Chinese officials have shuttered 205 websites in a crackdown on Internet piracy that came partly at the behest of U.S. entertainment interests, Reuters reported. Between the end of September and January, the country investigated 436 cases, 130 of which were at the request of overseas industry associations. In all, 361 sites were ordered to cease [...]

The Vereshagino district court decided to stop the criminal case against school Principal Alexander Ponosov. However, the court didn’t find him guilty. The case was closed due to the insignificant degree of the damage Mr. Ponosov inflicted on Microsoft. But the accused himself intends to appeal the decision. The court said there is evidence of [...]

Steve Jobs may want to scrap digital rights management (DRM) for digital music – or so he says – but the British government doesn’t agree. Blogger Neil Holmes created a petition at the government’s e-petitions website asking Tony Blair to ban the use of DRM technologies for digital content, and gathered 1,414 signatures (admittedly, not [...]

The boss at Yahoo Music, Dave Goldberg, thinks Apple CEO Steve Jobs got it right when he suggested that record labels should drop digital rights management (DRM) in downloaded songs. When Yahoo experimented with DRM-free songs, music sales went up, according to Silicon Valley Watcher. Goldberg commented: “I’ve long advocated removing DRM on music because [...]

According to “two sources in the online music biz,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs might have been influenced by EMI to release his anti-DRM “Thoughts on Music” open letter. “Last year, RealNetworks (the company behind the Rhapsody subscription service) came up with a proposal for switching to MP3s and circulated it among the major labels. In [...]

Fox has served YouTube with a subpoena in an effort to discover the identity of the person who recently uploaded entire episodes of The Simpsons and 24. The subpoena was granted by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Jan. 18 and served this Wednesday, writes the Hollywood Reporter (via Reuters). [...]

Twenty million Americans downloaded a movie off the Internet in the past month, with 80% of these reporting that they only use file-sharing sites — a figure that doubled between 2005 and 2006, according to a report from market research firm Solutions Research Group. Overall, 32 million Americans, or 18% of the U.S. online population, [...]

A federal judge has ruled that record labels may sue XM Satellite Radio over the company’s new devices, which allow consumers to record and store copies of songs played on the radio service as MP3 files. XM’s argument is that the ability to record broadcasts is legally justified by a 1992 law, the Audio Home [...]

A hacker claims to have written code to break Windows Vista encryption within hours of the operating system’s consumer launch. Canadian programmer and security researcher, Alex Ionescu claims on his blog that he’s managed to unlock Vista’s Protected Media Path (PMP) encryption feature to enable high-def DVDs to be copied. Microsoft’s system is designed to [...]

Sony BMG Music Entertainment has agreed to pay consumers up to $150 each toward the cost of repairs of their computer systems damaged by using the company’s music CDs that came embedded with a copyright protection software. These CDs, when played by consumers, installed the DRM software on their computers without their knowledge, restricting the [...]

Music Alley say an unnamed “influential and wealthy” Russian businessman is planning to buy AllofMP3 and intends to give it a legal makeover by taking control of the company. Now that would be a sight to see.

Apple plans to open up protected music and movies content bought from the iTunes Store. The iPod maker is expected to make two announcements, possibly as early as this week – the first will be to allow streaming of protected AAC content via USB; the second will be to licence its Fairplay DRM to the [...]

The Pirate Bay, one of the world’s most popular websites for the illegal downloading of films through filesharing, has said it wanted to buy its own “island” in a bid to avoid copyright laws. “It’s not only about Pirate Bay, it’s more about having a nation with no copyright laws,” one of those behind the [...]

EMI announced that every single CD it sells from now on will be free of DRM, and thus open to personal format shifting, such as the world should be. This means no DRM audio CD’s will be released anymore. In 2002 Bretelsmann (record companies BMG, Arista and RCA) were the first to use DRM. Initially [...]

WIBU-Systems USA, a German firm headquartered in Seattle, says it’ll pay that much to anyone who can strip its digital restrictions management software from a “protected” application. And if somebody can break the security software, maybe they’ll get a job, InformationWeek has the company saying. “If you’ve produced software that will tell an oil company [...]