A 16-year-old boy being sued by five record companies accusing him of online music piracy accused the recording industry on Tuesday of violating antitrust laws, conspiring to defraud the courts and making extortionate threats. In papers responding to the record companies’ lawsuit, Robert Santangelo, who was as young as 11 when the alleged piracy occurred, [...]

TV shows like Doctor Who are expected to be available for download later this year after the BBC Trust gave initial approval to the BBC’s on-demand plans. Under the proposals, viewers will be able to watch popular programmes online or download them to a home computer up to a week after they are broadcast. But [...]

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft representatives on Tuesday implored the US government to help set ground rules for complying with demands by foreign law enforcement agencies for user records or censorship. But a key question that remains after the U.S. Department of State concluded its inaugural global Internet freedom conference here is how to determine when [...]

Over the years, large-scale peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa and eMule have enjoyed significant popularity, as users scrambled to download the latest Madonna and Metallica albums without paying a penny. More recently, “Torrents” have also appeared, adding a similar system to the downloading craze, with music and movie fans enjoying free content with just a [...]

The people behind Grooveshark, the groundbreaking new P2P music download service, answer the tough questions like what benefits users will get from contributing, what content they can contribute, and what the they think of the RIAA and the IFPI. Last week I wrote an article describing the upcoming start of a revolutionary new P2P music [...]

Ice Age 2: Meltdown makes history as the first Blu-ray Disc to wind up in the popular BitTorrent file-sharing community. It’s been reported that Ice Age 2: Meltdown has become the first Blu-ray movie disc to be leaked onto BitTorrent. This comes on the heels of recent news noting how a user by the alias [...]

The last chapter in Sony’s infamous attempt to stem piracy has been announced today, with the company agreeing to compensate users for damaged PCs. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced today that a settlement had been reached concerning the rootkit DRM that Sony had secretly embedded on music CDs sold to customers. Windows users were [...]

US restrictions on online gambling may be challenged by the European Union, the bloc’s top financial regulator said Tuesday. “In my view, it is probably a restrictive practice, and we might take it up in another” forum, EU Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy told the European Parliament. The United States was protecting its own gambling [...]

The FBI appears to have adopted an invasive Internet surveillance technique that collects far more data on innocent Americans than previously has been disclosed. Instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be assembling the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, according [...]

Spain’s uphill battle against piracy is getting steeper. The reason: small modem-like boxes, with remote controls and a computer USB plugs. Sold in department stores, they sport names like Best Buy’s Easy Player Jumbo Plus HD 400GB or Argosy’s Mobile Video GDD 400 GB. They’re hard disk drives that plug into PCs and then TV [...]

A pair of recent studies suggests that for the first time in years, HTTP traffic consumes more network bandwidth than P2P file-sharing does, and that video sharing services are to blame. It’s no secret that P2P users have long consumed the lions share of a given ISP network’s bandwidth but, with the rise in popularity [...]

Vista, the latest version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, makes its long awaited consumer debut tomorrow. The first major upgrade in five years, Vista incorporates a new, sleek look and features a wide array of new functionality such as better search tools and stronger security. The early reviews have tended to damn the upgrade with [...]

Microsoft Corp. will take a new approach toward midsize companies it suspects of using unlicensed software, sending a series of letters culminating in a threat of legal action from the Business Software Alliance (BSA), a company official said Monday. By involving the BSA, which is an advocate for copyright and intellectual property issues, Microsoft is [...]

Microsoft’s quest to closely control the way Windows Vista can be used on PCs has taken a turn for the worse as new information indicates that the company is breaking tradition when it comes to Windows Vista upgrades. With Windows Vista, users will not be able to use upgrade keys to initiate completely new installations. [...]

Internet giant Google plans to share advertising revenues from YouTube with users of the video-sharing website. The Financial Times (FT) quoted Chad Hurley — the co-founder of YouTube who sold the site to Google for 1.65 billion dollars (1.28 billion euros) last year — as saying it would introduce the system within months. Hurley spoke [...]

Verizon Wireless, the No 2 US cellphone carrier, passed on the chance to be the exclusive distributor of the iPhone almost two years ago, balking at Apple’s rich financial terms and other demands. Among other things, Apple wanted a percentage of the monthly cellphone fees, say over how and where iPhones could be sold and [...]

Tired of downloading a file on Torrentspy or other public BitTorrent tracker sites only to have it stop at 99% completed? Well, then Fenopy’s Fake Finder is the site for you. For those that don’t like the hassle of private BitTorrent tracker sites, TorrentSpy, isoHunt, The Pirate Bay, BTJunkie, and Mininova are then no doubt [...]

The Dutch consumer protection agency became the latest in Europe on Thursday to pressure Apple Inc into changing restrictions that tie songs bought on iTunes to its market-leading iPod players. Consumentenbond spokesman Ewald van Kouwen said his group had filed a formal complaint with the Dutch antitrust watchdog NMa asking for an investigation into what [...]

Nearly three years ago, EFF published a paper advocating voluntary collective licensing for P2P, a system that would get artists paid and allow fans to keep sharing music however they like for a flat fee. It seems the major record labels may finally be coming around to this sensible solution: “This year, with music sales [...]

Movie and music piracy has been common place for years, but now the pirates of the net have set their sights on completely new targets – hit US TV shows. In the old days when you wanted to watch a TV show you needed a television – what a quaint, 20th Century notion. With the [...]