On Friday, the Department of Justice and the RIAA claimed another victory in the never-ending battle against file-sharing when the government agency seized the domain of Sharebeast.com.

Sharebeast included pirate content beyond music as well. A studio-commissioned report from 2014 showed Sharebeast was one of the Top 250 sites for pirated music and TV files in the UK for instance. And when FIFA and its partners pushed hard to eliminate illicit streams of the 2014 World Cup, Sharebeast was one of the sites the football (soccer) organization asked to be blocked.

The so-called, self-professed "faith healer" sued an online critic, Stephanie Guttormson, earlier this year. It was a clear SLAPP lawsuit. Guttormson had taken one of Miller's laughable promotional videos and added some commentary mocking it.

Adam Miller is back and he's insisting that he's going to reopen the lawsuit against Guttormson. Oh, and not only that, he's also launched a new site, FaithWarrior.org where he insists that he's declaring "war" on "anarchy" and a variety of other things, including communism (he insists his critics are all communists), "faith bashing," "cyberbullying," "online harassment" and more.

We thought it was a joke for almost an entire day until one of us figured out that they were actually claiming our use of a small bit of ink splatter that was on one of their images was actionable.

You see, not only are they trying to get us to pay them for using a few ink splotches, but as it turns out, the ink splotches don't belong to them in the first place!

So not only is Trunk Archive trying to scare people into paying them for images, but they're apparently doing this for images they have absolutely no connection to.

Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, 29, who is also wanted by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), posted a tweet to the social networking site, Twitter on Monday that may have inadvertently revealed his presence in Costa Rica. The social networking app, when used from a smartphone, pins a user’s location to each tweet, unless the feature is turned off.

Any provision of U.S. law that eliminated “pre-established damage” or “additional damages” for any class of works could be a violation of various TPP provisions requiring that such damages be made available, and it even appears that distribution of orphan works would have to subject the distributor to criminal copyright liability.

These (and other — poke around at the KEI site for more evidence) copyright provisions in the TPP are pretty dreadful and continue the disturbing trend of making copyright bigger, longer and stronger just when public policy demands the opposite.

The very first one involves the CBP agent forwarding all of his email to a personal account, but messing up the configuration, so that it actually forwarded to someone else's Gmail account (someone with a similar name) -- and this mistake was only noticed when this "civilian" responded to an email he had received via this forwarding, and the response was sent to a wider mailing list of Homeland Security employees.

Not sure about to you, but this doesn't make me feel much safer about DHS at all. And, remember, DHS is one of the government bodies currently looking to manage the government's cybersecurity efforts -- and they're considered the better option given just how little people trust the NSA or the FBI (the two other main contenders).

The studio behind a poorly reviewed Adam Sandler movie has targeted 11 Popcorn Time users in Oregon who used the BitTorrent-based app to download The Cobbler.

They are believed to be in violation of a copyright held by Cobbler Nevada LLC, the corporate entity behind the film.

The unnamed woman, a resident of Petrer in Alicante, south-east Spain, posted the photo on her Facebook page with the comment “Park where you bloody well please and you won’t even be fined”.

Asked how the photo had put the police at risk, he said the officers felt the woman had impugned their honour by posting the picture and referred the incident to the town hall authorities. “We would have preferred a different solution but they have the legal right to impose the fine,” Portillo said.

Netzpolitik had just published stories concerning plans to expand German bulk surveillance efforts to internet users, as well as plans by the German Secret Service to expand its internet surveillance capabilities.

Netzpolitik has received a letter from the German government telling it that Netzpolitik staffers are being investigated for treason.

British Columbia's privacy laws are in the crosshairs of the nearly completed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. If you're wondering what the heck data privacy protections have to do with trade, you're not alone.

The thing is, the TPP e-commerce chapter aims not only to free the movement of digital goods, such as software or downloadable music, but also to enshrine the rights of companies to freely move data -- including records of financial transactions, consumer behaviour, online communications and medical histories -- across borders.

While closed to ordinary citizens, the TPP is very open to influence from corporate special interests, whose lobbyists have special access as cleared advisors to negotiators. The U.S. lead negotiator on e-commerce, Robert Holleyman, is a former high-ranking industry lobbyist.