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Punk Filesharing Protest Song Wins Stephen Fry/TalkTalk Competition
TalkTalk’s campaign against UK Government’s plans to impose the notorious “three strikes” law and the entire debate sparked by Lord Mandelson’s anti-piracy proposals altogether was of great interest for us right from the start as you could easily see from our posts. As we have previously pointed out, such a law would be a serious blow to the people’s freedom on the Internet since alleged file sharers would have their Internet connections cut off without the guarantee of a fair trial prior to that. Moreover, as TalkTalk has underlined a number of times, this absurd measure not only will fail to prevent illegal file sharing but will cause a dramatic increase in Wi-fi theft .
Continue reading »Mandelson Gets His Own Digital Economy Bill Protest Song
When Lily Allen inflamed the UK, and indeed, much of the Internet with her views on piracy a couple of months ago, it was difficult to see who could come along and create more controversy on the issue. But of course, Britain has a secret weapon – Peter Mandelson. Lord Mandelson, or ‘Mandy’ to those speaking of him affectionately, has truly set the cat among the pigeons with his Digital Economy Bill, pleasing almost no-one apart from Big Music and Big Movies, and alienating everyone from most of the ISPs in the country through to millions of Internet users.
Continue reading »UK responds to online anti-Phorm petition
The UK seems to be having a few problems, writes Christopher Parsons in his Technology, Thoughts, and Trinkets blog. According the BBC, he says, the Speaker of the Commons has stepped down , there’s an Irish child abuse report coming due, and violence is rife in a failing prison . Dear, dear.
Continue reading »MySpace sinks. Fa$ebook doesn’t.
Will Rupert Murdoch soon have to start collecting social security rather than social network cheques? His MySpace is a, “battleship that’s going in the wrong direction at high speed,” says TechCrunch , observing, “It’s hard to turn a battleship. Perhaps even impossible in this case.” And about a year from now, it’ll receive its last “welfare payment from Google,” says the story.
Continue reading »Big Music renews efforts to crush Blubster
In 2001 Pablo Soto, based in Madrid, Spain, created the Manolito protocol, and P2P file sharing applications Blubster and Piolet. Blubster was the first to advertise in p2pnet, the other perfectly legal companies Morpheus, LimeWire and BearShare followed suit, and the four were for a number of years p2pnet’s sole source of income. Like p2pnet, they believed P2P and sharing was the way of the future and tried to build independent businesses around the concept.
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