A new report based on data from 100 US and European ISPs claims P2P traffic has dropped to around 20% of all Internet traffic.

'In fact, the P2P daily trend is pretty much completely inverted from daily traffic. In other words, P2P reaches its low at 4pm when web and overall Internet traffic approaches its peak ... trend is highly suggestive of either persistent congestion or, more likely, evidence of widespread provider manipulation of P2P traffic rates.'

US drama Heroes was the most popular illegal download this year, according to research firm Big Champagne.

About 55 million people downloaded the show, while 51 million chose to access Lost, the second most popular show.

"Millions of television viewers now access free, unauthorised versions of favourite shows at least some of the time," says Eric Garland, chief executive of Big Champagne.

Mininova, an alternative to BitTorrent tracking site The Pirate Bay, has lost a key legal battle. A court in Sweden ruled the site will face fines if it does not take action to remove links pointing to copyrighted material from its servers.

The court accused Mininova of both promoting the violation of copyrights and profiting from said activity due to advertising on the site.

To please the entertainment industry GGF will install a system that will allow the copyright holders to either authorize the 'illegal' torrent or have it removed from the site.

One of the pitfalls of this new reactive system is of course that copyright holders might start to remove content en masse instead of authorizing it, so that there is nothing available for the (paying) users to download and share.

"The risk that rights holders will remove all content on The Pirate Bay at the date of acquisition is estimated as inexistent by GGF."

It seems that just about everyone who has tried it absolutely loves Spotify. It has in excess of 3.5 million tracks available, all for free (if you chose that option), all funded by advertising.

Uggla says that when he received his first earnings statement from Spotify it became apparent that he "earned as much in six months as a BUSKER could earn in a day."

However, Uggla was as surprised as most people when he learned last week that the major labels, including Sony, all have a stake in Spotify.

If an $80,000-per-song verdict isn't enough to deter Thomas-Rasset from file sharing, we're not so sure an injunction matters. Still, the RIAA fears the 32-year-old Thomas-Rasset, who undoubtedly has become the world's most notorious copyright scofflaw.

"Furthermore, the nature of defendant's means of infringement - a peer-to-peer file sharing network with tens of millions of potential users - has resulted in the distribution of plaintiffs' copyrighted sound recordings to innumerable other people, who, in turn, are likely to further distribute plaintiffs' sound recordings," Reynolds wrote.

News reached the press today in Sweden - The Pirate Bay might get aquired by Global Gaming Factory X AB.

It's time to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody.

I hope everybody will help out in that and realize that this is the best option for all. Don't worry - be happy!

Just days after Norway's data protection department told ISPs they must delete all personal IP address-related data three weeks after collection, it's now become safer than ever to be a file-sharer in Norway. The only law firm with a license to track pirates has just seen it expire and it won't be renewed.

Earlier this month we reported that since Norway's Personal Data act prohibits the storage of unnecessary data, ISPs in the country must delete all IP address-related personal information they hold on their customers which is more than three weeks old.

Stephen Garrett from Kudos, the firm behind Spooks and Ashes to Ashes, warns that illegal file sharing threatens the existence of hit TV shows.

His comments come as the government outlines its strategy for broadband, broadcast, and digital content in the Digital Britain report.

A German court has ruled that a user can't be criminally prosecuted for files that he unknowingly shared on a P2P network, according to heise.de.

A lower court found him guilty nonetheless, arguing that an active user of a P2P client should be able to understand how it works, including the fact that it might share all downloaded data. The District Court of Oldenburg however disagreed, ruling that the name of the "incoming" folder suggested that these files weren't also going out to other users.