To hear the MPAA tell it, Hollywood faces a mortal threat from something vaguely defined as "piracy." The danger is supposedly so great that the MPAA has been lobbying Congress for help -- all the while inflating their numbers to exaggerate the amount of filesharing on college campuses.
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Last week at SXSW, music industry veteran Jim Griffin broached the idea that file sharers pay a small fee through their ISPs in exchange for unlimited file sharing. There is a great deal to recommend an idea like this (as we've been saying since 2004), but there's a...

The music and movie industries have been making a concerted attempt to introduce a "three strikes" rule for Net users in many countries simultaneously — pressuring ISPs to throw their customers offline, possibly permanently, if the rightsholders report that they have been infringing.
The response by national ISPs...

On Friday, Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) wrote an op-ed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that epitomizes the sort of unvarnished misrepresentations and scare tactics that the apologists for the President and the phone companies have increasingly resorted to in the fight over amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance...

Italian Privacy Authority Upholds Privacy of P2P Users' IP addressesGoogle translation of court decision defending 3000 Italian P2P users, whose IP addresses were obtained by German label Peppermint.

License Plate Surveillance 'The Hallmarks of a Totalitarian State', Says German Supreme CourtRoundly rejects the technology from being used in...

Wow. This morning, the House stood up for our rights and passed a FISA reform bill with no retroactive immunity for phone companies! This is a flat-out rejection of the bill passed by the Senate last month, which would have let phone companies off the hook for illegally delivering innocent...

For weeks, the House has been deliberating on its response to the Senate's FISA Amendments Act, which aims to grant retroactive immunity for telecoms involved in warrantless wiretapping. While it's seemed like a possibility that the House was going to cave and agree to grant immunity, the tides have shifted...