In the summer of 2009, I found myself invited to a small party in an old bourgeois apartment with breathtaking views of the Champ-de-Mars and Eiffel Tower. The gathering was meant to be an informal discussion among media people about Nicolas Sarkozy’s push for the HADOPI anti-piracy bill. The risk…

Don’t expect the European Commission to introduce its own version of America’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

A day after the SOPA protest on the web, the hacker group Anonymous has taken the blackout theme to a whole new level: in retaliation for the closure of the Megaupload file-sharing site, and for its own SOPA protest, the group has started to systematically take down a number of…

A small loophole for Wikipedia’s SOPA and PIPA protest, in which the English-language version of the site has gone dark for 24 hours: the mobile site and apps are still working.

Dozens of commercial book collections, including the entire Harry Potter series, have been downloaded for free from Google’s official Android Market after being uploaded by an unauthorised publisher.

An English student who set up a website comprising links to illegally-hosted TV shows and movies must be extradited to the U.S. to face charges, an English judge has ruled.

Illegal downloading of copyrighted content is up to twice as prevalent as perpetrators admit, according to research that will inform how Ofcom measures UK online piracy.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek took the stage at Spotify’s first-ever press conference to expand the music streaming service’s Facebook integration to a wider world of social networks and devices, arguing that sharing is the only thing that can save the music industry and stop piracy.

Away from the Eurozone crisis, France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy has come up with one way to raise more funds in his country for one struggling media sector: taxing another one that appears to be doing alright. And in a speech to other European politicians, he said he also wanted to…

China has become an increasingly important part of Apple’s empire, and today it looks like the company has taken one more step to growing that even more: the company is now accepting payments in Chinese Yuan on its App Store.

America is fond of chiding other nations about freedom of speech in the internet age. Leaders including President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are constantly reminding their global counterparts, especially in places like China, that internet censorship is a detriment to open government and honest self-rule. Yet, the…

Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has been going tooth and nail after big Android device makers, especially Samsung, accusing them in courts worldwide of lifting designs and other features from Apple products like the iPad and iPhone. But one case decided yesterday in Spain illuminated a couple of key facts: Apple’s been…

The UK government has proposed allowing owners of media content to copy it for their own use, among a range of measures to reform intellectual property law for the digital age.

Vince Cable, the business secretary, will say on Wednesday that government plans to block illegal filesharing websites under the controversial Digital Economy Act are in effect unworkable.

Hollywood film studios won a landmark UK high court ruling on Thursday forcing BT (NYSE: BT) to block access to an illegal file-sharing website accused of operating “on a grand scale”.

While everyone’s attention was focused on Spotify finally launching services in the U.S., another online music milestone has been reached on the other side of the world. China’s search giant Baidu (NSDQ: BIDU), long accused of aiding and abetting music piracy, has finally inked a deal with major music labels…

The entertainment industry has been pushing some version of a “three-strikes” system in countries around the world, where internet providers would cut off customers who repeatedly engage in online piracy. But they’ve only gotten that wish in a few countries. The “early adopter” in this case was France, where the…

Hollywood film studios will take their battle against illicit downloading to the high court in London on Tuesday in an attempt to force Britain’s largest internet service provider, BT (NYSE: BT), to block access to a website that allegedly distributes pirated material.

If one of the best measures against piracy is to make content more easily available in a legitimate format, then Warner Bros. (NYSE: TWX) has made a key move in combating the problem in China. It has signed a deal with the country’s first pay-TV service, YOU On Demand (YOD),…