A Norwegian student has been found guilty of copyright infringement and has been told that he has to pay the music industry the equivalent of £8,000 for hosting a site called napster.no. As its counterpart in the United States, the problem is that this site had links to actual infringing Read more
The RIAA continues its strategy of suing P2P users by initiating lawsuits against 717 users of the Kazaa, eDonkey and Limeware P2P networks. Will this strategy work? I will conduct a survey of users tonight and get back to you tomorrow with a report of numbers of people sharing.
This is where the great battle of our time will be fought. The P2P debate in the US Supreme Court is upon us, a case that will probably shape the near future of the legal validity of sharing networks. But one must say that sharing will go on regardless of Read more
Remember Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”? Remember the chorus of kids singing “We don’t need to education”? Now, those kids are asking for the royalties that they are due from the recording of those famous lyrics. EMI, Pink Floyd’s record label, has declined to comment, but those kids Read more
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is suing an undisclosed number of people who they claim are sharing movies online. This follows the same heavy-handed approach by the RIAA against music downloaders. I am not sure what the economic argument is. DVD sales and rentals are more than robust, Read more
Groklaw reports that Novell has filed an anti-trust suit against Microsoft regarding WoprdPerfect. The filing states that: “By reason of Microsoft’s anticompetitive acts, WordPerfect’s share of the word processing market, which was nearly 50 percent in 1990, fell to approximately 30 percent in 1994, and to less than 10 percent Read more
Three people are being charged in Virginia for breaking the state’s anti-spam legislation. They could get up to fifteen years sentence if convicted. We don’t like spammers, but 15 years? Seems a bit excessive! And no Monty Python jokes please.
This is a new case against a site that offered MP3 music. The problem is that the article is not clear on the type of technlogy that was being used to serve the files. It seems that the accused was not serving files, but was offering hyperlinks to other sites Read more