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Cybersquatting complaints dropped 9.5% from 2008 when a record complaints were logded. WIPO head mentions drop may just be due to economic climate, and companies limited budget to start litigations. This article mentions even the fifa world cup site lodged a cybersquatting complaint.

A group of independent film producers have initiated court actions against over 20,000 Bit Torrent users, through an organisation of their own design, a group of lawyers known as the U.S Copyright Group. This group are demanding users to either defend themselves in court or alternatively, to settle outside of court for downloading particular movie titles. Most accused will settle to avoid the costs of litigation. Actions such as this are worrying as may give rise to a standard in which large numbers of corporates, not only in film but in all types of media, may start bringing forth unrelenting actions against individual users- holding them personally accountable. This is problematic (amongst a variety of reasons) that in the identification process through IP addresses is not 100% accurate, leaving room to wrongly accuse some users.

If you are going to look at copyright on the internet, you really can't go past this settlement. This is Google's next step at world domination: control of our intellectual property. No one likes it, but everyone is going ahead with it because Google has them over a barrel ... The basic deal is that Google wants to digitise every book ever written and make them all searchable online by google customer. On the surface this is all shiny; it seems commonsense that all material should be digitised - we have to keep up with technology. The problem arises when you get to the sticky situation of copyright - generally with books, owners get royalties every time someone buys a copy. With the digitisation, Google wasn't too keen on the idea of pay-per-view. Ideally, they would have loved to present all that information free and just reap the benefit ... well, however Google reaps benefits. There was litigation all round - publishers were against it, yahoo and other internet giants were against it (because it wasn't their idea) and it went to the doors of the US Supreme Court, but not quite to trial. Google's rivals were not too sure that they wanted to go to trial, because the outcome was a little on the uncertain side. So the Google book settlement was drawn up, objected to, fought, signed up to, taken to the US Supreme Court for approval, rejected, modified, fought over a bit more, and sent back to the judge. The last move was in Feb 2010; we're still waiting for Critics argue that the deal gives Google too much power over digital books and will not benefit customers in terms of cost, possible censorship issues, privacy. Copyright owners will also lose out, as Google's royalty policy cuts them out of the system and reduces their royalty - and they are automatically included in the agreement unless they 'opt out' (even if they have not 'opted in'). Really, Google is the only party that seems to benefit, and yet for all of the fighting, the settlement seems

The Acadamey of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are suing domain registration giant (under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act) 'godaddy' disputing over 100 domain names they have 'parked' such as 2011oscars.com, academyawardz.com and oscarsunplugged.com. The lawsuit is 134 pages long and worth up to $10 million dollars in damages. GoDaddy run 'cashparking' offering customers the chance to earn cash when they buy a domain and park the page collecting funds when godaddy's advertising partners receive revenue based on a cost per click model.