Soon after the domain was registered in Hong Kong, the now-defunct Megaupload.com grew into one of the world's most popular file-sharing sites. At its peak, the site engaged nearly 50 million users a day and took up around four percent of the world's Internet traffic. Users uploaded nearly 12 billion files overall. But the infamy of the site's rise is only matched by the infamy of its fall. In January 2012, US authorities closed down Megaupload.com and the network related to it. The feds arrested seven people and froze $50 million in assets.

Last week the local branches of Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music, Warner Music and EMI won a default judgment against Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde. The Helsinki District Court ordered Sunde to pay $395,000 (350,000 euros) for music shared illegally through the site by its users. In addition, he faces an additional one million euro fine if the infringements continue in the future, even though he has no control over the site.

A new academic paper from Carnegie Mellon University examines the link between international DVD release delays and piracy. The study shows that release delays give rise to increased piracy, hurting sales in the process. In addition, the researchers conclude that the movie industry should consider minimizing or eliminating the unneeded delays. After a film premiers in theaters, movie fans usually have to wait a few months before they can get their hands on a DVD or Blu-Ray copy, depending on the local release strategy.

Whoo boy. Did not expect this one. For a while now, we've noted a variety of lawsuits over pre-1972 sound recordings, due to a quirk in copyright law. You see, for a long time, sound recordings were not covered by federal copyright at all (the...

The torrent-sharing websites like The Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents continue to employ the tactics of changing domain names to stray away from the copyright cases and anti-piracy advocates. The Pirate Bay has now started redirecting its users to the .ORG domain after a new ruling from a Swedish court endangered its .SE domain name. On 12 May, the court ruled that ThePirateBay.se and PirateBay.se, two Pirate Bay domains registered in Sweden, would be confiscated as they were infringing copyrights on a massive scale.

For the first time Swedish Internet service provider Bahnhof has shared details on the nature of police requests for subscriber identities. The data reveals that with 27.5% "file-sharing" is by far the largest category. The ISP, however, doesn't see piracy as a serious crime and has refused to hand over any subscriber data.

The UK Intellectual Property Office is investigating how search engines and social media networks can step up their game to deter piracy. The Government is pushing for voluntary anti-piracy agreements between major Internet companies and entertainment industry groups, but will consider a legislative approach if these fail.

IBM has submitted an application to expand its portfolio with a rather peculiar patent. To protect rightsholders the technology company has invented a printer that doesn't copy or print any copyright infringing text or images. Every week hundreds of million of people copy and print documents, even though they officially don’t always have the rights to do so. This unauthorized printing can be problematic for copyright holders, such as book authors, IBM says, and this...

While it’s not widely publicized, many larger torrent sites regularly remove links to infringing files. This allows copyright holders to somewhat limit the availability of their works on the Internet. Generally speaking, movie studios and other rightsholders hire anti-piracy companies to track down infringing content. These outfits then send takedown notices to the sites in question. In India, the local Sony Pictures’ representatives are taking a different approach.

There are possibly millions of infringing videos on YouTube and for the most part users see it as a bonus. This week, however, I stumbled across a suspect video on the site and the resulting cascade of emotions made me wonder: Don't we all appreciate copyrights and get annoyed by piracy when conditions are just right?

This isn't about sharing some sort of commercial music or video or anything. This is about academic research, much of which has been paid for with public tax dollars, and which Elsevier paid no money to create.

Sci-Hub is facing millions of dollars in damages in a lawsuit filed by Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers. As a result of the legal battle the site just lost one of its latest domain names. However, the site has no intentions of backing down, and will continue its fight to keep access to scientific knowledge free and open.

Last year, there was an attempt to keep the Diary of Anne Frank out of the public domain by adding her father's name as a co-author. That seemed to be a pretty clear abuse of copyright but also a dangerous precedent, which has just turned up again

There are ways to get in trouble with the law for just about everything: smoking weed, theft, horse theft, stealing a horse and teaching it to smoke weed, and even shouting “fire” in a crowded not-on-fire stable full of stoned horses. But numbers are pure and theoretical and definitely exempt from legal action, right?

Every year the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) publishes its Special 301 Report highlighting countries that aren’t doing enough to protect U.S. intellectual property rights. In 2016 the report sticks to a tried and tested format, with countries such as China, Russia, India and Ukraine all making the Priority List once again. However, just as the USTR wasn’t afraid to place Canada on the Watch List several years ago, this year it has added another ally.

Many Canadians are enraged by Netflix's declared war on cross-border watchers, who skirt the company's rules by sneaking across virtual borders to stream Netflix shows and movies restricted to other countries. Sometimes it's hard to be satisfied with Netflix Canada's library when our American neighbours have, it's estimated, access to almost double the content. Since mid-January, the streaming service giant is cracking down on border hoppers by blocking access to foreign content.

According to the IFPI's head of anti-piracy, calling illegal downloading "piracy" has become somewhat of a hindrance. Those confronted with the term are more likely to romanticize the topic, Graeme Grant suggests, but can simply changing the name of something really change the beast?

A period of consultation has led our government to think that 10 years in prison is a suitable punishment for sharing copyrighted material online. The figure was arrived at by Baroness Rolfe and her thinkers, and is the result of an almost year-long consultation into whether two years in jail is enough, or whether an extra eight is required. "These offences are currently punishable by a maximum of two years' imprisonment.

After signing up to Spotify several years ago one of my first tasks was to begin hand-crafting playlists of the thousands of 1980s and 1990s dance tracks I had previously bought on vinyl. Once lovingly stacked and indexed in a spare room, these much-loved relics of a bygone era are now gathering dust in the attic, probably never to be played again. Or at least that’s what I thought.

Led Zeppelin has long been accused of copying others songs, and there are actually a bunch of videos on YouTube detailing examples. Some of the examples do sound like pretty blatant copies, while others are, at best, homages or inspirations, rather than direct copies.