According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's attorney, Fred von Lohmann, it was his refusal to hire a lawyer who could represent him in court. "I think if Howell had an expert and lawyer to speak for him, he would have told a different story," von Lohmann told Ars Technica. Now Howell owes $40,500 in damages, plus 2.12 percent interest until he pays it off. On top of that, he has to pay the court $350 in costs. That's a lot of used Guns N' Roses CDs.

The site uses a package of Javascript, Mootools, which was also used by Muxtape. And in the source code, an HTML comment reading "Liberating taste" appears where an ASCII graphic appears in the Muxtape source code. The launch of Opentape is likely a tactic in Muxtape's fight against the RIAA. It puts the record industry trade organization in the position of having to play whack-a-mole as mixes pop up on numerous clone sites using the open-source software. It also means that Muxtape's backers no longer have to shoulder the site's soaring bandwidth costs.

• Biden this year "proposed a $1 billion program to monitor P2P networks for “illegal activity” and a version made it through Judiciary."
• Last year, Biden sponsored an RIAA bill designed to limit the recording and playback of individual songs from Satellite and Internet radio stations.
• Biden "urged the Justice Department to prosecute individuals who allowed mass-copying intentionally through P2P."

I was born and raised in Alabama. Went to school there. I know these people, I have lived among them, I am one of them, and let me tell you something...they're assholes.

However, Alabama is notorious for having the kind of civil litigation environment that makes tort reform advocates scream about "jackpot justice." So she probably thinks she can make this thing pay out like a Biloxi slot machine, and given the right sort of jurors, she probably can. Until the massive award gets knocked down to nubbins on appeal.

Please, somebody from Mississippi - do something stupid in public, quick!

They're clearly not spending enough money on ??? to achieve profit.

A tipster tells us Muxtape investor Jakob Lodwick has been heard to complain that the site's hosting bill alone amounts to $30,000 per day. That figure seems absurdly high — but could our tipster have misheard Lodwick saying the bill is $30,000 a month? After Muxtape's first day, Ouellette posted the site's stats, reporting 8,685 users uploading and playing 19,731 songs over 35,000 visits cost Muxtape $118.17 with Amazon's S3 online-storage service. Extrapolate that first day over a month, at Amazon's standard rates, and you've got a $3,545 hosting bill. Compete.com confirms that Muxtape's user base has grown at least tenfold since then, making a $30,000/mo. hosting bill not just plausible, but likely.

The bill is also far more than Lodwick or Ouellette seem to have expected. In an accidentally published investment term sheet, Ouellette estimated three months of hosting would cost $18,000. That's about $72,000 off the mark, enough to eat through Lodwick's $95,000 investment and shut down the site, angry letters from the RIAA or no.

Let's not forget: Apple pays a similar percentage to music labels for sales through iTunes, and yet it manages to stay in business. For that matter, Google pays publishers the bulk of advertising revenues it collects on ads it places on their websites. Oh, and how much of Wal-Mart's revenues get shipped straight to its suppliers in China? It's not like it's impossible to make a living in a business where most of your revenues go to the people who make the business possible. Perhaps this is Pandora's problem, not the music industry's.

One way Pandora could boost revenue and curry favor with the RIAA is through good old-fashioned payola. Why not strike a deal to waive royalties on tracks the industry would like to see promoted and mixed into playlists just a little more heavily than usual? Users would still have a "commercial-free" listening experience, and Pandora could provide the thumbs-up, thumbs-down data back to promotions and marketing departments with contextual data like related songs as chosen by listeners to boot.

Or Pandora could cater to the hipster avant-garde. Why not broaden affiliate sales to vinyl? LP sales jumped over 33 percent from 2006 to 2007. Let me program "only if available for online purchase on vinyl" into my Pandora listening schedule. If I could click-to-buy a 12" of Pushin' On by the Quantic Soul Orchestra, I'm sold on the record and even $10 a year for the filter feature and a few others besides.

(Photo by Steven Toomey)

"Please remove this script, it can only contribute to getting the site shut down," Ouellette wrote in April on Userscripts.org. "As long as you can hear the music you can copy it, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to do the diligence of trying to stop casual downloading (one of the things that would hurt its long-term viability)," he wrote on another occasion. "I was naïve enough to think assholes like you wouldn't want to wreak a good thing, but I guess I was wrong," he concluded.

He's been quieter since then, aside from suggesting the site would drop the popular MP3 format in an effort to stop downloaders. The scripters have kept up their efforts.

Not that this cat-and-mouse game matters. The RIAA has wisely left Muxtape alone, avoiding an ugly publicity squabble over a site that has yet to show any commercial potential. If it does begin to show some financial success, then the music-industry lawyers will swoop in demanding money.

People are swift to criticize the RIAA, which has made a number of boneheadedly unpopular moves. But what should we say about the naivete of entrepreneurs like Ouellette, who are hoping that battling Firefox script kiddies will somehow count in their favor when the record labels come knocking? Muxtape's lawyers might make a "safe harbor" argument under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — but that requires showing that Ouellette was unaware of copyright violations on the site. Hard to argue that, when he uses it himself.

What brought down Revision3's network wasn't the security hole, however. It was MediaDefender's response after Revision3 technicians noticed the breach and shut it down. MediaDefender's servers, in what that company told Louderback was an automated response, started trying to contact Revision3's servers through the now-closed hole. That turned into a flood of traffic that overwhelmed Revision3's network.

MediaDefender has worked for Sony Music, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the Motion Picture Association of America to shut down illegal file-sharing networks. But Revision3's use of file sharing for its own content was entirely legal; to the extent its servers pointed to any illegal files, it was only because of MediaDefender's hacking, Louderback tells me.

Revision3 has asked the FBI to investigate MediaDefender's alleged abuses. For years, the music and movie industries have been telling us that sharing files is criminal, and that blocking file-sharing networks is proper. For millions of file-sharing users, it would be quite satisfying to see the opposite proved in court.

The RIAA does not recognize that you have a legal right to rip your CDs into MP3s. The RIAA will not say that ripping MP3s for personal use is legal. That's why the Sony executive said ripping a song was the same as stealing one. To sum up, the RIAA does believe a majority of American music buyers are thieving criminals, but it's not going to sue anyone over ripping MP3s because a) it's not really a big deal b) there's no way to find out and/or c) it would be terrible publicity to sue someone for using an iPod.

The recording industry is suffering from a bit of an image problem lately. Beyond digital ineptitude, as illustrated by Universal CEO Doug Morris and Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman, the RIAA is wasting money on lawsuits while attempting to hack publicly funded universities. Bad press isn't the best way to win consumer goodwill, and by cutting ties with the rest of the industry, EMI could send the message that it cares more about selling music than suing its customers.

As Zachary McCune, a sophomore at Brown University, once a hotbed for student anti-war protests in the Vietnam era, puts it:

People wonder why college students aren't rallying more around the Iraq war," Mr. McCune said. "If there were a draft, we probably would be. Students are so quick to fight for this cause because we're the ones bearing the burden.

Ah, that's an idea for NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker, the industry's most notable anti-piracy whiner! Rather than enlist the entire government to fight copyright, use a government draft to enlist college students to fight the war in Iraq! I suspect file sharing would no longer be today's college kids' most pressing political issue. And then, better yet, Zucker could make a reality show out of it. (Photo by Thomas Good)

• Guns N' Roses: "Welcome to the Jungle"; "November Rain"
• Vanessa Williams: "Save the Best for Last"
• Janet Jackson: "Let's Wait Awhile"
• Gloria Estefan: "Here We Are"; "Coming Out of the Dark"; "Rhythm is Gonna Get You"
• Goo Goo Dolls: "Iris"
• Journey: "Faithfully"; "Don't Stop Believin'"
• Sarah McLachlan: "Possession"; "Building a Mystery"
• Aerosmith: "Cryin'"
• Linkin Park: "One Step Closer"
• Def Leppard: "Pour Some Sugar on Me"
• Reba McEntire: "One Honest Heart"
• Bryan Adams: "Somebody"
• No Doubt: "Bathwater"; "Hella Good"; "Different People"
• Sheryl Crow: "Run Baby Run"
• Richard Marx: "Now and Forever"
• Destiny's Child: "Bills, Bills, Bills"
• Green Day: "Basket Case"

Note the inclusion of "Bills, Bills, Bills" on that list. Someone on the majors' legal team has quite the sense of humor!

RIAA Trial Produces Playlist of the Century [Threat Level]

We can't wait to see save-the-children-type public service announcements before our porn starts, begging watchers not to pirate the videos like the ridiculous ones we see now before movies showcasing all the people "behind-the-scenes" like gaffers and script editors and the like.

Dear readers, remember: don't pirate pornography. Please, think of the fluffers.

(Photo by Boss Tweed)