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RIAA says piracy "contained"

Sounds like, "Let's declare victory and withdraw." 

The CEO of the RIAA tells USA Today, "The problem has not been eliminated," said Mitch Bainwol. "But we believe digital downloads have emerged into a growing thriving business and file-trading is flat."

Not so fast groove-boy.

Eric Garland, chief of BigChampagne, says his servers and trackers are seeing more file-sharing.  "Nearly 10 million people," he told the newspaper, up from 8.7 million a year ago.  Now, maybe they're not swapping as many music tracks, because online stores are selling millions and millions, but they're downloading something - and it's probably not all games, warez, and videos.

Album sales are down 3% this year, but Bainwol is putting on a happy face.  He says digital sales are up 77%, making up for the shortfall.

At least Bainwol didn't also say "Mission Accomplished."

TechDirt headlines the storry, "RIAA Now Reaches Denial Stage." A reader commented, "I fix peoples PC's in the home, and I have found more instances of P2P file share clients on peoples' home machines today then I did before the lawsuits began."

Copyright pirates bounce back

The Moscow-based low-cost MP3 download site, allofmp3.com, has been up and down over the past week.  Speculation the Russkies finally taking copyright seriously.  Maybe not.  The site's back, 35 albums added in the past 24 hours.

Then, yesterday, Swedish police raided ThePirateBay.org, one of the Net's biggest sites for BitTorrent files, for swapping movies, music, software and more.  A worldwide crackdown?  Nah.  This morning, the site says the Bay will be "will be up and fully functional within a day or two." LA Times: The movie industry viewed the shutdown as a modest victory."

Meanwhile, an e-mail arrived promoting Tunster.com, apparently another Russian-based music download site.  One option is to "Buy full albums and pay by phone anonymously without registering."  Tunster's site says it "pays license fees for all the materials subject to the Law of the Russian Federation 'On Copyright and Related Rights'."   Sure.