Windows Live Messenger is now blocking links to The Pirate Bay, The Verge has learned. The move isn't relegated to links from the illegal sharing site, however, as Microsoft has gone on record to say its chat program blocks messages that contain malicious or spam URLs, third-party sources and user complaints. It's entirely based on intelligence algorithms.
Two organizations that represent the music industry may file a lawsuit against Google in order to make it harder for web users to find pirated content online. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have gone as far as to obtain a preliminary legal opinion on the matter, TorrentFreak revealed. The two maintain that Google is abusing its dominant market position and should degrade search results that link to websites hosting pirated material.
The years-long legal battle between the founders of file-sharing site Pirate Bay and copyrights holders in a Swedish Supreme Court has come to an end on Wednesday. The appeal of Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundström was denied by the judge, and the three were sentenced to various lengths of jail time. All were ordered to serve less than the original 12-month terms, however, though the fine was upped to $6.8 million.
Movie studios are the latest group to launch a legal assault on Swedish BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay, filings indicate. The Motion Picture Association, an international extension of the MPAA, has filed a 93kr million ($15.4 million) lawsuit against Pirate Bay, which it accuses of hosting illegal torrent trackers for movies such as The Pink Panther and Syriana, as well as 13 episodes of the TV show Prison Break. Damages are said to amount to between 222 and 261kr ($37 and $43) per movie, and 415kr ($68) for each Prison Break episode.
Well-known pirated material site The Pirate Bay has been charged with its first clear copyright infringement case, according to reports. A combination of major movie labels and music studios, including EMI, Fox, Sony BMG, and Universal, accuse the Swedish-run site of profiting from linking to BitTorrents from pages with advertising; as much as $4 million US a year is generated through normal traffic, according to the Swedish prosecutor in the case, Hakan Roswall. Labels involved with the suit are demanding as much as a $188,000 fine for each of the four principal site operators and that computers they own be confiscated.
