plus: Napster. RIAA's Anti-Piracy Unit. jackson5.com. What does Music Row think about their music? Korn [ tickets ] and other plants.

A New York jury found rapper Sean "Puffy" Combs not guilty of gun possession and bribery charges in connection with a 1999 nightclub shooting, the Associated Press reported. Combs' bodyguard Anthony Jones was also acquitted, but fellow rapper Jamaal "Shyne" Barrow was convicted on two counts of assaut. The verdict came on Friday (3/18).

Napster’s recently activated filtering system--the purpose of which is to block the trading of copyrighted works--is apparently improving, according to a Wired.com report. The report says that, as of Thursday afternoon (3/15), “veteran Napster traders” noted that far fewer copyrighted songs were available on the service.

The U.S. Secret Service, assisted by the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) New York Anti-Piracy Unit, raided bootleg-CD operations in Queens and Manhattan, N.Y., on March 8, according to an RIAA press release.

Approximately 20,000 recorded CD-Rs and 1,200 master CDs--featuring the work of artists such as Tito Puente, Julio Iglesias, Santana, Jay-Z, Jennifer Lopez, and the Beatles--were seized in the raid, as were 102 eight-speed CD-R burners, nine computer monitors, four computers, three thermal imprinters, two paper-cutting machines, two laptops, two industrial color copiers, and two industrial shrink-wrap machines.

Motown Records has filed suit over the domain name jackson5.com, Billboard reported. The label licensed the Jackson 5 trademark in 1973.

Mercury Nashville chairman Luke Lewis and MCA Nashville president Tony Brown--while speaking during a panel at the annual South by Southwest music convention in Austin, Texas, on Thursday (3/15)--said that country music has become boring, and that country record-label executives don’t listen to the music that they sell, according to a report in Nashville paper the Tennesseean.

''For me, in Nashville our music is totally boring, and I'm partly responsible,'' Brown said. ''I think we've let ourselves be manipulated too much by radio.''

''If you were to poll label heads on Music Row,” Lewis added, “the ones who didn't lie to you would tell you they don't listen to country radio. How sad is that?''

Marijuana enthusiasts and parents of underage Korn fans alike will be interested to learn that the band’s latest email newsletter touts a 40-percent-off sale on an engraved Korn “dug out.” The item is a small wooden case that contains a marijuana pipe--commonly referred to as a “one-hitter”--and room for Korn fans to, as the band’s advertisement says, “Carry your herbal refreshment in a discreet way.”