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 [...]

P2P distribution for new media seemed like a good idea to a lot of people a few years ago. The idea was that you’d be able to distribute your content over P2P networks and avoid paying a lot of money for bandwidth.  Unfortunately for content producers, P2P distribution for new media doesn’t offer any benefits [...]

Security firm TrustedSource reports that a new trojan has been identified that infects multi-media files on Windows computers. The malware embeds malicious content into multimedia files based on the Advanced Systems Format (ASF), a widely used format for video and audio content such as MP3 and WMA music files, WMV video files and others. When [...]

Jim Louderback, CEO of podcasting/new media network Revision3, has an explanation for why his site died over Memorial Day weekend: they were hacked and attacked by MediaDefender, a company that works for the music and film industries doing anti-piracy work.

“Media Defender was abusing one of Revision3’s servers for their own purposes, without our approval,” says Louderback. “They willingly admitted to abusing Revision3’s network, over a period of months, by injecting a broad array of torrents into our tracking server.”

NBC & Pando Networks, a provider of P2P content delivery services, announced today that Pando will be providing video delivery services for the NBC Direct service. While it’s interesting to see a mainstream network using P2P to distribute video, it looks like NBC Direct is going to be another misbegotten proprietary Internet television offering. It [...]

The net is abuzz with talk today about Qtrax, another service that promises free ad-supported music. The Qtrax service offers to let you use an ad-supported program to search for and download DRM’d music that you can play on a PC and on some media players. Unfortunately, it looks like Qtrax will be as dead [...]

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 [...]

The RIAA is increasing the pressure it puts on colleges and universities to restrict activities on school networks, sending thousands more complaints to top universities this school year than it did last year. A few schools, including Ohio and Purdue universities, already have received more than 1,000 complaints accusing individual students since last fall. For [...]

A new study in the Journal of Political Economy has found that illegal music downloads have had no noticeable effects on the sale of music, contrary to the claims of the RIAA and other music industry organizations. The study, The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis, by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman [...]