copyright infringement

In honor of Cyber Monday, the feds cracked down on Web sites allegedly selling counterfeit goods. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it joined forces with international law enforcement authorities to nab 132 domain names that were supposedly hawking bogus sports jerseys, DVD sets, jewelry, and clothing.

"Our partnerships enable us to go after criminals who are duping unsuspecting shoppers all over the world," Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement director John Morton said in a statement. "This is not an American problem, it is a global one and it is a … Read more

The U.S. Copyright Office published its new set of rules on whether people can jailbreak smartphones, tablets, and gaming consoles today; it also outlined the guidelines on DVD copying.

Overwhelmingly, its conclusions were that besides smartphones, all of the above remain illegal.

Every three years the Copyright Office takes requests from digital rights proponents and opponents to re-examine the laws under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that dictate whether people can unlock or jailbreak their varied devices. Today, in a lengthy document (PDF), the government listed all of the changes it made.

The key developments are that people cannot … Read more

MegaUpload founder Kim DotCom has proven to be unstoppable. After the U.S. government's major takedown of the cloud-storage service, which came with charges of racketeering, copyright infringement, money laundering, and more, DotCom has escaped extradition to the U.S. for now and was given a formal apology by New Zealand's prime minister.

Emboldened, DotCom has announced that he is building a new file-sharing site called Mega. According to Wired, this new site will work slightly different than MegaUpload but will still let users upload, store, and share data files. DotCom also intends to make it raid-proof.

"… Read more

In the midst of threats of a possible police raid, the Pirate Bay decided to armor itself and become literally raid-proof. It's ditched its servers and moved to several cloud-hosting providers in different countries around the world.

"Slowly and steadily we are getting rid of our earthly form and ascending into the next stage, the cloud," the Pirate Bay wrote in a blog post. "Our data flows around in thousands of clouds, in deeply encrypted forms, ready to be used when necessary. Earth bound nodes that transform the data are as deeply encrypted and reboot into … Read more

Facebook has cracked the whip on The Cool Hunter. After little warning the social network shuttered the design and pop-culture Web site's Facebook page eight weeks ago, leaving both the founder and its 788,000 fans wondering what went wrong.

In a blog post this week, founder Bill Tikos bemoaned the shutdown and said that it has severely hurt the site's business. According to Tikos, its Facebook fan base grew by 1,500 to 2,500 per day and also generated more than 10,000 click-throughs to the site per day. Overall, The Cool Hunter has 2.1 … Read more

Swedish police raided Web host PRQ earlier this week but it wasn't clear what they were after. Now, the ISP's owner is saying that the authorities seized servers for Web sites that allegedly dealt in illegal file-sharing.

According to TorrentFreak, police took three servers -- one belonged to one of Sweden's popular torrent sites called Tankafetast, another to an alleged Android app piracy site called Appbucket. It's unclear what was on the third server.

On Monday, the authorities targeted PRQ, which is known for hosting some of the most popular outlaw sites on the Internet. Former … Read more

The Swedish police seem to be going straight to the source in their battle against copyright infringement. According to Forbes, the country's authorities raided the Stolckholm-based Web host PRQ, which is known for hosting some of the most popular outlaw sites on the Internet, including the Pirate Bay, Wikileaks, the North America Man-Boy Love Association, Pedophile.se, and the Chechen rebel site Kavkaz Central.

It's unclear why police raided PRQ, but its owner Mikael Viborg told the Swedish news outlet Nyheter24 that he believes the investigation had to do with intellectual property violations, according to TorrentFreak. Viborg also … Read more

It seems like Google is finally complying with the Recording Industry Association of America's wishes by not showing alleged copyright infringing Web sites in its Instant and Autocomplete search features.

According to TorrentFreak, the search giant just added the Pirate Bay to its censorship list.

Now, when users type "thepiratebay.org" or any of the site's other domain names into their search box, nothing relating to the Pirate Bay's Web site pops up. However, the file-sharing site is still indexed in Google's overall search function.

The RIAA has been working hard over the past … Read more

Oracle is due to receive a hefty amount in legal damages from SAP, but the database giant wants more.

In early August, SAP agreed to pay Oracle $306 million following a trial that found SAP guilty of copyright infringement. The jury verdict reached in 2010 determined that Oracle should receive $1.3 billion in damages.

But last September, U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton deemed that amount excessive and gave Oracle a choice of accepting $272 million in damages or requesting a new trial.

The amount ballooned to the$306 million agreed upon last month. At the time, Oracle general … Read more