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"I can't afford to pay any amount. It's not a matter of won't, it's a matter of I can't." In Minnesota, this is the response that Jammie Thomas-Rasset made about paying 1.5 million dollars for the illegal sharing of music online. Each of the 24 songs that she illegally violated copyrights on is $62,500. Her defense is that she can't afford to pay that kind of money, especially since she is the mother of four children. Sharing over 1,700 songs on Kazaa, a file-sharing site, the Recording Industry of America, on numerous occasions, had tried to settle with the woman at $5,000. The stubborn Thomas-Rasset refused and was criticized for not taking responsibility for her actions. Due to all these problems, Jammie was taken on trial and was proven guilty. Jammie persistently denies her use of Kazaa and is willing to keep fighting. Many people are in the same position as Jammie, and as the saying goes, "Don't do the crime, if you can't do the time."

Date issued: January 7, 2010. An article from Law Vibe. Written by C.C. at International Law News/Lawyer Lifestyle. The article was written about what in the writer's opinion were the top ten biggest copyright infringement lawsuits between 2000 and 2009. Cases such as "Napster shuts down", "Apple sues Pystar", and UMG and Viacom take on Veoh and Youtube" lead the article. A reoccurring theme in the business of copyright lawsuits seems to be illegal file sharing online. Many websites that provided options for illegally downloading music have been sued or shut down over the years, including Napster and Pirate Bay. Modeling agencies such as Perfect 10 sued Google over copyrighted pictures of their models showing up online, the courts however ruled this fair use and the case has since been closed. This article shows a brief history of how copyrighting has become a central legal issue over the past decade and how various companies and defendants have dealt with the cases presented to them.

4. Date Issued: Wednesday, Jul. 28, 2010. An article from the TIME magazine written by Adam Cohen. Cohen, a lawyer, is a former TIME writer and a former member of the New York Times editorial board. The article focuses on the jail breaking being legal or illegal and the fight between Apple and customers who rebels against all the rules Apple has chosen for them; unfairly. But the Liberty of congress has concluded that jail breaking is a fair use. Also The Electronic Frontier Foundation mentioned that they asked the Copyright Office to give a green light to the people who jailbreaks their iPhones. But of course there are others who go against jail breaking and say that it is indeed illegal. The author here is unbiased and informative even though he is 'one of those iPhone maniacs' because he shows both point of views equally.

Issued: March 2009. Big companies are starting to crack down on copyright infringements. With over 15 lawsuits in 2007, the number of lawsuits targeted against blogs has started to rapidly rise. The author, Brian Stelter, is a writer for New York Times who's main focus is on television and the digital media. This article seems to be aimed at the big companies who the author believes are unfairly digging into to copyright laws. The article mentions a lot of disputes such as the ones between New York Times and Gate House Media, Silicon Alley Insider and The Wall Street Journal, Associated Press and All Headlines News and others. Most of the websites getting sued were blogs or newspaper websites that quoted other people's works, assuming it would be okay under the "fair use" statute of copyright laws.

i went to the New York Times online to search the term, "copyright" to get an article relating to copyright issues or infringement. this article by Brian Stelter was published on March 1st, 2009. Stelter is a journalist for the New York Times. Stelter sides with the people who claim to be getting copyrighted. He bases the majority of his article against the bloggers and other online publishes "who seem to be on the rise." He also questions when excerpting from an article becomes illegal copying. Although he mostly sides with the people claiming to be copyrighted he also sheds light on those bloggers and online publishers whom give credit to those sites they excerpted information from. Statler keeps bringing up the issue of "excerpting to find value" in which online publishers combine articles to validate their thesis. In the end, Statler shows both sides of the story and doesn't leave out any information regarding the thoughts of both parties.

By BRIAN STELTER Published: March 1, 2009 Brian Stelter focuses on a quotation from the Silicon Alley Insider which quoted a quarter of Peggy Noonan's Wall Street Journal. "We thank Dow Jones in advance for allowing us to bring it to you." The editor added "in advance" because Dow Jones, the publisher of The Journal, had not given the blog permission to use the column. With this particular instance of copyright infringement and others, Stetler brings light to the fact that permission isn't being given between different industries when taking direct quotations or titles from that industries publication. "Some media executives are growing concerned that the increasingly popular curators of the Web that are taking large pieces of the original work - a practice sometimes called scraping - are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content." He also brings up the numerous lawsuits that arise because of copyright infringement.

Published May 23, 2006. Creative Commons License was a controversial topic. The major objection to Creative Commons licensing was whether it was really sprouting creativity; many who did not agree with creative commons believed that it was allowing people to download free songs and that no creativity was needed to make a mashup by combining various artists' works into one song. Simon Lake, the CEO of a not-for-profit company called Screenrights argued that '"there's a certain arrogance in believing you can do whatever you want to someone else's output. To say copyright stifles creativity is ridiculous. If you put those two things together, copyright is the end process, it's what protects creativity. And to suggest that copying is creating is ridiculous."' However, others disagreed and said that it in fact was the contrary. People, like Jim Moynihan, found that copyrights actually "force you to be more creative." In the end however, creative commons allows artists more freedom and the ability to selectively restrict certain works as copyrighted and to allow other works to be public and accessible. But it is illegal to use unauthorized media in mashups, sampling, and remixes; posing the justified potential threat, to many DJs and creators of reworked media, of lawsuits and getting sued.

An article from BNO News has recently reported that LimeWire has been shut down by a U.S. court on claims that the site was used for infringement. LimeWire is notorious for allowing its users to download music without paying for the file, which begs the question, is this legal? The Recording Industry Association of American, which represents several important record labels such as Sony, EMI, Universal, and Warner filed a lawsuit against LimeWire in 2006 stating that the company was allowing downloading of illegal music, violating the terms of the music's copyright. Since these record labels own the copyrights to the majority of the music that was being distributed, they were losing money and business because they were not getting paid for the use of their music. Lime Group, the company that owns LimeWire, continues to function otherwise, it is just this subsidiary that has been ceased to conduct business. Although the future seems bleak for LimeWire, its CEO remains optimistic.

On October 27, 2010 a very popular music sharing application called Limewire was shut down due to copyright infringement. BNO news reported the story to wireupdate.com and the a few record labels like SOny, EMI, Universal and Warner filed a lawsuit against Limewire in 2006 so this is nothing new for the file sharing company. The Lime Group CEO and owner of Limewire George Searle said "challenging time, we are excited about the future." So he seems to have a good outlook on the future eeven though his company is going through this touch time.

LimeWire, the popular music downloading site, has been shut down. A judge determined that the "downloading or sharing copyrighted content without authorization is illegal." LimeWire will negotiate with the major music companies about licensing deals to offer the legal sale of music. The company is now liable for damages because of their violations of the copyright laws. Issued: October 27, 2010

This article is about how there are many ways that people are trying to stream music, movies, and television shows through the internet. These are legal or illegal depending on the location of the computer based on the countries piracy laws and on the contracts that the media streaming company makes with publishers/recording companies/etc. since they are trying to do this in a legal fashion. In some European companies, they are streaming music via a new service, Spotify, where subscribers can listen to music for free with advertisements, or pay short of 5 pounds for ad-free streaming. However, due to contractual disagreement, Spotify is not available in USA but they are in fact trying to bring this cheaper (but legal) music service to the Americans which could abruptly change the music industry as well as bring turmoil to services like iTunes.