conclusions
Despite Court Loss, Aussie Copyright Group Demands ISP Pay
Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) intends to argue in Federal Court that it shouldn’t be forced to pay the costs of those portions of the trial which iiNet lost or impeded. The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), still stinging from a dazzling loss in an Australian Federal Court after suing ISP iiNet for failing to stop copyright infringement of its customers , has now decided to try and recover those costs of the trial on issues which iiNet lost or admitted delaying the court’s findings. “AFACT put in application for costs to be re-heard and it asks for costs to be adjusted for the parts of the matter that iiNet lost,” said a spokeswoman.
Continue reading »uTorrent Users Double to 52 Million in a Year
Earlier this year several publications claimed that P2P and BitTorrent were dying because of the increased popularity of streaming sites. In reality, BitTorrent is about to close a record year in terms of traffic and usage. The misleading reports all based their conclusions on data supplied by a network-management firm, which showed that of all Internet traffic, the percentage consumed by P2P has slowly declined.
Continue reading »Libraries dying for bandwidth—where’s the fiber (and cash)?
Most of America’s libraries make it a part of their mission to offer Internet access to anyone in the community, but a severe bandwidth crunch is hobbling those efforts. That’s one of the conclusions reached by the American Library Association, which says that 59.6 percent of American libraries “report their connectivity speed is inadequate some or all of the time to meet patrons’ needs.” One of the problems is funding; in a recession, and especially a recession where housing prices (and therefore property taxes) are dropping in many communities, it can be hard to scrape the cash together for a library bandwidth upgrade.
Continue reading »IT needs to prep for carbon trading, green build-outs
The European Union has crafted a variety of standards for energy use and green buildings that may have significant impacts on IT-focused companies, but there are still large differences among its member states that should influence any planning decisions. That’s one of the conclusions of an analysis of European regulations performed by The Green Grid, an organization dedicated to helping datacenters improve energy efficiency. Despite the differences, however, the report’s authors conclude that tighter building regulations and carbon trading are an inevitability, and companies would do well to prepare for them.
Continue reading »Shocking: Pirates Like Britney Spears Too
The outcome of the study is not really that much of a surprise, since nearly half of all Internet users download copyrighted music without permission, so we have to agree with the overall conclusion. However, we do have problems with the authors’ following argument that unsigned and new bands don’t really profit from sharing their music online. By sheer volume the number of downloads these lesser known bands accumulate might only be a fraction of those generated by the Britney Spears and Duffys of this world, but 10,000 downloads is pretty significant for developing artists.
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