Acting on information provided by an anti-piracy group, Swedish police have carried out raids and taken down at least one warez scene topsite. Items seized include at least a dozen computers and servers containing a conservative 200 terabytes of media, mainly Hollywood movies. As other sites get sucked into the fallout, the recriminations and finger-pointing have begun.
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A lot of ink has been spilled these days spilled over ICANN’s (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) seizing of domain names without a detailed explanation or a full trial which many link to the government trying a new method to stamp illegal file-sharing.
ICANN, the US-based organization managing the DNS root zone starts to appear dangerously empowered. Last year, the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Viviane Reding, (meanwhile appointed European Commissioner for Justice), brought up a very important the issue – that of ICANN being accountable solely to the US government.
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Three of the admins behind The Pirate Bay are all still guilty, a Swedish appeals court decided on Friday, but their jail time has been reduced. Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundstrom's prison sentences have all been reduced from the original one year to between 4 and 10 months each, though the trade-off is an increase in damages that they must pay to the music and movie industries.
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After the Mulve music downloading app burst onto the scene in September, it didn’t take long for it to be closed down and cold water poured on the fun. Now, just a couple of months later, a new application has appeared which not only does everything that Mulve did, but adds more sources, integrates music discovery, last.fm, a playlist and download manager, videos, lyrics and more.

While its birth was a relatively low-key affair, the launch of Mulve into the mainstream proved to be quite the opposite. In September the news of its arrival was reported on dozens of sites but it all came crashing down just a few days later. Undoubtedly prompted by IFPI, BPI and the Big Four labels behind them, the British police moved to make an arrest. Mulve was no more.
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Arizona-based criminal attorney David Michael Cantor claims that LimeWire has “created more sex offenders in the prison system than any other site or service out there,” and that everyone should be glad this “dangerous service” has been closed down.
Last month U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood issued an injunction ordering LimeWire to disable the “searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality, and/or all functionality” of the famed file-sharing program, and since then many have debated its effects.
The RIAA heralded its closure as a “significant step in the bright future of digital music” while most of those who use P2P on a regular basis were amazed that people still even use the program.
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