Campaigning for sweeping reform of copyright, privacy and patent laws, Sweden’s Pirate Party this weekend won enough votes in the country’s national elections to secure a seat (possibly two) in the European Parliament. Sweden is accorded 17 representatives in the EU governing legislature, and the Pirate Party’s 7.1 percent showing is enough for at least […]

Peter Althin, the attorney representing Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde, has called for a retrial, Swedish news site The Local revealed today. Swedish radio channel Sveriges Radio’s P3 news programme reports that the judge in the case was a member of the same copyright protection groups as several of the main entertainment industry representatives, who […]

Limewire, makers of a file-sharing client, is launching a podcast directory, Limecast. Billing itself as “the Web’s open podcast directory and archive” only has about a hundred podcasts at the moment. The platform for the directory, however, is intriguing. It is still in the process of being built, and is being created online as a […]

Ad-supported online music service Spiral Frog suspended operations yesterday, nearly three years after its launch. SpiralFrog launched in Summer 2006 to much media fanfare, painting itself as a free alternative to .99/song iTunes, and as a legal alternative to illegal file-sharing sites. At that time, SpiralFrog CEO Robin Kent said, “Offering young consumers an easy-to-use […]

P2P distribution for new media seemed like a good idea to a lot of people a few years ago. The idea was that you’d be able to distribute your content over P2P networks and avoid paying a lot of money for bandwidth.  Unfortunately for content producers, P2P distribution for new media doesn’t offer any benefits […]

Microblogging service Pownce announced today that it has been acquired by Six Apart, the blogging software and hosting company behind Moveable Type, Vox, and TypePad.  Pownce will shut down two weeks from now, on December 15.  Buyer Six Apart says they are “very sorry the site will be closing.” Founded by Digg’s Kevin Rose and […]

Michael Moore appears to be using bootlegging to ensure distribution of his latest film, Slacker Uprising, outside the US and Canada.  Torrentfreak reports that the film is actively being shared on bitTorrent around the world, despite only being freely available from the official source to people in the US and Canada. “What do you think I’m up to? […]

Security firm TrustedSource reports that a new trojan has been identified that infects multi-media files on Windows computers. The malware embeds malicious content into multimedia files based on the Advanced Systems Format (ASF), a widely used format for video and audio content such as MP3 and WMA music files, WMV video files and others. When […]

Jim Louderback, CEO of podcasting/new media network Revision3, has an explanation for why his site died over Memorial Day weekend: they were hacked and attacked by MediaDefender, a company that works for the music and film industries doing anti-piracy work.

“Media Defender was abusing one of Revision3’s servers for their own purposes, without our approval,” says Louderback. “They willingly admitted to abusing Revision3’s network, over a period of months, by injecting a broad array of torrents into our tracking server.”