Articles by Jon Newton

Rumors that Apple is going over to Intel were discounted last month, but the company reportedly plans to announce today that it will start using Chipzilla's microprocessors and phase out IBM's Apple plans to use Intel chips, "in lower-end Macs such as the mini in mid-2006, and higher-end models such as the Power Mac in the middle of 2007," CNET sai...

Revenge is sweet Record-breaking box-office receipts came in for the opening of the final installment of the "Star Wars" series this past weekend....

When Princeton University Office of Information Technology policy adviser Rita Saltz learned the MPAA might follow the RIAA in suing students, she said, "My heart and viscera just shrank and chilled." Saltz is quoted in the Daily Princetonian in a story that reveals MPAA boss Dan Glickman has "expressed concern about illegal movie downloading on th...

In an April 20 report, Rafael Fernandez, the Recording Industry Association of America's VP of Latin music, declared: "We know that more than any other genre, Latin music is the most heavily pirated." The Big Four record labels' RIAA claims P2P file sharing is wreaking havoc with sales, causing terrible hardships to workers and forcing it to drasti...

Canadians concerned about attempts to have Canada's Copyright Act re-written to suit the entertainment industry's desires are marshaling their efforts to make sure it doesn't happen Member of Parliament Peter Julian has introduced "Petition for Users Rights" signatures in Canada's Parliament. More than a thousand people have signed so far, and MPs ...

Google is being sued by French news agency Agence France-Presse for using AFP photos and news stories in the Google News listings That's a bad break for Google and now, to make things worse, p2pnet.net is joining AFP in suing not only Google, but also Yahoo and any other news aggregation services it can find for reusing p2pnet story leads, headline...

With a landmark Supreme Court hearing on online file sharing slated for March 29, Hollywood is stepping up its multimillion-dollar, international PR blitz to keep peer-to-peer networks in the public eye and to characterize men, women and children who share music and other files online as hardened criminals In the U.S., nearly 10,000 people have bee...

The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is trying to persuade the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court ruling that P2P companies aren't responsible for what users do with P2P technologies. Meanwhile, the movie industry trade group is suing more people it says are illegally distributing films online MPAA officials won't say how many laws...

The movie industry's latest effort to subjugate file sharers and the P2P networks by taking over LokiTorrent, a well-known BitTorrent site, is still a hot topic The entertainment industry's principal weapon is fear. Like all bullies, it picks on people who can't defend themselves. The RIAA and MPAA are currently using attacks on BitTorrent sites as...

Last Thursday the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) boasted it had launched another 717 lawsuits against people who share music online, bringing the total number of those victimized to a shocking 8,423. By the weekend, however, Google had indexed a only a handful of links on the story, which didn't even rate a headline on the main news page...

Brilliant Digital Entertainment and Altnet are still trying to come up with ways to make money out of their TrueNames DRM project Their latest efforts look remarkably like a phishing exercise, almost akin to those Nigerian scams in which industrious scribes send out messages meant to hook the unwary into paying for, well, nothing....

"Warez is a computer slang term meaning copyrighted material (usually software) traded in violation of its copyright license. The term generally refers to releases by organized groups, as opposed to file sharing between friends." -- Wikipedia The real warez action goes on in the soundless vacuum of deep, deep cyberspace, not the noisy atmosphere of...

Big Music's claim that its sue 'em all campaign is driving people away from sharing files over the P2P networks has once again been seriously questioned The latest figures from P2P network research specialists Big Champagne show strong increases in use of popular file sharing nets in the U.S. and globally, despite the fact that last month, the reco...

"'Regardless of what people found in the early days of lawsuits,' says Eric Garland, head of research firm BigChampagne LLC, which tracks Internet activity, 'the consensus now is that file sharing is hitting all-time highs.'" That's Garland quoted in Canada's MacLeans and he's referring to the fact that, claims from the Big Four music cartel notwit...

The members of the Big Four record label cartel have succeeded in characterizing 6,952 very ordinary Americans -- many of them students and children -- as hardened thieves and criminals who rob the beleaguered music industry and its financially hard-pressed contracted artists and support staff of what's rightfully theirs But the labels aren't bele...

"Check out the clever, engaging and fun activities in the copyright awareness curriculum of Junior Achievement, Inc., and especially all the special activity plans, interactive lessons, informative materials and games in the piracy education section called 'What's the Diff?'" Another great, easy-to-understand place for you and your students to explore the world of copyright is copyrightkids.org...

As of November 15, the Big Four record label cartel's 'Man in Canada' will be Graham Henderson, senior VP of business affairs and e-commerce for Universal Music Canada, who manages Universal's e-commerce strategy and helped launch the Puretracks plastic music site He'll soon be running the CRIA, short for Canadian Recording Industry Association, so...

To the members of the Big Four record label cartel -- Warner Music, EMI, UMG and Sony-BMG -- music doesn't have much to do with music. It's a commodity they sell to the lowest (and therefore largest) common denominator They've been seeing a decline in sales and are scapegoating P2P file sharers and commercial P2P application operators for their tro...

"Spitzer's Iron Wrist Sh*ts To Music Industry." So said Xinhuanet, the Web site for China's official state news agency, Xinhua....

Take-Two Interactive Software, owner of the "Manhunt" video game that was banned in New Zealand and which sparked the adoption of new video/CD purchase and rental rules in Canada, recently announced a partnership with one of the members of the record label cartel that's currently suing p2p users around the world Take-Two's publisher Rockstar Games ...