Under the predawn sky on June 29, 2005, federal agents armed with arrest warrants and Glock handguns banged on the door of the house at 38244 Hastings St. in Fremont, Calif. “FBI!” they shouted. Their target was a heavyset 24-year-old biker named Chirayu Patel, alleged to be a leader of the “Boozers” and a handful of other underground gangs that illegally copy and load onto the Internet blockbuster movies such as Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith and Batman Begins.

Patel’s dad answered the 6 a.m. wake-up call, FBI officials say. Ten agents swept the house, guns drawn. Patel was found in his bedroom, where he was cuffed and arrested.

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Sky TV has launched a broadband service allowing its customers to legally download films from the internet. Sky by Broadband provides 200 films free to digital subscribers, although they must have a broadband connection and a PC using Microsoft Windows XP.
The company says it hopes to supply more than 1,000 films from Sky Movies’ back catalogue through broadband.

Sky Sports subscribers will also be able to download sports clips through the broadband service.

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Back in 2004, Microsoft big cheese Steve “Ballistic” Ballmer reportedly claimed that “the most common format of music on an iPod is ’stolen’.” - in the process extolling the virtue of Windows DRM which, as we all know, completely prevents piracy of any sort, anywhere, ever.

Ballmer quickly backtracked on the iPod claim and just as well, because we can exclusively reveal today that MS is apparently offering copyrighted music for free download and dissemination without regard for common IP decency and in flagrant breach of several, if not dozens, of international laws.

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News began circulating last year that the major 4 recording labels were dissatisfied with iTunes’s current price structure. These rumors eventually spilled over into reality when Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computers, publicly called the record labels “greedy” for wanting a bigger piece of the iTunes pie.

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Is eBay is going into near competition with the people who made it rich, its online sellers?
It’s launched a aunched a new fixed-price shopping service, justifying it with by claiming it’s aimed at, “people who find online auctions too time-consuming, too nerve-racking or just plain frustrating,” says the San Jose Mercury News.
All of the above would certainly apply to eBay, together with other superlatives.

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French president, Jacques Chirac hopes his great legacy to France’s “struggle against the global dominance of the US” will be a series of technological projects, among them a, “European search engine to rival Google,” says The Guardian Unlimited.
“After the biggest street protests in decades forced him to stage a U-turn on employment reform last month, Mr Chirac is keener than ever to be remembered for doing something positive for French pride,” says the story.

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Apparently, ABC television network’s decision to sell content online had nothing to do with money. Perish the thought! It was to show those dastardly pirates what’s what.Angering affiliates, the move, “was aimed at preventing piracy from eroding the broadcasting business, a senior network executive said on Tuesday,” states Reuters, going on:

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Unhappy eBay online auction customers are legion, but a Romanian programmer and engineer who allowed his anger get the better of him will pay dearly.
Unhappy with eBay’s business practices, he admitted e-mailing threats to eBay chief executive Meg Whitman and company founder Pierre Omidyar.

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Warner Home Video has begun trial sales in China of a movie DVD priced at just Rmb12 ($1.50), a move likely to anger consumers in developed markets such as Europe and the US, who typically pay $20-$30 for a recently released film on DVD.

The test sales of the modestly packaged edition of the The Aviator mark one of the boldest efforts yet by an international film company – WHV’s Chinese joint venture, CAV Warner – to adjust its marketing strategies to the potentially huge but piracy-plagued Chinese DVD market.

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MP3.com, Inc. filed a malpractice suit for over $175 million against its legal representative, the San Francisco law firm of Cooley Godward. MP3.com contended that the law firm’s advice was responsible for MP3.com’s decision to launch its music distribution service, MYMP3.com - a decision that resulted in dozens of copyright suits being filed against the company.

At the heart of this lawsuit lies a difficult question: Where should the responsibility, and liability, fall when a business fails because of adverse developments in an unsettled and hard-to-predict area of law such as cyberlaw? Should responsibility lie with the company - which was, after all, willing to utilize a business model it knew was fraught with liability risks, and might, in a different world, have profited from taking those very risks? Or should it lie with the lawyer, who may have recommended taking the risk because he or she made an inaccurate prediction as to what future legal developments would be?

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Five people have been arrested at a computer fair in Wolverhampton accused of selling pirated games, modified chips and modified game consoles.

The five traders were held overnight following a raid by 30 local police and Trading Standards officers.

Officials also discovered fully operational piracy factories at two of the suspects’ homes, comprising four computers, nine burning towers and numerous computer and video game master copies.

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It might be called Hollywood’s revenge. Angered that its fans don’t spend enough time at the movies, Hollywood is reaching into consumers’ homes to seek retribution against those allegedly peddling counterfeit movies on eBay.The Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA), the movie industry’s powerful lobbying arm, has filed 14 lawsuits against eBay sellers who it says have been selling counterfeit DVDs, seeking criminal penalties that could include jail time and fines up to $250,000.

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On Wednesday, movie actors Jasmin Tabatabai and Herbert Knaup helped two board members from the German Film Academy officially inaugurate the beta version of the new movie portal in2movies at the Ludwig-Erhard-Haus in Berlin. In a joint venture between Warner Brothers Entertainment GmbH and technical service provider arvato mobile, a member of the Bertelsmann Group, the two companies will be addressing new target groups via the Internet. Movies that are purchased are stored on the customer’s hard drive and are permanently playable.

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A SECURITY outfit investigating the state of Yahoo’s email service has found that more than half of the outfit’s email hosts are closed or unavailable.TrimMail’s Email Battles site pinged 16 of Yahoo’s email hosts 240 times over a half hour period. During that time only 133 of its pings were answered. Most of the servers were down, closed or unavailable.

Unfortunately the test was conducted over a short period of time, but a similar test on Gmail found all of them were working. Four out of the 16 Hotmail servers were closed.

http://www.techworld.com/applications/news/index.cfm?newsID=5790

MySpace, the popular social-networking , has hired a former prosecutor from the Justice Department to patrol the site and educate its users. Hemanshu Nigam also has helped develop security and child-safety strategies.

In related news, Fox Interactive Media, the parent company of MySpace.com, is partnering up with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to run several public service announcements. The announcments will educate the public on the danger of online sexual predators and will air on both the Fox Television networks and onthe Internet.