For all those teachers who take work home at night, creating lessons they hope kids will like, the reward is a good day in class. Now there could be another payoff: cash. Teachers are selling their original lectures, course outlines and study guides to other teachers through a new Web site launched by New York [...]

Viacom Inc.’s (VIAb.N: Quote, Profile, Research) MTV Networks on Thursday said it has begun selling more of its shows at Apple Computer Inc.’s (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) iTunes digital media store. Original programs from Viacom’s Spike TV, TV Land, MTV and Logo channels can now be purchased for $1.99 per episode. Earlier, Viacom’s Comedy Central [...]

Virgin France has been slapped with a €600,000 fine for illegally downloading Madonna’s Hung Up for resale on its site – in the process ignoring an “exclusive deal reached by Warner Music France with France Telecom and Orange”, the BBC reports. France Telecom had inked a €500,000 deal with Warner, which allowed it to exclusively [...]

Such an obvious idea, but what perfect timing. According to Slashdot, a Swedish company is now offering insurance against possible P2P lawsuits. “A new insurance company in Sweden is offering a new policy to protect you from the RIAA [Swedish]. For a mere 140 SEK ($19 USD) per year, they will pay all your fines [...]

FBI raids Wednesday led to the arrest of 13 members of an international movie-piracy ring suspected of being responsible for half of all camcorder copies of films available on the black market and on the Internet in the U.S., according to the MPAA. It was estimated that the New York-area group is responsible for 25 [...]

A U.S. Senate panel narrowly rejected strict Net neutrality rules on Wednesday, dealing a grave setback to companies like eBay, Google and Amazon.com that had made enacting them a top political priority this year. By an 11-11 tie, the Senate Commerce Committee failed to approve a Democrat-backed amendment that would have ensured all Internet traffic [...]

Americans will pay less in Internet, mobile and local telephone taxes in the future, according to multiple proposals approved by U.S. Senate committees Wednesday. One set of tax changes comes from the Senate Committee on Finance, where Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, won approval of legislation that would rescind a 3 percent telecommunications tax [...]

A Stockholm court today rejected an application to return servers seized in raids against file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. Internet hosting company PRQ had demanded the return of both paperwork and computer equipment seized by police, saying that the material had no significance for the investigation and arguing that it was vital for PRQ’s work. [...]

A Spanish intellectual property law has finally banned unauthorized peer-to-peer file-sharing in Spain, making it a civil offense even to download content for personal use. The legislation, approved by Congress on Thursday, toughens previous provisions. An early May circular from Spain’s fiscal general del estado, or chief prosecutor, allowed downloads for purely personal use. Now [...]

Congress has plunged into a multi-million-dollar debate over Internet usage fees that are feared by computing giants like Google and Microsoft and championed by the phone companies. Opponents of the new usage toll — predominantly the IT heavyweights — demand nothing less than “Internet neutrality” where all traffic remains free in the spirit of democratic [...]

At its annual meeting in Ottawa earlier this month, the Canadian Library Association passed a resolution on Access Copyright’s Captain Copyright. The resolution is powerful rebuke from one of the groups that the Captain Copyright program presumably hoped to attract. It criticizes the biased approach on copyright, the linking policy, and notes that the “website [...]

Create $1m image database A group of US internet giants have come together to form an alliance in a bid to combat child pornography. AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, EarthLink and United Online have teamed up to create a database of known child pornography images, with each image being assigned a unique mathematical signature within the database. [...]

In a rare case of music retailer-turned-Internet pirate, the Virgin store chain in France said Tuesday that it had been found guilty of downloading and reselling a Madonna hit without permission. The store’s online portal, virginmega.fr, was ordered by the Paris Tribunal de Commerce to pay €600,000, or $754,000, in damages for downloading the Madonna [...]

BitTorrent is developing a video download website to distribute movies online. They’re still negotiating with several movie studios, but they’ve selected GNi to ‘host’ their online Video Store. GNi signed an agreement with BitTorrent Inc to provide an IP transit Internet address for streaming videos at one gigabit per second. GNi’s Service Level Agreement (SLA) [...]

Web site operators posting sexually explicit information must slap warning labels on their pages or face prison terms of up to 15 years, according to a proposal adopted by a U.S. Senate committee on Tuesday. During a day of debate on a wide-ranging communications bill, the Senate Commerce Committee approved an amendment backed by the [...]

I wrote last week about MySpace’s impact on the music scene, yet I would be remiss if I neglected the most potent weapon in MySpace’s toolbox, independent music fans. This weapon is the growing army of independent music fans who use the service to evangelize their favorite acts. Word of mouth. It’s an institution in [...]

A TEST case comes before the law lords, Britain’s highest court, today that will determine how far newspapers and other internet publishers are open to lawsuits from people alleging that they have been libelled in any part of the world. In a landmark ruling last year, the Court of Appeal ruled that internet publishers could [...]

These days, the trendy way to refer to the iPod is to call it the iPizzle — or iPizz for short. At least, that’s what it says at the Urban Dictionary website, a dictionary of slang compiled by its readers. Whether true or not (I’ve never actually heard it uttered myself), the Urban Dictionary is [...]

SingingFool.com announces the redesign of its site. With the look and feel of a ‘social music network’ and new interactive features and tools, users can now build their own library of videos, create and publish playlists, and browse other users’ collections as well as the best music video collection on the web. They can use [...]

A year after the Supreme Court’s landmark Grokster decision — which set out to curb online theft of music and movies — illegal-file sharing is as popular as ever even as Silicon Valley technologists and Hollywood moguls continue their awkward embrace. The court’s unanimous decision that Internet file-sharing services can be sued if they encourage [...]