France has become the latest country to block world's number one file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay, in an effort to defend copyright-protected content. The ruling of the Grand Instance Court of Paris, published in IT magazine Numerama on Friday, ordered the country’s leading internet providers, including Orange, Bouygues Télécom, Free and SFR, to ensure “all measures are put into place to prevent access (to the site) from French territory”.

Swedish police have reportedly raided The Pirate Bay. The Portal has been down for several hours. The site has long hidden behind the relatively lax laws of Sweden, but it appears it's exhausted the leniency. The embattled site went down this morning, and Swedish Police confirmed to TorrentFreak that servers were seized in connection with a broad intellectual property operation of some kind.

Hollywood studios have struggled with Google over piracy issues before, but a new leak suggests the companies may be patching up their differences with some unexpected help from Homeland Security. A leaked email sent to Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton on March 19, 2012, provides a new look at how Google fits into anti-piracy efforts, in Hollywood and beyond. The email describes a small, secret group assembled by Homeland Security's John Morton...

Torrent site isoHunt appears to have unofficially resurrected The Pirate Bay at oldpiratebay.org. At first glance, The Old Pirate Bay seems to be just a commemorative site for The Pirate Bay, which went down this week after police raided its data center in Sweden. Upon further inspection, however, it turns out the site is serving new content. Various mirror sites of The Pirate Bay have sprung up since the site...

One easy takeaway from perusing leaked emails from Sony’s TV and movie division is that the company, like the rest of the Hollywood establishment, absolutely loathes digital piracy and everything associated with it—so much so that a plan to circulate a fake version of a television show was praised for being “clever” but spiked because of a strict policy against using torrent sites. “Personally, I love this… unfortunately the studio position is that we absolutely cannot post content...

The Pirate Bay was deep-sixed this week in its home port of Stockholm, Sweden, after cops raided a data center hosting the world’s most famous piracy organization. But its absence appears to have put hardly a dent in global piracy activity over the last four days. On Monday, Dec. 8, a total of 101.5 million Internet addresses worldwide were engaged in torrent downloads of relevant titles tracked by anti-piracy...

Trinidad and Tobago's music industry is used to controversial lyrics in its annual crop of new soca (soul of calypso) and calypso songs for carnival.

After nearly two weeks of downtime the official domain of The Pirate Bay is showing signs of life. For now ThePirateBay.se is only waving a pirate flag, but that's good enough to give many Pirate Bay users hope for a full recovery. On December 9 The Pirate Bay was raided at the Nacka station, a nuclear-proof data center built into a mountain complex near Stockholm.

Well, that didn’t take long. Just days after she took to social media to excoriate the dastardly scoundrels who leaked ‘unfinished’ versions of tracks from her forthcoming album, Madonna fired back at the bad guys by suddenly making the first six tracks from the album available for purchase on iTunes. The album, which is now definitively called Rebel Heart, will be released in full on March 10, and according to the iTunes listing will have 19 tracks.

isoHunt, the group now best known for launching The Old Pirate Bay, has shared an update a week after debuting The Open Bay. The Pirate Bay, the most popular file sharing website on the planet, still isn’t back following police raids on its data center in Sweden, but its “cause” is very much alive.

As the controversy surrounding the The Interview continues, a singer is claiming that after failing to reach terms with Sony, the company put her music in the movie anyway. After receiving not a penny from the movie giant, Yoon Mi Rae is now set to sue. Meanwhile, 1.5 million pirates have downloaded the comedy.

One of the oldest torrent sites on the Internet has permanently closed its doors. The private torrent tracker TVTorrent.com shut down due to "recent events," leaving a large community of dedicated users behind. For well over a decade TVTorrents.com has served TV fans from all over the world. The site started in 2003 as a public torrent index and later transformed into one of the best known private trackers. In recent months, however, the site has suffered frequent outages.

In the pirate-infested waters off the coast of Somalia around 180 private military contractors from 35 countries work to protect international shipping. They cost as little as a tenth of the official protection provided by the governments of France, Holland and Spain. Yet they can deploy lethal force and have proved very effective; they have even formed an industry group, the Security Association for the Maritime Industry, to represent their interests.

Kim Dotcom has never been shy. And in December 2011, roughly a month before things for Dotcom were set to drastically change, he still oozed with bravado: Dotcom released a song ("The Megaupload Song") in conjunction with producer Printz Board. It featured a number of major pop stars—including the likes of Kanye West, Jamie Foxx, and Serena Williams—all singing that they "love Megaupload." If the star power wasn't enough, Dotcom placed an exclamation point at the end.

For many years we've been warning that intellectual property wars over things like music and movies were just a preview to the sort of insanity that would come about when 3D printing goes mainstream. We've seen some copyright takedowns of 3D printed objects in the past, but here's an absolutely crazy one. Jerry Fisher, a photographer in Sioux Falls South Dakota, was interested in 3D printing and 3D image capture.

Popular torrenting site The Pirate Bay is back after it was shut down by Swedish police late last year. While tons of copies popped up after the original disappeared, the swift resurrection of thepiratebay.se makes it clear that it's damn near impossible to stop determined pirates.

Now that The Pirate Bay is back in action after a long time on the sidelines, conspiracy theorists have conjured up something that will stop you using the torrent site. Theorists, including the likes of hacktivist group Anonymous, are claiming the file sharing website could now be in the hands of the FBI and are warning users of the risks of using the site.

Andrus Nomm, one of the seven Megaupload employees indicted by the United States, has been arrested. The U.S. authorities have yet to comment on the arrest of the programmer but Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken believes that he may have cut a deal with the FBI. Acting on a lead from the entertainment industry, the U.S. Government shut down Megaupload early 2012.

Sending $20 piracy fines to alleged copyright infringers has landed Warner Bros. in federal court. The Hollywood studio is accused of harassment and abuse of legal process, but denies any wrongdoing.

Netflix says that the company is pushing down piracy in countries where illegal sharing is prevalent. Part of its strategy is to determine the price of its service based on local piracy rates, so it can better compete in places where piracy is rampant.