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Spotify, the popular music subscription service, is due to meet in the coming weeks with its major counterparts in the record industry to renew their licensing agreements. The Verge has learned that managers at Spotify are expected to ask for substantial price breaks from the music labels as well as the rights to extend its free pricing tier to mobile devices.

The Stockholm-based Spotify has already started negotiations with Warner Music and will begin talks with Sony and Universal in the coming weeks, according to several music industry sources. (A Spotify spokesperson declined to comment on this story.) These negotiations with music’s "big three" labels will likely go a long way to determining whether Spotify reaches profitability, a crucial threshold as it increasingly competes with Apple and other cash-rich players in the digital music market.

he internet has changed the world so much that current legislation is not adequate, said Wales. "

" If, for example, someone uploads a video of their child's birthday party and then finds it has been deleted because a copyrighted song is playing in the background, "that's not piracy. That's how we use our music these days," says Wales. "A lot of what people want to do now is not legal but should be legal. We can say that and still be against full-scale piracy."

I think we are at a point where we are asking whether you really need a film industry for a film to be made or a music industry to make music. People can now speak directly to their audiences,"

wouldn't it be nice to have a phone that just does phone calls?

at the Buckeye Tool Expo in Dalton, Ohio there is unusual demand for devices that do less.

the exhibition is a draw for the Amish community, whose access to technology is restricted by their faith.

Five-year-old runs up £1,700 iPad bill in ten minutes

"Danny was pestering us to let him have a go on the iPad. He kept saying it was a free game so my husband put in the passcode and handed it to him.

"He was crying, as the rest of the children were telling him we could have bought a house with the amount he had spent.

rejected an international treaty to crack down on digital piracy, a vote that Internet freedom groups hailed as a victory for democracy but that media companies lamented as a setback for the creative industries.

European legislators

Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, which has been signed by the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, South Korea and a number of individual E.U. members.

After three days he found it: the boundary between 'real life' and 'online' has disappeared

If my grandchildren ever ask me where I was when I realised the internet was over – they won't, of course, because they'll be too busy playing with the teleportation console

If Web 2.0 was the moment when the collaborative promise of the internet seemed finally to be realised – with ordinary users creating instead of just consuming, on sites from Flickr to Facebook to Wikipedia – Web 3.0 is the moment they forget they're doing it. When the GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like

How many times do you click on your email icon in a day? Or look at Facebook, or Twitter? And how many times when reading on the internet do you click on a link navigating away from the text that was the original object of your enquiry? The web, it seems, is like an electronic sweet shop, forever tempting us in different directions. But does this mental promiscuity, this tendency to flit around online, make us, well, thicker?

power of modern electronic media – the net, mobile telephones and video games – to capture the attention of the human mind, particularly the young mind, and then distract it has lately become a subject of concern. We are, say the worriers, losing the ability to apply ourselves properly to a single task, like reading a book in its entirety or mastering a piece of music on an instrument, with the result that our thinking is becoming shallower. Sir Tom Stoppard aired a version of this view last week when he warned that the printed page was in danger of being "swept away" on a tide of technology, with the moving image assuming ever-greater precedence in the lives of young people.

Kim Dotcom, founder of the banned Megaupload filesharing site, has announced a new version called Mega designed to sidestep the American laws under which he is being prosecuted for £175m worth of alleged online piracy, racketeering and money laundering.

The site would not use US-based hosting companies as partners in order to avoid being shut down by US authorities, Dotcom said.

Megaupload was shut down in January 2012 when New Zealand police helicopters swooped into Dotcom's mansion outside Auckland to seize computers and other evidence at the request of US authorities.

The downloading of copyrighted content has been a common concern for the motion picture and music recording industries, but their public relations response has been quite different.

A significant, moderate correlation of attributes used to frame this issue was found between the RIAA press releases and media coverage, but not between the MPAA press releases and the media.

This article examines the scholarly literature pertaining to music, film and software piracy around the world, with special attention to data sources, research scope and general findings. The article finds that the conspicuous absence of methodologies utilizing critical theory in this broad literature has constricted the world view of piracy, resulting in monolithic explanations of the causes and correlates of piracy. It further identifies systematic biases relating to the unjustified use of data published by the industry watchdog Business Software Alliance