Last year the Dutch tried to tax all MP3 players, but that proposal didn’t make it into law. But not to worry, they have other brilliant ideas. Earlier this week, Dutch politicians suggested that it might be a good idea to tax Internet traffic, and use this money to compensate the music industry. This, under the condition that DRM is abandoned, and people can’t be charged for downloads. Say what?
His Royal Highness Prince Michael of Sealand said in an interview with ‘CBC The Hour’ that buying Sealand is probably a good way to circumvent international copyright law, but that he won’t sell sealand to the Pirate Bay.
In the recent past we’ve seen the record and movie industry sue everyone from little girls and soccer moms to college kids for illegal file-sharing. Imagine what would happen if book publishers started to take on public libraries.
Solid State, a digital media delivery company has developed an advanced streaming technology based on the BitTorrent protocol. The company presented their peer-assisted streaming technology at the DEMOfall 2006 conference in San Diego. Technologies like this could save popular streaming websites like YouTube or Google Video a lot of money. It is estimated that YouTube [...]
Tribler, the “social” BitTorrent client has just released a new version. The recommendation function has been optimized, along with other bugfixes and improvements. Tribler is far from anonymous, and therefore probably not suited for sharing content you’re not supposed to share. However, the social aspect of Tribler has the potential to be helpful to sites [...]
Sony Pictures aquired the Youtube-like video sharing service “grouper”. CEO Michael Lynton announced this deal earlier today, and said Sony is paying $65 million dollar for the internet startup. For now Grouper will keep its current management, but they will be working closely with a team at Sony Pictures. Lynton stated: “Consumers are spending more [...]
Sweden again. The Filesharing debate continues, and the Pirate’s vote might be an important one in the upcoming election. Justice minister Thomas Bodström is flirting openly with filesharers, while the Pirate Party is getting bigger and bigger. Lars Ilshammar, an information-technology historian who recently suggested Sweden to impose a fee similar to the one proposed [...]