough, and unless the ISPs actually disconnect customers then users can just ignore it." [PublicAffairsLynx]