The Pirate Bay is the world's most high-profile file-sharing site and is being taken to court by media firms including Sony and Warner Bros.

Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmsioppi and Carl Lundstorm have portrayed themselves as digital libertarians and say that they cannot be prosecuted for copyright theft because none of the content is hosted on their computer servers.

"It is legal to offer a service that can be used in both a legal and illegal way, according to Swedish law," Mr Samuelsson said at the opening of the trial, which is expected to last three weeks.

According to its creators, the approach can monitor networks without interrupting the flow of data and provides investigators with hard evidence of illicit file transfers.

When the tool detects such a file, it keeps a record of the network addresses involved for later analysis, says Major Karl Schrader, who led the work at the Air Force Institute of Technology, in Kettering, OH.

"Our system differs in that it is completely passive, meaning that it does not change any information entering or leaving a network," says Schrader.

The RIAA's claim that it'll stop suing people may have serious consequences... for the RIAA. When it dropped its attack on seven University of Michigan students, Recording Industry vs. The People wondered if the move was linked to three investigations, with MediaSentry as the target, before Michigan's Department of Labor and Economic Growth.

Is there anything the RIAA can do to reduce illegal file-sharing without generating massive amounts of bad publicity?

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) press release claims that 95% of music file downloads in 2008, an estimated 40 billion files, were illegal.

Collating separate studies in 16 countries over a three-year period, IFPI estimates over 40 billion files were illegally file-shared in 2008, giving a piracy rate of around 95 per cent.

Aside from generating over $1.6 million in revenue for NIN in its first week, and hitting #1 on Billboard's Electronic charts, Last.fm has the album ranked as the 4th-most-listened to album of the year, with over 5,222,525 scrobbles.

Even more exciting, however, is that Ghosts I-IV is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon's MP3 store.

NIN fans could have gone to any file sharing network to download the entire CC-BY-NC-SA album legally. Many did, and thousands will continue to do so.

The next time someone tries to convince you that releasing music under CC will cannibalize digital sales, remember that Ghosts I-IV broke that rule, and point them here.

After years of suing thousands of people for allegedly stealing music via the Internet, the recording industry is set to drop its legal assault as it searches for more effective ways to combat online music piracy.

The trade group said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider's customers making music available online for others to take.

Under the new strategy, the RIAA would forward its emails to the ISPs without demanding to know the customers' identity.

It never really made sense for EA to be so insistent on having draconian DRM on games. Before the company even launched Spore people made it quite clear the plan would backfire, but EA went forward with it anyway, creating a PR nightmare.

Spore has now been declared the most downloaded video game of the year.

The company got a huge PR blackeye which probably only encouraged more people to download the game via file sharing.

Championed by the RIAA, who pointed to the University of Tennessee's no. 4 position on the list of top music piracy schools, and the MPAA, which noted the school's no. 19 spot on its infringement list, the law will force both public and private schools in the state to implement policies to prevent and prohibit copyright infringement on campus computers and networks.

The Tennessee Board of Regents will have to spend nearly $2.8 million for software, over $6.5 million for hardware, and hire 21 full-time employees at a cost of $1.575 million annually.

The RIAA is understandably elated at the passage of the bill, and why not? It forces schools to crack down on copyright infringement at no cost to the industry, and sets a disturbing legislative precedent for other states to follow.

Automated infringement-detection systems really don't work that great: researchers at the University of Washington were able to attract almost 500 bogus DMCA takedown notices, some of which were directed at three networked printers.

Several reports came in from China, indicating that popular BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay had been hijacked.

People in the Beijing area who attempted to access the sites were promptly redirecting to Baidu, China's Google.

According to some sources, there was never an attempt to censor the BitTorrent sites, claiming that a DNS error cause the problems. This doesn't seem very plausible though, as the diversions almost exclusively involved P2P related sites, which are hosted right across the globe.

The Swedish book publishers organization recently issued a report in which they revealed that 85% of the best-selling books in Sweden are available on The Pirate Bay.

In the report they write that they had to code a specialized tool to scrape the Pirate Bay database for book titles, since there were no ready-made tools available.

Peter Sunde is now arguing that they were breaking the law by scraping the site multiple times without permission. "The Pirate Bay actually owns the copyright to its own database of torrents," Sunde writes on his blog.