The Pirate Bay sold to gaming firm for £5m

The Pirate Bay, the notorious file-sharing website, was yesterday sold to a Swedish software company, Global Gaming Factory (GGF), sparking outrage from many of its users. The Pirate Bay, whose founders were sentenced to a year in prison and a Skr30m (£2.36m) fine in April for promoting copyright infringement, said yesterday it agreed the Skr60m deal as otherwise the site would collapse. The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that supports projects on freedom of speech, information and the openness of the internet, it said. File-sharing, much of it illegal, is estimated to account for more than half of global internet traffic. Many users attacked the move yesterday, labelling the founders "sell-outs". Many predicted that the Pirate Bay would die as the new parent company seeks a new business model to satisfy "content providers, broadband operators, end users and the judiciary," which would include "compensation" according to GGF. User264 said this "doesn't sound like something pirates would like".

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/the-pirate-bay-sold-to-gaming-firm-for-1635m-1726215.html

Limewire helps to circumvent Irianian Internet censorship

Limewire is encouraging its users to download and share videos documenting the protests against the Iranian election. The company's P2P client started to display a splash screen late last week that asks users to add videos about the protests in Iran to their shared folders, explaining: "Iran has been limiting its own citizens' and the world's access to coverage of the post-election protests by blocking sites distributing such material. Peer-to-peer software, like Lime Wire, provides access to critical information and coverage of the events in a manner that the Iranian government cannot effectively block." Users that click on the splash screen are automatically starting to download a zipped 110 MB archive of videos from Iran. The Zip file comes straight from Limewire's servers, and users are encouraged to unzip and then share it. Some of the videos are pretty graphic, and most of it is clearly shot with mobile phone cameras or small photo cameras. Of course, you'll probably find most of these videos on Youtube as well - unless you're in Iran, and Youtube is blocked ...

Source: http://www.p2p-blog.com/item-1097.html