The music industry has announced a fresh series of legal actions against 784 people they suspect of illegally downloading songs from the internet. The action is brought by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), bringing the total number of actions to nearly 11,000. The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has sued 90 file-sharers to date. Separately, 90 raids have been carried out around the world in a co-ordinated crackdown on internet piracy. Police in 12 countries have seized computers and made arrests in an attempt to disrupt the “warez” groups responsible for the majority of copyrighted material available illegally online.

“We have shown law enforcement can find and prosecute those who try to use the internet to create piracy networks,” said US attorney general Alberto Gonzales.

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File-sharers have moved away from the popular BitTorrent system following legal action, say experts. Instead they have moved to another network called eDonkey, showed a study by internet analysis firm CacheLogic. It found that eDonkey has become the dominant peer-to-peer file-sharing network in countries such as South Korea, Italy, Germany and Spain.

The study seems to suggest that the legal action to stamp out file-sharing is meeting with limited success.

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A search engine used to locate links to movie and music files has moved to dismiss legal attempts by the US film industry to sue over copyright. Lawyers for Torrentspy say the lawsuit is an attempt to make the BitTorrent system itself illegal. People use BitTorrent as a way of downloading content, often illegally sharing copyrighted material. Torrentspy says it does not host copyright files and obeys requests to remove links to such material.

BitTorrent has become a widely used online system to get hold of very large video files as the technology is very efficient at splitting up and sharing data. Use of the technology has proved to be a thorn in the side of the MPAA as it can make it hard to work out who is behind illegal movie sharing.

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The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced on June 25, 2003, that it will begin suing users of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing systems within the next few weeks. According to the announcement, the RIAA will be targeting users who upload/share “substantial” amounts of copyrighted music. The RIAA has stated that it will choose who to sue by using software that scans users’ publicly available P2P directories and then identifies the ISP of each user. Then, using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the RIAA will subpoena the ISP for each user’s name, address, and other personal information in order to sue that user.

While there is no way to know exactly what the RIAA is going to do, who it is going to sue, or even how much music qualifies as a “substantial” amount, users of P2P networks can take the following steps to reduce their chances of being sued:

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The World Privacy Forum and 30 other privacy and civil liberties organizations have written a letter calling upon Google to suspend its Gmail service until the privacy issues are adequately addressed. The letter also calls upon Google to clarify its written information policies regarding data retention and data sharing among its business units.

The 31 organizations are voicing their concerns about Google’s plan to scan the text of all incoming messages for the purposes of ad placement, noting that the scanning of confidential email for inserting third party ad content violates the implicit trust of an email service provider. The scanning creates lower expectations of privacy in the email medium and may establish dangerous precedents.

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Ever heard of “Cookies” . Well they might sound like those warm little things your mother or wife makes, but they are far more evil than that. Those little “Cookies” track your every move across the internet and tells people alot about YOU.

Welcome to Data Mining 101. We knew you would be reading this as we have been tracking your every move since you logged on. Does that statement not give you the creaps? Well it should unless you are brain dead. More information is collected each day from users on the internet that it would be impossible to surf the internet without those cookies.

Cookies can tell others where you have been, what you have looked at and what you like, and they keep track of these cookies for a long time. Google keeps its cookies for……well they are set to expire by 2038. Nope those numbers are not dog years, that is human years. The cookie on your computer will expire in well 30 plus years from now. Basically it is forever as you will either be very old or dead by the time the cookie expires! You could think of them as fortune cookies, at least they are making someone else a fortune! Read more »