An organization of more than 8,000 authors accused Google Inc. Tuesday of "massive copyright infringement," saying the powerful Internet search engine cannot put its books in the public domain for commercial use without permission.   "The authors’ works are contained in certain public and university libraries and have not been licensed for commercial use," The [...]

Tired of suing hundreds and hundreds of individual file downloaders the RIAA or Recording Industry Association of America has decided to hit file sharers at their source. Last week the RIAA sent letters to seven P2P (or person to person) file sharing websites telling them to cease and desist… or else. According to the Wall [...]

Six major Hollywood studios have formed a joint venture to protect their movies from the threat of electronic theft. Motion Picture Laboratories will research and create new technologies to stop the unauthorised distribution of films, particularly via the internet. The company, also named Movielabs, will have offices in Los Angeles and a $30m (£16.6m) budget [...]

At least two new pieces of surreptitiously installed software can hijack the most popular search engine, placing ads amid legitimate Google search results on infected PCs, a computer security company recently revealed. "It uses your search term and then replaces the Google results with their own results," said Paul Piccard, director of threat research at [...]

Tony Sanfilippo is of two minds when it comes to Google Inc.’s ambitious program to scan millions of books and make their text fully searchable on the Internet. On the one hand, Sanfilippo credits the program for boosting sales of obscure titles at Penn State University Press, where he works. On the other, he’s worried [...]

Red Hat Inc., an open source and Linux provider, said Friday it would join forces with International Business Machines Corp. to help accelerate the development and adoption of Linux-based solutions in emerging markets.   The two companies will provide software developers in China, India, Russia, Korea and other nations with the technical resources needed to [...]

TOKYO — The Revolution will be televised, and so will every movement of your hands.   After months of teasing, Nintendo has pulled back the curtain on the controller that will accompany its upcoming home game console, called Revolution, when the system launches in 2006.   Its Japanese designers call it a "game remote control." Nintendo’s [...]

As the RIAA sues file sharers by the thousands, more are starting to fight back against them. Two more mothers, Dawnell Leadbetter of Seattle and Tanya Andersen of Oregon have joined New York’s Patricia Santangelo to have their cases thrown out. The chances are good as the RIAA’s legal work is turning out to be [...]

Concerned about the vagueness in the law’s phrasing, the Entertainment Software Association will try to block the state’s action.   Michigan Governor Jennifer M. Granholm today signed SB 416 into law, which could impose very heavy penalties on people caught selling or renting violent games to minors. In fact, a manager of a business that [...]

Alienware’s dual-core Aurora isn’t cheap, but for graphics-intensive games, you won’t find anything faster The Good: Dual-core AMD chips mean out-of-the-ballpark performance The Bad: Be prepared to shell out big bucks for this system. Productivity software adds even more The Bottom Line: A fast, boutique PC that will appeal to media enthusiasts unwilling to build [...]

Methlabs.org and PeerGuardian developers in exile The majority of the Methlabs.org administration and development team have been forced out of their website following a series of threats and incidents. The member of the group that had been trusted to handle the finances and servers slowly managed to take over each individual part of the website’s [...]

p2p news / p2pnet:- There were a number of comment posts to my Canada copyright bill update, and I felt a new article would help address these important questions. A bill goes through three readings in parliament before it can pass. The first reading in the House of Commons is the introduction where the bill [...]

First and foremost, why use ratDVD, and what’s it all about? In a nutshell, it’s probably hands down the easiest way for one to take a regular DVD, which is usually 8.5 to 9 gigs in size, and shrink it down to almost whatever size desired based on the options and quality you select, usually [...]

CacheLogic has released a study on P2P trends in the last two years. If you’re into statistics, or are simply interested in what’s happening in the world of P2P, you may want to take a look. As was previously reported, eDonkey took the lead from BitTorrent following some pretty high-profile court cases, except in Asia [...]

The next version of Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox game console will be available in the United States two days before Thanksgiving, in time for the important holiday shopping season, the company said Wednesday. The Nov. 22 launch of Xbox 360 in North America will be followed by a Dec. 2 launch in Europe and a Dec. [...]

The Recording Industry Association of America has sent letters to seven peer-to-peer companies, asking them to halt what the RIAA alleges is their practice of encouraging users to illegally distribute copyrighted material. The RIAA’s actions follow a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June against P2P services provider Grokster and marks one of the first actions [...]

The Dutch government will begin tracking every citizen from cradle to grave in a single database, opening a personal electronic dossier for every child at birth with health and family data, and eventually adding school and police records. As a privacy safeguard, no single person will be able to access someone’s entire file. And each [...]

This article is excerpted from the newly published book A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming The BitTorrent protocol implements a hybrid client/server and P2P file transfer mechanism. BitTorrent efficiently distributes large amounts of static data, such as installation ISO images. It can replace protocols such as anonymous FTP, where client authentication [...]

EBay said yesterday that it would buy Skype Technologies, the Internet phone provider based in Luxembourg, for $2.6 billion in cash and stock, a move that eBay hopes will bolster trading on its online auction site. The total value of the deal may grow based on "potential performance-based consideration" that could be worth an additional [...]

When private investigators staked out the Castle Cove home of the glamorous music pirate Nikki Hemming, they often saw a man sitting outside in the morning. He was thought to be Hemming’s partner Richard Kilmer-Barber but all they really knew about the mystery man was that he liked to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. He didn’t [...]