When the Bittorrent distribution deal was announced a little over a month ago, I was sceptical about the benefits for wither company involved. But details in this PC Magazine story shed a whole different light on what may be going on here.

"It's a higher performance content delivery system," Wise said. "A lot of times when someone is downloading, it's smaller or the real time is not important because it's about the end result. Because this is a real-time streaming issue, it requires higher IP support. BitTorrent were more interested in finding a high-performance solution for bandwidth and that's what we do."

Barely a month after 3,500 file-sharing network users were placed under investigation by the public prosecutor's office in Cologne, the figures for P2P network use are back to where they were. This is a result of an analysis undertaken by the Leipzig-based company ipoque GmbH.

"Schmidt said IT managers typically control the use of file sharing networks within their own networks but contractors or agents working for their organisation can often keep or access corporate data on their laptops or home PCs, alongside P2P clients. He added that these users may then look for music or movie downloads on P2P applications, and inadvertently expose the entire contents of the hard drive."

"The fallout from the May 31 raid on The Pirate Bay has made clear just how widespread and deeply entrenched file-sharing has become in Sweden. On-line forums have been filled with protests against the raid, and a pro-piracy demonstration in early June drew close to 1,000 people. A poll published in early June showed that three out of four Swedes between 18 and 21 supported file-sharing, even if it was illegal."

With 1 million potential votes hanging in the balance, Swedish politicians are salivating at this huge swing vote.

"As a country at the forefront of information technology, we also have to be at the forefront of how we legislate the issue.  Above all, we have to say yes to technological development, and encourage people to use computers and to download." said justice minister, Thomas Bodstrom.

[via International Herald Tribune]

Something tells me this won't last long. "Quick and dirty website allowing you to search Google for MP3s. No need to remember all those funny codes and parameters."

Funny codes and parameters indeed. A few quick tests with the G2P interface show that it does find files containing the artist name, and with an extension of "mp3". The trick uses a default behavior of the Apache webserver to identify pages that have been indexed in Google containing the standard Apache boilerplate that is generated when a published directory has no index file.

While Google, quite obviously, passes the "substantial non-infringing uses" test layed out in U.S. court decisions, the G2P interface does not.

[via Digg]

Instead of just taking The Pirate Bay's own servers police also took servers belonging to a diverse group of unconnected companies and organizations during the recent, widely publicized raid on the file-sharing giant. The businesses plan to demand compensation from the Swedish government as a result of lost business incurred during the raid and after.

The companies say they will hand in demands for between 10,000 and 200,000 kronor each to the Chancellor of Justice in Stockholm on Wednesday, amounts that they say correspond to their losses following the raids.

"At least, that's what the ip info tells us. Another point of interest is the "reverse DNS" that sends out a clear message to the MPAA and their friends;

hey.mpaa.and.apb.bite.my.shiny.metal.a**.thepiratebay.org."

1. We sued some people
2. P2P growth flattened
3. File-sharing was contained
4. We diverted our efforts to stopping those nasty thieves at XM

"Advertisers are willing to pay a lot of money to be associated with music, and the music industry is willing to cooperate as long as the value is preserved and the artists get paid," Parks said.

``We held an urgent meeting last week, and eight of 11 member companies agreed to block MP3 files until we find ways to charge users,'' said Jun Hyun-sung, chairman of the association of P2P service providers.

P2P services like Soribada and Purna have been widely used for file sharing, where thousands of users can give and take their music and movie data. The music companies say such file sharing on the Internet has severely damaged the industry.

Soribada, the first and most popular P2P music sharing service in South Korea, said last month it postponed the launch of its new subscription service indefinitely, as it has failed to make a deal with copyright holders on the price of the songs.