Did you guys see this one? Disney and some others movie studios threatened legal action against DVDCoverArt.com (which offers high-res scans of dvd covers and custom covers), so the site owners had to shut it down. story here: http://p072.ezboard.com/fdvdepotcustomerforumfrm27.showMessage?topicID=3835.topic

Music fans in the UK, France and Germany downloaded over 800,000 tracks from Apple Computer’s iTunes online music store in its first week of operations in Europe, the company has announced. In Britain alone, 450,000 songs were downloaded from iTunes since June 15th, when the service launched in Europe. “iTunes’ success is indicative that there [...]

Cory Doctorow, sci-fi author and evangelist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation journeyed to Microsoft and gave a paper on why DRM is a bad thing. In the paper he makes 5 assertions: 1. That DRM systems don’t work 2. That DRM systems are bad for society 3. That DRM systems are bad for business 4. [...]

Making a connection between online file trading and child exploitation, key Democratic and Republican senators are backing a bill that would effectively ban peer-to-peer networks where copyright infringement takes place. Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a Republican of Utah, sought to dispel some of the early criticisms of his proposal, saying [...]

WASHINGTON– A group of technology vendors, consumer rights groups, and ISPs are banding together to support 18-month-old U.S. House legislation that would let consumers make personal copies of copyrighted digital products, including movies and music. The Personal Technology Freedom Coalition has kicked an effort to push the Digital Media Consumers’ Rights Act through Congress. The [...]

Introduction Hagelslag is an implementation of GNUtella. The main goals for this implementation are flexibility, stability and performance. The development of Hagelslag was primarily aimed at i386 machines running Linux, as of version 0.8, FreeBSD is supported as well. Release Notes 0.14.1* Fixed bug with PUSH downloads* Fixed all similar hashValue related bugs* Fixed downloader [...]

The Recording Industry Association of America launched a new round of lawsuits Tuesday against online music-swappers, targeting 482 individuals around the United States. As with previous rounds of suits filed by the music industry group, the “John Doe” lawsuits come without names attached. The identities of the individuals are expected to come out through a [...]

The Beastie Boys have finally released a new album. This CD, unlike their previous releases, installs copy-protection software on Windows and Mac PCs. It’s bad enough copy-protecting the CD, however the record label EMI is being particularly egregious because they install the software without telling the user. You know, sort of like a virus.

Cinema staff in the US are being offered up to $500 (£275) to catch people recording movies on camcorders. The reward scheme is being run by film studios and movie theatres in a bid to stop piracy, which costs the industry billions of dollars each year. Staff can qualify for the reward by catching the [...]

New Features: Core | Health items now show if a torrent is being shared/published Core | Creation of self-signed certificates for SSL (etc) via UI Core | Set download speed per torrent Dev | ToolTip access functions for table cells Plug | Tracker plugin supports simple category view Plug | Webui support for password protected [...]

Goverments have stepped in to join the fight against spyware and malware, the names we attribute to those annoying little programs that “somehow” get installed on your computer without your knowledge. The US Congress has proposed the SPY Act, which would oblige companies and individuals to conspicuously warn consumers before giving them a program capable [...]

The world record for the transfer of data across the Internet has been claimed by telecommunications company Sprint and the Swedish National Research and Education Network. The two organizations announced late last week that they had managed to send nearly 840 gigabytes of data across a distance of 16,346 kilometers (10,157 miles) in less than [...]

Jack Valenti, whose soaring flights of rhetoric have defined Hollywood’s voice in Washington, D.C., for two generations, is nearing the end of his post as the film industry’s chief lobbyist. With announced plans to step down when a replacement is found, he will leave behind an industry deeply entangled in a love-hate relationship with the [...]

This is test version for people who know how to make useful bug reports.From this version on it is also possible to translate KCeasy to other languages. Translators please subscribe to http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/kceasy-localization, details will be posted there shortly. All changes from 0.13 to 0.14 – rc1: Added general purpose bookmarking to browser Added internationalization code [...]

Simon Moon has opened up a system for file sharers who wish to donate to help him in the on-going ShareReactor court battle.SR was the biggest eDonkey2000 weblinks site of it’s kind, many file-sharers of today started out after finding ShareReactor. A few months ago, SR was taken down by the Swiss authorities for the [...]

Lobbyists for record companies and Hollywood movie studios laid out a case against online file-sharing before a group of attorneys general, suggesting the state prosecutors should examine whether such companies are breaking state laws. Addressing the National Association of Attorneys General Thursday, the entertainment industry representatives warned that consumers in their states needed to be [...]

Machintosh clients in the P2P world are a rarity. Some do exist, however very few are close to being popular. Limewire is so far the only client that approaches mainstream status, as this program provides one of the few avenues for Mac users to engage in file-shairng. The music industry has taken advantage of this [...]

While the Big Five do their best to kick the stuffing out of the mom-and-pop P2P file-sharers, they’re nonetheless looking to downloads for some kind of salvation, having arrived in Europe with Apple’s iTunes and, to a much lesser extent, Napster 2, carrying the tattered corporate music portfolios. What’s so great about the 70 million [...]

Napster, which was transformed into a legal service after turning the music industry on its ear with an unauthorized song-swapping platform, is now giving away MP3 devices to anyone who subscribes for a full year. On its Web site, Napster said it would give consumers a Rio Chiba Sport portable music device, valued at about [...]

Rumor has it that Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) will be introducing a bill tomorrow that would add a new Section 501(g) to the Copyright Act granting copyright owners a cause of action against those who “induce” copyright infringement (cf. patent law). This bill, dubbed the INDUCE Act, would apparently also reach those who “counsel” infringers.Even [...]