The recording industry sued thousands of individual file-sharers in an unprecedented campaign of lawsuits that began in 2003; but only two of those cases ever went to trial. Both resulted in large damage awards against the accused downloader. Now, one of the cases is on appeal, and defendant Joel Tenenbaum’s…

After a four year battle, the only issue remaining in the record labels’ lawsuit against the Limewire file-sharing network is the battle over damages. And it’s turning out to be a big fight, with dozens of documents filed in the last week alone. Now, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and MySpace (NSDQ: NWS)…

New forecasts out today for the mobile music market from Juniper Research: it will bring in revenues of $5.5 billion by 2015, compared to $3.1 billion last year. What’s interesting is that mobile music might just turn out to be more competitive than the digital market overall. While digital music…

Google is still locked in a legal battle with Viacom (NYSE: VIA) over how it handled users who violated copyright rules on YouTube. So a copyright enemy of Viacom would be a friend of Google’s, right? No. Take IsoHunt, a BitTorrent search engine based in Canada. Legally speaking, IsoHunt may…

Internet piracy is as big as…everyone already probably assumed it was. But just in the case the Motion Picture Association of America hasn’t sufficiently scared you with fresh statistics lately, here’s a new trove of numbers commissioned by NBC (NYSE: GE) Universal.

Since Napster exploded into the public consciousness when it was founded 12 years ago, the world of digital piracy has been associated with a particular type of software—“peer-to-peer” download services. (Sometimes fairly, sometimes not.) Either way, 2011 is likely to be the year when P2P is finally eclipsed by “cyberlockers,”…

Earlier this week, the popular BitTorrent news blog TorrentFreak published a list of the most pirated TV shows of 2010. The No. 1 most-pirated show—that would be ABC’s Lost, which was illegally downloaded nearly six million times—had a strange characteristic about it. It was available, for at least several months…

The internet telephony service Skype got a good deal out of the net neutrality vote earlier this week, with the FCC deciding that Skype and other voice services like it could not be banned or throttled on broadband networks. But services in the past 24 hours seem to show that…

Prosecuting the criminals that steal content is one way of fighting piracy. Over at Warner Bros. (NYSE: TWX), they’re adopting a more opportunistic attitude, closely tracking pirates in hopes of converting them into consumers.

In a sign that the Obama Administration is taking a harder line on intellectual-property crimes, the government has seized dozens of web-domain names over the past week, including some peer-to-peer file-sharing sites.

The Pirate Bay’s co-founders today lost their appeal against convictions for encouraging illegal filesharing, and have had their collective fine increased by $2m (£1.3m) to $6.5m (£4.1m). A Stockholm court of appeal ruled that Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrom remain guilty of helping Pirate Bay users illicitly share…

In the past several months, tens of thousands of “John Doe” defendants have been sued for copyright infringement in federal courts. It’s an unprecedented number of people to have hauled into court, even if it’s only on paper. The campaigns are essentially a ramped-up version of what the recording industry…

Some interesting legal tidbits for the day: »  The sharing of data through referral URLs—where companies pass on more about the user than just the URL that he or she last came from, like the specific terms he or she was searching on or even the user’s name—is practically as…

Some of the stories people are talking about this morning:»  If you want a white iPhone, better be patient. Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has experienced delays again and says the white version won’t ship until sometime next year. [Digital Daily] »  P2p file-sharer LimeWire has been ordered to permanently shut down…

Looks like the sale saga of The Pirate Bay may not be over quite yet. The sale of the site’s domain and trademarks to Swedish software firm Global Gaming Factory X was never completed last fall. But Global Gaming Factory X now says it expects a deal to be done…

A big setback Down Under for Hollywood studios: A federal judge in Australia has ruled that ISP iiNet is not liable for copyright infringements that get made by its customers. The precedent-setting decision flies in the face of the three-strikes laws being formed in other markets like neighboring New Zealand,…

It calls itself “the ultimate BitTorrent source”, but P2P tracker Mininova has now removed almost all links to copyrighted content after complying with a cease-and-desist court ruling in August from Dutch entertainment rightsholder group Brein. As the site’s staff write in a blog post, only content uploaded via the site’s…

Has the tide turned against bedroom P2P file-sharers in the music industry’s epic fight against piracy? The IFPI’s branch in Sweden—the home of illegal file-sharing—is reporting that Swedish music sales rose 18 percent in the first nine months of the year, after seven years of consecutive decline, following the introduction…

Global Gaming Factory X (GGF)‘s much-hyped and now defunct bid to buy BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay was a ship that never sailed. But more bidders could be on the horizon… Swedish games download site Gamersgate.com and, bizarrely, GGF CEO Hans Pandeya are amongst them, according to DI.se (via Thelocal.se).…