While last week's shutdown of MegaUpload is of huge interest in itself, but a wave of aftershocks and side-effects are proving equally fascinating to watch. In addition to causing all sorts of problems for legitimate users of file-sharing services, there is no avoiding the fact that certain elements of the…
In the wake of the MegaUpload shutdown Bloomberg interviewed Yochai Benkler, Prof. of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Benkler criticizes the actions of the Department of Justice, which he characterizes as “aggressive.” “What is a surprise is how aggressive…
At a behind-closed-doors meeting facilitated by the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport, copyright holders have handed out a list of demands to Google, Bing and Yahoo. To curb the growing piracy problem, Hollywood and the major music labels want the search engines to de-list popular filesharing sites such…
The European Union has officially signed the controversial “anti-piracy” trade agreement ACTA. It hereby follows in the footsteps of Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and the United States, who already signed it last October. While this is a step in the wrong direction, it is not…
In the wake of the online protests against the pending PIPA and SOPA anti-piracy bills, Rasmussen asked US voters what their opinion is on the issue. Should the public worry more about piracy or Internet censorship? Through a telephone survey voters were asked the following question. “Which is a bigger…
Newzbin2, the site chosen by Hollywood to be their UK web-blocking guinea-pig, has revealed some of their forward plans. Within weeks the Usenet indexing site will not only dump its .COM domain, but also look towards the creation of both VPN and cyberlocker services.
This is a guest post from Otto de Voogd, digital freedom fighter, a member of the non-profit Estonian Internet Community and a volunteer Mozilla contributor. Thousands of sites, led by Reddit and Wikipedia, staged a successful blackout against SOPA and PIPA last week. But, it would be a mistake to…
After losing access to their favorite file-hosting service last week, millions of former MegaUpload users have fled to the many alternatives available. Filefactory, Depositfiles and many of the other top cyberlockers have seen an unprecedented surge in traffic in recent days, showing that people haven't stopped sharing even though the…