A Danish court ruled in favor of the IFPI, and ordered the Danish ISP "Tele2" (DMT2-Tele2) to block all access to the popular BitTorrent tracker.

The Pirate Bay team has already asked other BitTorrent admins to stand up against the IFPI lobby, and arranged a meeting with Tele2 to discuss the current events. Pirate Bay co-founder Brokep told TorrentFreak in a response: "I hope the torrent community understands what this will do to Danish people. It will also act as a very bad precedent for the European Union, and I hope everybody will fight this."

IFPI has announced it will continue it's battle against BitTorrent sites in Europe. Last month they tried to convince European lawmakers that ISPs should block access to websites such as The Pirate Bay, and block filesharing protocols, no matter what they're being used for.

Paulo Coelho, the best-selling author of "The Alchemist", is using BitTorrent and other filesharing networks as a way to promote his books. His publishers weren't too keen on giving away free copies of his books, so he’s taken matters into his own hands.

He's convinced - and rightly so - that letting people download free copies of his books helps sales. For him the problem is getting around copyright laws that require him to get the permission of his translators if he wants to share copies of his books in other languages.

In his speech he talks about how the Internet is changing language and books, and how online "piracy" and BitTorrent have helped him not only be more widely read, but also sell more books!

After commissioning a 2005 study from LEK Consulting that showed collegiate file-swappers were responsible for 44 percent of movie studio "losses" to piracy, the MPAA then used the report it bought to bludgeon Congress into considering legislation to address this massive problem. Now the MPAA admits that the report's conclusions weren't even close to being right; collegiate piracy accounts for only 15 percent of "losses."

The fact that one of the key data points in this lobbying for the last two years was overstated by a factor of three is bad, but the fact that it came from a secret report just makes it all worse.

The Swedish Courts of Appeal questions whether banning citizens from the Internet would indeed reduce online file sharing. Despite several other countries having already taken similar action, none have had good results to show for it.

Decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution. It's the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet.

The simple truth is that almost all communication channels on the Internet can be used to distribute copyrighted information. If you can use a service to send a message you can most likely use the same service to send an mp3-song. Those who want to prevent people from exchanging of copyrighted material must control all electronic communication between citizens.

In the late 1970s, the copyright industry wanted to prevent people from recording TV-shows with then-new Video Cassette Recorders. In 1998 the recording industry tried to get mp3 players banned.

Despite a series of law enforcement and other attacks on illegal file-sharing this year the number of people using the anti-copyright BitTorrent tracker Pirate Bay has almost doubled.

TorrentFreak reports that Pirate Bay has leapt from about 4.3 million users at the end of 2006 to more than 8 million at the end of this year. The number of files being tracked for download has risen to 915,000 from 576,000.

The Swedish site has added several new servers, mostly from Dell and HP, over the course of the year. Pirate Bay admins reckon they have capacity to double the number of peers tracked without further upgrades.

The Swedish site has attracted floods of file-sharing refugees from TorrentSpy, Demonoid, OiNK, eDonkey and isoHunt, which have all been either shutdown or neutered by legal action this year.

The Court has ordered UMG Recordings, Warner Bros. Records, Interscope Records, Motown, and SONY BMG to disclose their expenses-per-download to the defendant's lawyers, in UMG v. Lindor, a case pending in Brooklyn. The Court held that the expense figures are relevant to the issue of whether the RIAA's attempt to recover damages of $750 or more per 99-cent song file, is an unconstitutional violation of due process.

The Motion Picture of Association of America is urging some of the nation's largest universities to deploy custom software designed to pinpoint students who may be using the schools' networks to illegally download pirated movies. A closer look at the MPAA's software, however, raises some serious privacy and security concerns for both the entertainment industry and the schools that choose to deploy the technology.

What we found was that depending on how a university's network is set up, installing and using the MPAA tool in its default configuration could expose to the entire Internet all of the traffic flowing across the school's network.

The MPAA overview of the toolkit stresses that the software does not communicate any information about a university's network back to the association. But in its current configuration, the very first thing the toolkit does once it is fired up is phone home to the MPAA's servers and check for a new version of the software.

The toolkit sets up an Apache Web server on the user's machine. It also automatically configures all of the data and graphs gathered about activity on the local network to be displayed on a Web page, complete with ntop-generated graphics showing not only bandwidth usage generated by each user on the network, but also the Internet address of every Web site each user has visited.

According to a thread on the forums of AnimeSuki, a popular anime bittorent index site, Comcast has begun sending DCMA letters to customers downloading unlicensed fan-subtitled anime shows via bittorrent. By 'unlicensed', they mean that no english language company has the rights to it. The letters are claiming that the copyright holder or an authorized agent are making the infringement claims, though usually these requests are also sent to the site itself rather that individual downloaders.

A newly study commissioned by Industry Canada, which includes some of the most extensive surveying to date of the Canadian population on music purchasing habits, finds what many have long suspected (though CRIA has denied) - there is a positive correlation between peer-to-peer downloading and CD purchasing.

When assessing the P2P downloading population, there was "a strong positive relationship between P2P file sharing and CD purchasing. That is, among Canadians actually engaged in it, P2P file sharing increases CD purchases."

The results of that research, consistent with earlier Canadian Heritage sponsored study by Shelley Stein-Sacks that refused to blame P2P for the industry's problems, is that P2P actually increases CD sales since those that download also tend to buy more music.

When the file sharing system OiNK was shut down last week, we pointed out how silly it was for the recording industry to go after such a site. The RIAA has been shutting down sites like that regularly for years, each time claiming that it was a significant blow against piracy... but then many more new services would pop up, each one more underground than the last, and the amount of file sharing would increase.

The simple fact that every time these sites get shut down more open up and more people use them shows pretty conclusively that it's never been a deterrent before, so why would it start this time? In fact, as TorrentFreak is monitoring, a bunch of new sites have quickly sprung up, attempting to replace OiNK. In other words, by taking down this one site, the recording industry has just helped create a bunch more, many of which will build up pretty strong followings.