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"Stephen Fry, a highly respected actor, comedian, writer, presenter and author yesterday admitted to downloading TV shows for free using BitTorrent. Speaking at the iTunes Festival in London last night, Fry told the audience that he's grabbed episodes of 24 and the series finale of House, starring his former comedy partner Hugh Laurie." And he admits that he feels a bit guilty about it, but the reason is that he can't really get that content elsewhere. The fault is with the industry, and yet the gov't is trying to protect that industry, rather than recognize that the real problem is the industry not giving people what it wants. Having the gov't come up with a plan to try to stomp out file sharing misses the point. The problem isn't the file sharing -- it's the industry not responding to the market.

April 21, 2009: Today the Malaysian government ordered prominent webhosting provider Shinjiru to close down BitTorrent site LeechersLair.com. The order came from the Content, Consumer and Network Security Division of the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission.

When the Pirate Bay verdict came in last Friday, many feared that the copyright holders would use it as ammunition against other sites. Indeed, Antipiratbyrån - the Swedish anti-piracy office - is now going after BitTorrent trackers with that verdict in hand. They demand that the trackers stop their activities, threatening them with legal action.

NRK, Norway's public broadcaster, has decided that its BitTorrent distribution experiment has gone so well that the company will launch its own tracker in order to distribute its programming. Norway's commitment to openness means that the files are DRM-free and even available for fansubbing.

"I think the trend is now clear. There have been a number of cases in the last five years and if you look at the way they have been decided - the Kazaa case in Australia clearly referred to the American [Grokster] decision and just tweaked the law in a way that suited the rights holders. In Belgium, an ISP [Scarlet] was forced to implement filtering [June 2007, Belgian Society of Authors Composers and Publishers (SABAM) v Scarlet, Brussels Court of First Instance, currently under appeal]; there was a case in Finland [June 2008, Finnish Court of Appeal, where administrators of P2P site Finreactor were sued on an individual basis and 21 people were jointly fined €500,000 ($647,284) for copyright infringement and assisting copyright infringement; 14 are appealing] where the BitTorrent super-users were found guilty and they pleaded they were only linking. So I do see that trend." [...] "The big frustration is that we act for all these legal services who pay lots of money to the rights holders, and it's almost impossible to get licenses. They are so expensive and the process is so slow. Two or three years can go by and you can throw millions at trying to get a compelling service launched, and there are obstacles in the way all the time. Pandora is a great example, it's just not possible [to operate it in Europe]. We also advise Last.fm and MySpace, it's just so much hard work. This is the irony: they [labels] complain about piracy and then you walk in the door with a new service with some VC funding and an amazing bit of software that is essentially promoting and selling their content. But they say 'we are not moving unless you give us an advance of $5 million plus equity."

At the end of March The Pirate Bay added new functionality to reach out to millions of Facebook users. Just over a week later and the world's largest social networking site has blocked all links to torrents on the world's largest and most infamous BitTorrent tracker.

Founded in January 2005, Mininova quickly became one of the most successful torrent sites. With millions of daily users the site is now listed among the top 100 most frequently visited websites on the entire Internet, and its traffic still continues to grow. When combined, Mininova's visitors have been downloading well over 10 million torrents a day and performing an equal number of searches on the site. These millions of downloads add up quickly and since the birth of the site a massive 8 billion torrents have been downloaded by Mininova users.