Paving the way for a copyright infringement tax on media? LAST WEEK the customs office in Argentina seized a shipment of recordable CD and DVD media which was smuggled to pay lower duties. Amazingly, local media presented this as proof of music and movies piracy. Three hundred boxes of recordable DVD-R media, containing 180,000 units [...]

An RIAA defendant who attempted to wipe her hard drive of infringing evidence has recently received quick judgment. In the case of Arista v. Tschirhart, judge Orlando Garcia of the Western District of Texas ruled that defendant Delina Tschirhart had made a mockery of the court. The defendant originally resisted RIAA attempts to secure the [...]

Prototype software from Google Research could listen to your TV and send back useful information — and ads of course. Google probably already knows what search terms you use, what Web pages you’re viewing, and what you write about in your e-mail — after all, that’s how it serves up the text ads targeted to [...]

A Dutch judge told cable operator and Internet broadband provider UPC, a unit of Liberty Global, on Thursday to give the name and address of one its clients to an anti-piracy agency. The result is a breakthrough for Dutch copyright holders interest group Brein, which has long tried to gain access to names and addresses [...]

Hong Kong – On August 15, following a call from an employee of the Taoyuan Venice Theater in Taoyuan, a suburb of Taipei, Taoyuan County Police officers, accompanied by Motion Picture Association (MPA) Taiwan representatives, arrested a 23-year-old man attempting to illegally camcord The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift with his mobile phone. The [...]

A Cape Girardeau man is one of the targets of lawsuits filed by the Recording Industry Association of America this week for copyright infringement. Shernet Showers is one of more than 18,000 people who have been sued by the RIAA since 2003 on charges of downloading music without paying for it or sharing music files [...]

Russia is going to simplify the procedure for enforcing copyrights and related rights, an Economic Development and Trade Ministry official said Friday. The widespread violation of intellectual property rights is a bitter point of contention in the currently stalled bilateral World Trade Organization accession talks between Russia and the United States. The U.S. has repeatedly [...]

Two men have pleaded guilty to violating copyright laws by posting an album by rock musician Ryan Adams on a Web site before its public release, federal officials said Thursday. Robert Thomas of Milwaukee and Jared Bowser of Jacksonville obtained and made available for copying portions of “Jacksonville City Nights” by Adams and his band, [...]

This new “thrilla from Mozilla” allows you to harness the power of BitTorrent from the comfort and safety of your Firefox internet browser. It’s much like the security of an FTP setup, where one predetermines what and with whom media and data files are shared. But, unlike FTP clients, AllPeers harnesses the power of BitTorrent [...]

In a refreshing take on the battle against software piracy, developer Introversion has revealed that it ’causes mayhem’ on peer-to-peer networks to exasperate pirates and downloaders who plan to play illegal copies of its games. Speaking exclusively to GamesIndustry.biz in an interview to be published next week, the developer talks candidly about its methods of [...]

“American Idol” winner Taylor Hicks has sued a Tennessee music producer to halt the online distribution of songs the grey-haired crooner recorded five years before copping the reality TV crown. In a lawsuit filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Alabama, Hicks charges that William Smith recently sold three of his songs via Apple’s iTunes [...]

Sometimes before advance screenings, security guards will confiscate camera phones for the duration of the movie in order to prevent piracy. Most people’s reaction is to question the likelihood of someone actually pirating a movie they record with their phone. Aside from the fact that few people could be interested in such a bad-quality product, [...]

Music industry officials are praising a South Auckland judge who jailed a man for nine months for copying and selling pirated music. It was believed to be the first time a music pirate had been jailed for stealing music copyright. Seti Tofaeono appeared for sentencing in Manukau District Court today after a jury earlier found [...]

Two Bakersfield women are in trouble with the law after investigators say they were selling movies that were illegally downloaded. The Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA) on behalf of the major motion picture studios filed four lawsuits today in District Court in Fresno. The suits claim the four illegally swapped movies online using [...]

What people want, and in what form they want it. In other words, where the future markets for digital products are. A new study by David Y. Choi of Loyola Marymount University and Arturo Perez of the business development service Growthink (at http://tinyurl.com/nr8eb) says that “online piracy has shown to be a valuable source of [...]

Users of Microsoft’s Messenger email service will be able to report suspected sexual predators directly to the police at the click of a mouse. In an attempt to protect the 11 million users of the service from potential abusers, the software giant has struck up a partnership with the UK government-backed Child Exploitation & Online [...]

ISRAELI newspaper Haaretz said private eyes tracked down the former CEO of Comverse when he used Skype from Shri Lanka. Kobi Alexander used Skype for just a minute from Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka. He faces charges related to a stock option scandal at Comverse.

In a new case in Oklahoma, Warner v. Stubbs, the defendant Tallie Stubbs has countersued the RIAA and its lawyers for her attorneys fees, charging that “Plaintiffs’ only evidence to support their claims against Tallie is her status as an account holder with Cox Communications….. ” and that she “denies that she had any knowledge [...]

File sharing has long been a popular use of the Internet. I remember sitting at my laptop and asking a friend to name a song, and then seeing if I could download it off of Napster and play it before he could find the cd on the shelf, put it into the player and play [...]

Time Warner Inc.’s AOL said on Thursday it will offer movies from four major Hollywood studios for downloading on its new Internet video service. AOL said films from Twentieth Century Fox, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group will be available for download on AOL Video for $9.99 to $19.99 [...]