Record labels have asked an Australian court to block peer-to-peer company Altnet's ad-revenue-sharing program.

Altnet said earlier this week that it would share advertising dollars from Kazaa parent Sharman Networks with any record labels that agreed to sell music through its peer-to-peer networks. Record labels, which are suing Sharman Networks in Australia, are now asking a judge to block distribution of those advertising revenues.

When the MPAA filed a round of lawsuits at BitTorrent sites, LokiTorrent stood up as a proud defender of P2P technology. It promised to battle the MPAA to the death in court and asked for financial aid from file-traders to make this legal fight possible. Loyal traders tossed more than $40,000 to Edward Webber's crew, hoping to give P2P technology another day in court.

The courts won't have a crack at answering these questions because LokiTorrent gave in to the major movie studious.

The settlement bars Webber from running any P2P sites that may violate any MPAA copyrights. He, however, has vowed to keep making "fun and useful" sites.

Steal This File Sharing Book by Wallace Wang must be the worst nightmare of deluded music big boys everywhere. It's a guidebook to trading music, movies, photos, software and just about any other type of file. More than that, it's a guidebook for trading as anonymously as possible and via methods the big media companies would prefer the average person not know about.

Wang gives out solid advice for masking your email and IP addresses and for setting up proxy servers. The author dutifully warns readers that many identity protectors don't work quite as well as billed. Still, he provides comprehensive lists of sites and types of technology that can help anyone protect their identities whether they are file trading or not.

"Remember, don't break the law; just creatively skirt around the legal boundaries like any law-abiding politician would do," Wang writes.

The book gets the highest of marks for content, clarity and usefulness. If every file-trader on the planet gave it a read, the media moguls would have a much tougher time fingering prolific swappers for lawsuits.

Researchers at Royal Philips Electronics are developing new "fingerprinting" technology that could automatically identify and block transmission of digital-video files, potentially handing movie studios a new weapon in its war on peer-to-peer networks.

Fingerprinting first appeared in the peer-to-peer world when a federal judge ordered the original Napster to block trades of copyright songs through its network in 2001. The company used early versions of audio fingerprinting technology to identify songs, which ultimately helped make the network all but unusable.

The trick is to make that identification process work even if the file is compressed, turned into a different computer file format or otherwise changed slightly.

One of the only BitTorrent hubs willing to battle the major movie studios has been shut down by Hollywood.

"The operator of that site, Edward Webber, agreed to not only pay a substantial settlement with even greater financial penalties for any further such actions, but by Court Order must provide the MPAA with access to and copies of all logs and server data related to his illegal BitTorrent activities, which will provide a roadmap to others who have used LokiTorrent to engage in illegal activities," the MPAA said in a statement.

LokiTorrent had been one of the only major BitTorrent hubs to stay up and running after the MPAA sent out a flood of lawsuits. The hubs serve as meeting grounds for file-traders looking to pick up software, music, movies and other content.

A so-called expert witness in an Aussie anti-file sharing case has admitted that some key prosecution evidence does not show piracy taking place.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the music industry got a court order to see all the log files from the file sharing outfit. In court they claimed that these were proof that music had been illegally swapped.

However, during cross-examination the prosecution's expert witness Gilbert & Tobin IT consultant Shane Pearson conceded that the logs did not show anything.

All they proved as that people actually visited the site and searched for files, it did not indicate that they had shared music.

Any download would happen from other sites via links and the log would not show this happening, Pearson said.

He said that log files could also be skewed by certain factors including proxy cacheing and dial-up failure.

The most explosive documents in the ongoing Kazaa court case have emerged today, including logs of discussions between parent company Sharman and the Estonian developer of the Kazaa Media Desktop.

APC Magazine journalist Garth Montgomery, who has covered every day of the trial in the Australian Federal Court, says: "In a nutshell, this has got to rate as the most explosive document revealed. It makes it damn near impossible to maintain the separation theory that Sharman and Altnet rely on in terms of business independence and technical infrastructure. The control they exercise over the system is complete."

Gertrude Walton of Fayette County hated computers, her daughter said.

More than a month after Walton was buried in Beckley, a group of record companies named her as the only defendant in a federal lawsuit. They claimed Walton made more than 700 pop, rock and rap songs available for free on the Internet under the screen name "smittenedkitten."

On Thursday, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America acknowledged that Walton was probably not the smittenedkitten it is searching for.

"Our evidence gathering and our subsequent legal actions all were initiated weeks and even months ago," said RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy. "We will now, of course, obviously dismiss this case."

The case demonstrates the imperfections of the record industry's two-year old effort to hunt down and sue people who put hundreds, even thousands, of copyrighted songs onto file-sharing networks on the Internet.

Hollywood studios filed a second round of lawsuits against online movie-swappers on Wednesday, stepping up legal pressure on the file-trading community.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) also made available a new free software tool so parents can scan their computers for file-swapping programs and for movie or music files which may be copyrighted.

"We cannot allow people to steal our motion pictures and other products online, and we will use all the options we have available to encourage people to obey the law," MPAA Chief Executive Officer Dan Glickman said in a statement.

Parent File Scan also uses a very liberal definition of file-swapping software. In a test on a CNET News.com computer, the software identified Mirc--a client for the Internet Relay Chat network, where files can be swapped, but where tens of thousands of wholly legal conversations happen every day--and Mercora, a streaming Web radio service that uses peer-to-peer technology but does not allow file swapping.

Backed by a diverse coalition of influential groups, including the Bush administration's top lawyer and the Christian Coalition, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America on Monday asked the court to overturn previous rulings that have let file-swapping software companies such as Grokster operate with only minimal legal restrictions.

"The Sgt. Schultz defense for Grokster doesn't work," RIAA Chief Executive Mitch Bainwol said at a press conference Tuesday, alluding to the bumbling camp guard from the "Hogan's Heroes" sitcom. "'See nothing, hear nothing,' doesn't apply."

At the case's heart is the 20-year-old Supreme Court ruling that made Sony Betamax videocassette recorders legal to sell. That ruling said technology that could be used for illegal purposes could still be legal to sell without liability, as long as it had substantial commercial noninfringing uses.

Those groups, which included the Christian Coalition, the Concerned Women for America, Morality in Media and others, wrote that the lower-court decisions relieving file-swapping companies of legal liability could lead to a "proliferation of anonymous, decentralized, unfiltered and untraceable peer-to-peer networks that facilitate crimes against children and that frustrate law enforcement efforts to detect and investigate these crimes."