RIAA puts up a generous face and offers the infringing mom the chance of an 'advantageous' deal

Last month we reported about Jammie Thomas-Rasset’s file sharing case which ended with the 32 year-old mom receiving no less than a $1.9 million (£1.2 million) fine for violating copyright law in the USA by sharing 24 unauthorized songs over the Internet.

Some days after the verdict, RIAA’s lawyers asked Thomas-Rasset if she would consider a deal.

The answer came promptly and Thomas-Rasset's lawyers said her client was not interested in any settlement that would mean paying any money to the music industry or admitting being guilty to any extent, RIAA spokesperson declared.

According to CNET News, Joe Sibley, one of Thomas-Rasset's attorneys, said he didn’t know of any such deal being discussed and needed to consult his law partner. The site also writes:

Throughout, the RIAA has said it is willing to settle and at one point was asking for just $5,000 from Thomas-Rasset. There is a chance that she could walk away from the nearly $2 million damage award by declaring bankruptcy, legal experts have said.

Recently, RIAA's credibility has been put to doubt (again) in reference to the number of settlements and warning letters it has sent to people suspected of illegal file-sharing.

In April we reported about the release of OneSwarm 0.6., a privacy-preserving P2P client developed at the University of Washington, backwards compatible with BitTorrent but also including features meant to protect the users’ privacy. Now OneSwarm v0.6.2 has become available. This latest version comes with a new feature which makes the app even more attractive - support for community servers.

OneSwarm is a p2p file sharing program with a special focus on user privacy. The site reads:

OneSwarm is a new peer-to-peer tool that provides users with explicit control over their privacy by letting them determine how data is shared. Instead of sharing data indiscriminately, data shared with OneSwarm can be made public, it can be shared with friends, shared with some friends but not others, and so forth. We call this friend-to-friend (F2F) data sharing. OneSwarm is:

• Privacy preserving: OneSwarm uses source address rewriting to protect user privacy. Instead of always transmitting data directly from sender to receiver (immediately identifying both), OneSwarm may forward data through multiple intermedaries, obscuring the identity of both sender and receiver. For more details, check out the OneSwarm overview screencast or our papers.
• User friendly: OneSwarm’s interface is web-based and supports real-time transcoding of many audio and video formats for in-browser playback, eliminating the need for casual users to master a new application’s interface or search for custom media codecs.
• Open: OneSwarm is freely available and built on existing standards. OneSwarm can operate as a fully backwards compatible BitTorrent client, and its friend-to-friend data sharing features are built on cryptographic standards, e.g., X.509 certificates and SSL encryption.

Go here to download.

The team behind Skype keeps itself pretty busy all the time releasing regularly new versions of the VoIP program on one of the platforms (except for Windows Mobile).

For Skype users who have the app on their WinMo phone should, Skype 3.0 has gone gold and can now be downloaded from here.

The new release offers file sharing and SMS texting, two fresh features meant to please a great number of users who have been waiting for them for a long time. You can get the app either as a PC version or a downloadable CAB file to install it directly from the phone.