Over the past 24 hours copies of at least nine big movies leaked online in decent quality, all apparently sourced from industry DVD screeners.

According to TorrentFreak sources who asked to remain anonymous, the nine movies came from three different sources. One accounted for the Hobbit and another Big Hero 6. The remaining seven all came from a single source.

Buried in one of the Sony leaks is an email conversation which confirms that the real settlement payment from Hotfile was just $4 million, just a fraction of the amount widely publicized in the press.

The huge difference between the public settlement figure and the amount that was negotiated also puts previous cases in a different light. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the $110 million settlement with isoHunt and the $110 deal with TorrentSpy were just paper tigers too.

With fast lanes, money would flow "from your favorite websites to the ISPs, the very same companies you already pay to deliver Internet service to your home," he wrote in a blog post scheduled to go live at this link at 1:30pm ET. "In this model, the ISPs get paid twice, both to provide their service and regulate heavy-use companies, like Netflix."

Government Accountability Office researchers who studied data caps say that wireline ISPs told them "that congestion is not currently a problem." In other words, data caps on home Internet service are for making money rather than managing congestion—and paid fast lanes would be too.

Service providers should become suspicious that customers could be pirating if they use VPN-style services and consume a lot of bandwidth, the BBC says.

Following submissions from Hollywood interests and local ISPs, BBC Worldwide has now presented its own to the Federal Government. Its text shows that the corporation wants new anti-piracy measures to go further than ever before.

The City of London police has started placing banner advertisements on websites believed to be offering pirated content illegally.

When a website on Pipcu's Infringing Websites List (IWL) tries to display an advert, Project Sunblock will instead serve the police warning.

Courts all around the world have ordered Internet providers to block subscriber access to the torrent site and this list continues to expand.

The entertainment industries have characterized these blockades as a major victory and claim they’re an efficient tool to deter piracy.

In order to access the digital version of the movie promised as a reward, they learned, they’d have to sign up for an account at Flixster—and even then, they’d only be able to stream the movie, not download it.

In statement released to the L.A. Times about the refund, a Warner Bros. representative described the move as part of the studio’s diligent work “to ensure that all the Veronica Mars backers have a great experience.”

The slickly designed torrenting app Popcorn Time had barely begun to live, but its creators have already pulled it down from their website, along with the supporting infrastructure.

Despite what the experiment of Popcorn Time "proves," the post concludes, "our experiment has put us at the doors of endless debates about piracy and copyright, legal threats and the shady machinery that makes us feel in danger for doing what we love. And that’s not a battle we want a place in."

New research published by Tulane University Law Professor Glynn Lunney shows that online piracy is linked to the creation of more hit music.

Keeping in mind that copyright intends to promote “the Progress of Science” by encouraging the distribution and creation of new works, Professor Lunney can only conclude that sharing music without permission of the owner should be legal under copyright law.

The MPAA will put out its press releases and bogus statements about how this will show other sites that they can't "get away with" enabling infringement, even as a dozen similar sites will pop up overseas where they'll be even less concerned with what the MPAA has to say.

The MPAA thinks that this will scare off other similar sites, but in their decades of "fighting piracy," that has never happened. Each one of these victories leads to... more such sites appearing, though in ways that are harder to shut down, less respect for the legacy Hollywood studios, and a general feeling that Hollywood refuses to adapt and compete.