Campaigning for sweeping reform of copyright, privacy and patent laws, Sweden’s Pirate Party this weekend won enough votes in the country’s national elections to secure a seat (possibly two) in the European Parliament. Sweden is accorded 17 representatives in the EU governing legislature, and the Pirate Party’s 7.1 percent showing is enough for at least [...]

Peter Althin, the attorney representing Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde, has called for a retrial, Swedish news site The Local revealed today. Swedish radio channel Sveriges Radio’s P3 news programme reports that the judge in the case was a member of the same copyright protection groups as several of the main entertainment industry representatives, who [...]

Viacom’s billion dollar lawsuit against Google is getting ugly. The federal court hearing the case has ordered (pdf) Google to provide Viacom with “all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website”. The ruling brings a new twist [...]

The controversy over the Richter Scales’ Here Comes Another Bubble appears to be drawing to a close. The video was taken down from YouTube after photographer Lane Hartwell objected to the unauthorized use of one of her photos in the video. This has led to a great deal of debate over the role of copyright [...]

The Lane Hartwell copyright controversy has led to a great deal of debate over the role of copyright and fair use in Internet videos. Hartwell is a professional photographer that publishes her images on Flickr, with all rights reserved. When she saw one of her photos being used without permission or credit in the video [...]

Photographer Lane Hartwell is tired of people stealing her photos and reusing them without her permission. She’s published her images, like a lot of us, on Flickr, with all rights reserved. Unlike most of us, though, Hartwell is a freelance photographer and a regular contributor to Wired News. Her work has featured in publications around [...]

50 Cent says he isn’t snorting coke, but some in the industry may think that he’s talking like he’s high. In an interview with P√•l Nordseth in Oslo, Fitty denied taking coke on live TV in Zagreb and then went on to talk about how file-sharing was inevitable and that the music industry needed to [...]

Billionaire blogger & HD video guru Mark Cuban has an interesting perspective on the controversy over the issue of Internet companies blocking P2P traffic: “BLOCK P2P TRAFFIC , PLEASE,” asks Cuban. “As a consumer, I want my internet experience to be as fast as possible. The last thing I want slowing my internet service down [...]

A survey (pdf)¬†of music fans in the UK suggests that pricing at Apple’s iTunes music store may be keeping people from buying more legal music downloads, and could be driving people to file-sharing sites. Equally surprising, the survey suggests that most music fans don’t know or care about DRM (Digital Rights Management software). iTunes Pricing [...]

Despite the tremendous popularity of legal music downloads, and the widespread availability of free legal music downloads, music piracy is at an all-time high, according to a report out today that urges the record industry to make legal buying easier and cheaper. Why? A growing band of consumers are unconcerned about being prosecuted for illegal downloads, according to Entertainment [...]