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By Tony Smith
Published Friday 17th December 2004 09:53 GMT

The Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) has filed a further 754 lawsuits against named and unnamed individuals it claims have infringed its members’ copyrights.

The latest round of court filings brings the total number of lawsuits the organisation has issued to 7706. However, there seems little sign that the RIAA’s aggressive, highly public legal proceedings have had any real result.

According to market watcher BigChampagne, cited by Reuters, around 7.5m computer users were running P2P software in November – 70.5 per cent more than the 4.4m who did so in November 2003.

The RIAA last filed complaints against alleged music-sharers in November. Then, it targeted 761 people, including a number in US universities and colleges. It issued 750 lawsuits in October.

TorrentBox Legal Defence Fund
We received this letter on December 14th which informed us that the MPAA has filed suit against the individuals responsible for operating this site (www.torrentbox.com) for copyright infringement.

In order to find out more about our legal rights on this matter, and possibly even fight this charge in court, I am asking all BitTorrent users to donate (no matter how small) to the TorrentBox Legal Defence Fund. Until I can afford to inquire a lawyer on this matter, I am turning off the ability to browse and download torrents from ths site. The tracker will remain on, and all torrents using it will now become anonymous and unknown to admins.

The bittorrent community is in dire straits, so please don’t let TorrentBox die like the other sites! -Hohead

This was posted on TorrentBox’s website (www.torrentbox.com), one of the few places I went to obtain my bittorrent files. They too have been hit by the MPAA’s barrage.

I made a backup XViD copy of a movie I own, “Perfect Blue”. However, subtitles for DVDs are saved as images, not text. Therefore I used a tool called SubRip to extract the text from the DVD files using OCR, and time it correctly into a .srt file. I then manually went over every line to get rid of any glitches that may have occured. I’ve released the subtitles file to the public, so that you may not have to go through what I did.

Download Subtitles: perfectblue.srt [60KB]

Happy Holidays Folks! 

I also made a little minute-long video officially wishing my best to all of you!

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Wow. Sooo, the in nation where piracy should be more rampant because of a lack of industry-suing-7,000-customers, you find record sales. Kind of makes the whole effort from the RIAA seem sorta pointless.