Los Angeles - Muxtape, a popular free music playlist-sharing service, has taken itself offline in light of an unspecified request from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Los Angeles - A federal judge has sided with the argument of a 16-year-old girl who claimed she had no knowledge or understanding of file-sharing or copyright infringement, and ruled she will only have to pay $200 per song, instead of the $750-30,000 allowed under the Copyright Act, Ars Technica reported.

Boston - Tufts University is challenging a judge's order that it turn over the identities behind the IP addresses the record industry charges were used for illicit file-sharing on its campus network, arguing that two of the IP addresses could belong to up to 40 different students, Ars Technica reported.

Duluth, Minn. - The federal judge presiding over the case of Jammie Thomas, the first person convicted by a jury of criminal copyright infringement of music on a file-sharing network, signaled during a proceeding on Monday that he is likely to declare a mistrial in the case, according to coverage by Wired.com and others. The hearing was scheduled after the judge announced in May he may have made a "manifest error" when he instructed the jury that simply the "making available" of songs from Thomas' computer on Kazaa constituted infringement -- even if no actual distribution had been proven.

The Motion Picture Association of America is doing their best to follow in the footsteps of their brethren at the RIAA and make business harder for its members. They, Im guessing at the direction of some lawyers of their member companies, want to try to make cable and satellite companies shut off the "analog hole" when showing movies that are being released to TV prior to their DVD release. In the MPAA's own words "Distribution over insecure outputs would facilitate the illegal copying and redistribution of this high value content, causing untold damage to the DVD and other 'downstream' markets."

Portland, Ore. - A federal judge has awarded an Oregon woman $107,834 in attorneys' fees to compensate for her expenses in a file-sharing copyright lawsuit that the record labels eventually dropped. The attorney for exonerated defendant Tanya Andersen had sought nearly $300,000 in attorneys' fees, while lawyers for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) had argued that that amount was excessive, and instead asked the court to award just $30,000 in fees.

New York - The major players in contentious negotiations over digital music royalties, which pit music publishers, record labels and digital music services against one another, have reached a settlement on two of five major issues, Billboard reported, citing an account from David Israelite, president and CEO of the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA).

San Francisco - A group of ten law professors has filed a friend of the court brief, indicating they believe a judge erred when he told the jury in the file-sharing copyright infringement case against Jammie Thomas that simply the "making available" of songs in a shared folder on a computer constitutes copyright infringement, Wired.com reports. The "making available" claim is a key argument in the record labels' 20,000 copyright lawsuits against file-swappers.

Los Angeles - The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has recently begun increasing its settlement amount offers to students who refuse to immediately settle and instead file motions or take the RIAA to court to challenge charges they illegally shared music online, Ars Technica reported.

Seattle - The investigations being conducted by copyright holders on file-sharing networks to discover instances of infringement are flawed, and can mistakenly identify innocent parties, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Washington. The researchers monitored file-sharing activity on the BitTorrent network last year, and in the course of their study received 206 complaints of infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) -- even though their machines transferred no illegal files.

Duluth, Minn. - The federal judge who presided over the first music file-sharing copyright damages award against an individual, when in October a jury ordered Jammie Thomas to pay record labels $220,000 in damages, said this week that he may have erred in his instructions to the jury, and is considering granting a new trial, according to reports.

Los Angeles - The major record labels that sued Tanya Andersen (Atlantic v. Andersen) for infringing their copyrights on file-sharing networks, then eventually dropped their case, have been ordered by a federal court in Oregon to pay her nearly $108,000 in attorneys fees and costs, P2PNet reports.

Los Angeles - The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors this week expanded the ordinance that allows for the county to shutter a property that becomes a "public nuisance," such as in gang or drug-related instances, to include properties used to illegally manufacture and sell recordings and audiovisual works. "This ordinance is an important milestone in our efforts to curb piracy in Los Angeles," said Dan Glickman, chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). "In its approval of this ordinance, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors have officially recognized that piracy isn't just an industry problem, but one that has a significant impact on the local economy as well."

San Francisco - Project Playlist, a service that aggregates streaming music links into playlists, and has been sued for copyright infringement by three of the four major record labels, has hired former Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) CEO Jay Berman as a consultant, CNET News.com reports. Project Playlist CEO Jeremy Riney told News.com that he will shut his site down if he is not able to license music legally from the labels; the sole major not party to the lawsuit against the company, Sony BMG, is reportedly negotiating with Project Playlist.

Los Angeles - A federal judge has rejected a pillar of the recording industry's argument in the copyright infringement lawsuits it has filed against file-swappers, ruling that simply "making available" songs in a shared folder on their computers does not equate to infringement. In Atlantic v. Howell, Judge Neil V. Wake has dismissed the label's motion for summary judgment against Pamela and Jeffrey Howell, saying in his ruling that "merely making an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work available to the public does not violate a copyright holder's exclusive right of distribution."

New York - Divisions of three of the four major record labels on Monday filed copyright infringement lawsuits against Project Playlist, a site that lets users create playlists from streaming songs served from all over the Internet, Reuters reported. For its part, Project Playlist maintains that it does not host any music files, but instead merely links to files on many third-party sites, including many on record label websites.

Los Angeles - While U.S. CD shipments were down 17.5% in 2007, digital formats now account for 23% of U.S. recording revenues, up from 16.1% in 2006 and 9% in 2005, according to year-end shipment data calculated by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). A total of 809.9 million digital song downloads were sold in 2007, a 38% increase from 2006, along with 42.5 million digital albums, up 54% from the prior year.

Washington - The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) spent nearly $2.1 million in 2007 lobbying Congress for favorable copyright-related legislation, Ars Technica reported, citing the group's disclosure via the Lobbying Disclosure Act.

New York - A federal judge in New York has ruled that a user's "making available" of songs or other copyrighted files using file-sharing software does not in and of itself construe infringement, in what could prove to be a setback in the record industry's legal campaign against such activities, CNET News.com reported.