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Archive for April, 2009

Tired of your old pizza boxes?  This is the new green pizza box!

If you’ve been following The Pirate Bay trial, you know that the verdict is due today. Unfortunately for the Pirate Bay Founders, and quite surprisingly given that the charges were partly dropped at the very beginning of the trial, the court has found them guilty.

Early reports from Torrentfreak that the verdict has already leaked (ironically, many of the charges against The Pirate Bay have to do with leaked copies of copyrighted movies and music), and that the Pirate Bay has lost, were true. Torrentfreak has gotten the info with site founder Peter Sunde, who he has heard the verdict early from a “trustworthy source.”

“Nothing will happen to TPB, us personally or file-sharing whatsoever,” he assures us, but this is definitely a big blow to all BitTorrent trackers around the world, and it might set a precedent for all similar cases in the future.

Update: the official verdict is out, and all four of The Pirate Bay’s founders are found guilty in ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström all receive one year in jail; they also must pay $3.6 million in damages.

Of course, this is not the end of this story. The Pirate Bay will appeal to the court, and there is a possibility that the verdict is reversed later. But the fact that the court has bought into the entertainment industry’s reasoning, which have at times been odd and unclear, is definitely not a good sign for The Pirate Bay.

On the other hand, even if The Pirate Bay loses the battle altogether and is forced to shut down further along the line, the entertainment industry has to understand that a thousand new pirate bays will sprout up everywhere. Can they sue them all? Or should they finally consider changing their business model and adapt to how Internet – the place that gives them previously unimaginable opportunities for reaching out to their customers – really works.

Tags: copyright, file sharing, piracy, the pirate bay, trial

source: The Pirate Bay Trial: Guilty As Charged

If it seems like Twitter is growing faster and faster each day, that is because it is. ComScore has released its March numbers for the U.S., and it estimates that unique visitors to Twitter.com grew 131 percent between February and March to 9.3 million visitors. No wonder Twitter is more popular than Britney. Read the rest of this entry »

Google has disabled both uploads of videos and comments on the Korean version of YouTube after the South Korean government tried to enforce a new law which requires web sites with at least 100,000 users to verify the person’s real name if they upload files or leave comments. The Cyber Defamation Law, as it’s called, went into effect on April 1st. According to officials at the Korea Communications Commission (KCC), the country’s broadcasting and telecommunications regulator, the law is an attempt to quell the cyber-bullying and spread of misinformation on the internet. However, critics say that it’s just another example of the Lee Myung-bak government’s overzealous efforts to monitor and control cyberspace. Read the rest of this entry »

Jennifer Aniston has trumped her ex-husband Brad Pitt‘s new partner Angelina Jolie – by earning a reported $13 million more than her in 2008.

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MySpace has announced that it is planning to launch a new “Editor’s Pick” category in its application directory next week, allowing members to quickly sift through the platform’s best apps. MySpace had previously shown a handful of featured apps as users browsed its Apps Directory, but these rotated and there was no way to browse through them. Now, users will be able to access a stable list of the best apps as determined by a team of MySpace employees who work with the applications on a daily basis (all apps will be chosen by merit, not through paid sponsorships). Read the rest of this entry »

Billy Bob Thornton has scrapped the remainder of his North American dates as support to Willie Nelson after fans booed him onstage at a Toronto show on Thursday night.

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Actor Skylar DeLeon has been sentenced to death for murdering Arizona couple Tom and Jackie Hawks.

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What are you doing? No what are you doing Apple, Skype, Flip, StubHub and Box.net?? These popular companies just couldn’t resist paying off Twitter users to put advertisements into their Twitter streams using the new pay-per-tweet service Magpie. It’s enough to make you question the true motives of any outspoken fan and the end result is pretty laughable when you take “a bird’s eye view.” Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to a slip of the fingers on Posterous (and Robert Scoble’s serious Twitter addiction), new images of Michael Arrington’s pet Internet-tablet project — the CrunchPad — have shown up looking very, very close to a finished product. As you can see in the gallery below, the (supposedly) $200, WiFi enabled pad has gotten dressed up in multiple colors and been shoved into some fairly handsome looking packaging. There’s no telling if this means the device is any closer to a buy-able reality, but one thing is for sure: a microblog is no place for secrets.

[Via Scoble's Twitterfeed, Arab Crunch]

Filed under: Handhelds

Leaked pics of the CrunchPad make it look dangerously close to availability originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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