Who would have thought a little button could cause so much animosity? Facebook’s “like” button, something that can be found on just about any website you visit, is no longer allowed in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. A German data protection center employee named Thilo Weichert says the button violates privacy laws of Germany and the European Union as a whole.

Individuals who pirate music and movies on the internet have a new concern thanks to a partnership between major internet service providers, movie studios and record labels. The organizations have created the Copyright Alert System which is designed to give suspected pirates fair warning before action is taken against them. This method currently has the support of AT&T, Time Warmer, Comcast, Verizon and Cablevision.

Japan is now the place to be if you want to have a better chance of avoiding computer viruses. The country has now made it illegal to create, distribute or store viruses. Those who are caught doing so without a good reason will be either sentenced to prison for up to three years, or be fined up to $6,000 or 500,000 yen. If one is caught storing or acquiring viruses, they could go to prison for two years or be fined around $4,000 or 300,000 yen.

The days of streaming copyrighted content on the internet for profit could be coming to an end soon. The Senate Judiciary Committee passed a bill that if approved by the entire Senate, would make it a felony for anyone to commercially stream copyrighted content. If this law is passed, chances are there will be someone still streaming illegal content, but their numbers could decrease drastically out of fear of jail time.

Facebook and Twitter are worldwide brands now. They are two of the most popular social networks that are used to send out information to anyone who is interested. Facebook and Twitter are also used for promotional purposes by many organizations. By luring potential followers to its Twitter feed or Facebook page, a company can expand the reach of its brand. That will eventually lead to more money through advertising or other means. France’s broadcasting regulator believes Twitter and Facebook have an unfair advantage over other networks. Therefore, the very mention of either of the two in an unacceptable way is illegal.

It seems as if it has been a while since we last heard an MPAA horror story, but not to worry because we have a goodie for you on this fine Friday morning. It would seem that those living in Coshocton, Ohio have at least temporarily lost their free Wi-Fi. And yes, they had city more »

When, oh when, are they gonna learn it is pretty much senseless to even attempt to hunt down the pirates? Right or wrong, P2P file sharing happens. And suing the creators of the popular Pirate Bay isn’t gonna stop it. And now, in a rather obvious attempt to support that fact, someone went out and created a The Pirate Google Bay. And you have to appreciate how bright and colorful they made their ship!

The Pirate Google Bay is a custom Google search made to find torrent files. They say right on their home page that:

“Please Note: This site is not affiliated with Google, it simply makes use of Google Custom Search to restrict your searches to Torrent files. You can do this with any regular Google search by appending your query with filetype:torrent.”

But slapping the “Google” name right on there sure makes it sound all official like, eh? Ahhhh….I can see a lawsuit against Google brewing anyway. That one should be entertaining. I mean, even a recent article in Forbes magazine said that Google itself is an incredibly efficient torrent tracker. That’s not any big secret.

The massive Chinese search engine Baidu is in trouble after state media uncovered that unlicensed medical services are buying good positions on the page through their P4P (pay-for-performance) scheme. This is a problem as more people then click through to their website and the pay for very expensive and totally useless treatment.

This inevitably leads to more cases of dangerous, and sometimes lethal, disregard of safety and expertise meaning that many operations are useless, expensive, and health-threatening. Examples include a man being charged $1,500 for an operations that didn’t do anything, when he could have paid $15 for effective treatment at a public hospital.

Piracy is a massive problem in the music industry as it is getting easier and easier to get your music free off the Internet. Obviously the music industry is trying to keep up, and the people at Bopaboo (what a weird name!) think they have come up with a solution: second hand music. But not any old music, oh no, you can now buy used digital music. “How on earth does this work?” I hear you cry, and that is exactly what I thought, but let me first explain the idea behind this and what is supposed to happen. . . .

Since it became an official standard in 1991, Moving Picture Experts Group -1 Audio Layer 3 (or MP3) has proven popular due to the fact that it is easily transferable, good quality and cheaper than hard copies. So far it has been unpopular with record companies as a result of the close links it has to piracy, but recently Atlantic Records said that over 50% of their revenue was coming from digital sales.