Michigan has been taking a beating in the high-tech press and in Net chat rooms over an update to the state’s penal code that free speech activists claim is an unreasonable effort to stop Internet piracy. Critics of Public Act 672, which was signed into law Dec. 30 by former Gov. John Engler, claim legislators [...]

An earlier court decision that also said Verizon would have to give up the information had been temporarily put on hold. Thursday’s decision will force the telephone company to give up its subscriber’s name in 14 days, unless an appeals court steps in to block the decision pending further review. Source

Story “Thanks to the internet, the music industry has changed, but it has taken a long time for the major labels to wake up to the fact, says Paul Myers Friday April 25, 2003 It was always going to happen. The first of the major labels, EMI, is finally making a significant move to offer [...]

From News.com: “A federal judge in Los Angeles has handed a stunning court victory to file-swapping services Streamcast Networks and Grokster, dismissing much of the record industry and movie studios’ lawsuit against the two companies.” “Defendants distribute and support software, the users of which can and do choose to employ it for both lawful and [...]

There’s been a lot of buzz about Steve Jobs and Apple making some big music news soon. In today’s Wall Street Journal they confirm that, among other things, Apple will announce a new online music site Monday, April 28th. (An interesting side note, in the article they note how Jobs insisted and eventually secured the [...]

With this new release comes the following features: – Participation backup and restoration – Extensive online help for application and website – Auto-updating functionality – Notification of compulsory installation of a fileshare client if one is not found – intelliLink generator with support for both URL and HTML links The following bug fixes were made: [...]

AntiCap can reveal today that Telewest/Blueyonder have proposed the following draconian alterations to their ‘Acceptable Use Policy’ that would quite simply outlaw peer to peer filesharing and the running of game servers as well as other internet activity The proposed changes have been posted to the blueyonder newsgroup hierarchy. Here’s an excerpt Section 5 Internet [...]

AviPreview has finally done an upgrade. The new version does the following: -Index caching: dramatically increases index regeneration speed. You never have to re-index your partial download again. -Error correction. Tired of AVIPreview by AJ stopping in the middle of a video (or even on the first seconds in some occasions)? This happens due to [...]

U.S. District Court Judge John Bates ruled Thursday Verizon must reveal the names of two Internet customers the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) claims have illegally downloaded hundreds of copyrighted songs from the Web. Bates also issued a temporary stay to allow the U.S. Court of Appeals time to consider the issue of a [...]

DescriptionKazaa Lite Toolbar is a customizable toolbar and web address bar integrated to Kazaa Lite interface. It’s useful to open favorite web pages, web email, shared folder or external tools (like Antivirus, Windows Media Player, Volume Control, AVIPreview, Sig2Dat, etc.) directly from Kazaa Lite. Also works with Kazaa Media Desktop. The toolbar also includes a [...]

Microsoft dug its roots a little deeper into the music business Wednesday, as copy-protection company Macrovision agreed to license its Windows digital rights management technology for CDs. The software giant has gained considerable ground over the past few months in its bid to have its audio technology loaded on every copy-protected CD sold by record [...]

The PacketSeek project is based on 2 applications. On the one hand you have the spider that runs on the PacketSeek.com webserver and monitors 97 IRC networks and over 500 channels for XDCC servers. XDCC Servers are started by IRC users that share their files with others. Each XDCC server provides ISO’s , Movies , [...]

Random Nut:I haven’t updated K++ for months, and I won’t update it ever again, so I’ll release a K++ with all my internal options that I never enabled in the public version. Here’s the list of all new options, in the order I think is most useful for most people: * LastName – Change the [...]

“Australian police said on Thursday they had closed down an Internet music piracy site and arrested three students in an alleged copyright scam that cost the music industry at least $37 million.” And to think I visited that site every once in a while. It looks Australia is getting as bad as the US on [...]

Zeropaid Data Syndication system has been updated, there have been problems with special characters in news stories but that has now been fixed. The Zeropaid Data Syndication is now formatted according to the RSS 2.0 spec, so you might have to make changes to your XSLT scripts. If you are using a tool such a [...]

I am heading up the development of an Open Source file sharing utility based on the IRC network. The program and associated source code have been released under the GNU General Public License. Download it here: http://krimpy.sourceforge.net I had the idea for Krimpy after using a mIRC script called SDFind. The script, written by SDSailor, [...]

EMI Recorded Music today announced plans for what it describes as “the biggest European music download initiative by a record company in Europe to date.” The company is to make available for sale online over 140,000 tracks from over 3,000 EMI artists, allowing customers to burn music onto CD-R, copy tracks to portable players and [...]

LOS ANGELES–Hollywood’s movie studios face a key test in their battle to defend copyright holders from digital pirates, when a federal court in California this Friday hears a case filed by a maker of software that allows users to copy DVDs. To read the full story from ZDNET click HERE

From News24.com – US scientists have broken the record for the top speed for transferring data over the internet. The magazine Nature reported in its online edition that a new piece of software allows data to be transferred up to 3 500 times faster than normal over broadband connections. That type of speed can ultimately [...]

A state bill reminiscent of the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act may be coming soon to a legislature near you. That is, if it hasn’t arrived already. Nearly five years after the federal government enacted the DMCA (a law that makes it a crime to circumvent security protections on copyrighted materials) legislators in several states [...]