A lot of things happened after the Swedish police attempted to take down The Piratebay. It’s time to recap and look ahead. Torrentfreak asked Mathias from Piracy Unlimited (and Sweden) to give an overview of the things that happened, and the things that will happen. First of all, the attack against the Pirate Bay was [...]

Music television is the endangered species of the pop world, and is learning the hard way that it must adapt to the Internet age, or die. Britain’s “Top of the Pops”, the world’s longest running weekly music show, will be declared extinct on Sunday when it is broadcast for the last time on BBC. Two [...]

Skype has released three new toolbars for Web, email, and desktop applications, which allow people to make VoIP calls from directly within from popular applications including Microsoft Outlook Express and Internet Explorer. The three new toolbars are the Skype Toolbar for Microsoft Office, Skype Toolbar for Outlook Express and Skype Toolbar for Thunderbird, which is [...]

For years, the RIAA has claimed that having the IP address of a computer that has shared unauthorized files is the equivalent of having the evidence of who was actually sharing files. That, of course, is false. The IP address simply can help you know who paid for the internet access, but not who was [...]

Yet another motion to dismiss a complaint has been denied in Texas, again with the judge saying that he has “incomplete understanding of the P2P technology at this stage” to decide whether or not “the mere presence of copyrighted sound recordings in Defendant’s share file constitutes infringement.” This was in Fonovisa v. Alvarez in Abilene, [...]

KTV clubs in China will pay at most 1 per cent of their total income in the near future to copyright owners of the music videos they use, a senior official with the National Copyright Administration said yesterday. The charge was initially fixed at 0.5 per cent of the yearly incomes of KTV clubs and [...]

Evidentally, very little is happening in Sweden right now. This is indicated by an attack against the Bureau of Piracy that turned out to become quite a funny story – only the laugh is on the attacker. Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet ran a story about Piratshoppen, the website that sells Piratbyrån and the Pirate Bay [...]

EMI Group, as part of a larger effort to support peer-to-peer networks that allow the sharing of licensed music files, has agreed to share its digital library with P2P start-up Mashboxx. The record label, whose 1000-plus artists include Janet Jackson, Gorillaz, the Rolling Stones and Coldplay, is not the first to license its content for [...]

An organisation committed to fighting for people’s digital rights in the UK is celebrating its first birthday. The Open Rights Group (Org) was founded last year on the back of an online pledge from 1,000 people to fund the group with £5 a month each. To date 650 people have honoured that promise, enough to [...]

Around 80% of mobile phones will be blocked on all five UK networks within 48 hours of being reported stolen in future, industry leaders have pledged. That pledge is part of a charter to reduce phone crime launched by the Mobile Industry Crime Action Forum. It will take effect by the year’s end but will [...]

The French Constitutional Court just released its decision about the DADVSI. The objective of this law was to transpose the 2001/29/CE Directive to protect Digital Rights Management in the same fashion as the US based Digital Millenium Copyright Act did in 1996. The Law was severely criticized for being extremely hard, but the decision of [...]

The IFPI, which represents the major music labels internationally, is out with its annual piracy report. Canada gets a fair amount of attention as we are one of ten priority countries. In explaining the situation in Canada, the IFPI resorts to a series of mischaracterizations and omissions that piggyback CRIA claims and therefore demand a [...]

Mozilla on Wednesday released an update to its popular Firefox Web browser that fixes a dozen vulnerabilities, seven of which it deems “critical.” The most serious of the flaws could be exploited by cyberattackers to commandeer a vulnerable PC, according to Mozilla. The company, which oversees Firefox development, has published security advisories for each of [...]

After years of helping TV viewers skip past ads, TiVo unveils an initiative Wednesday that will enable Madison Avenue to measure the damage. And, in the process, it is taking on longtime TV viewer tracker Nielsen Media Research in trying to quantify the impact of TV commercials. The digital video recorder pioneer has created a [...]

The operators of an X-rated online video game on Wednesday debuted Utherverse.com, an adults-only site that aims to duplicate the success of wildly popular teen hangout MySpace.com. Owners of the new site, who recently launched RedLightCenter.com, expect to have more than 1 million registered users by the end of 2006 and encourage members to upload [...]

Nokia, the world’s largest cellphone maker, has started its first tests of a technology that allows users to roam seamlessly between phone networks and local wireless hotspots such as Wi-Fi. Fifty families in Oulu near the polar circle in northern Finland will test the technology over the next two months, Nokia said on Thursday. Mobile [...]

Marketing agreement provides for TV, Internet video, photo viewing. TiVo Inc., the maker of digital video recorders, Thursday said it reached a joint marketing agreement to promote the use of its devices with BellSouth Corp.’s high-speed Internet subscriptions. TiVo said a group of BellSouth subscribers would be able to use its devices to schedule television [...]

Canceled fan favorite gets second life on Microsoft’s Internet video service. Microsoft Corp. will run free episodes of the quirky TV comedy “Arrested Development” through its MSN Video service later this year, making the show available online for the first time. MSN, the software maker’s Internet unit, said Wednesday it will run display and video [...]

Number of Americans with cable modems and DSL rise 33 percent. U.S. high-speed Internet subscriptions soared 33 percent last year to 50.2 million lines, according to the latest data released by the Federal Communications Commission Wednesday. More consumers signed up for digital subscriber line (DSL) service from telephone companies like AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications [...]

Probing licensing strategies for next-generation HD DVD, Blu-ray discs. European Commission antitrust officials are probing the licensing strategies of two rival new generation DVD developers, HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc, the EU executive said on Thursday. HD DVD was created by Toshiba Corp, while Blu-ray Disc was developed by a Sony-led consortium which includes Apple, [...]