Nearly 2,000 years ago the Roman poet Juvenal coined the now-famous phrase, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, commonly translated “Who watches the watchmen?” For centuries the phrase has been associated with political philosophy and the problem of corrupt government, but in …

A new Russian website continues to prove a source of embarrassment for high-level opponents of music and movie downloading. The site, YouHaveDownloaded.com, shows users their downloading history based on their IP address. It also allows users to put in IPs …

With all the controversy over SOPA, there has been a lot of attention lately on the so-called “piracy” of music and movies. The practice of downloading copyrighted content illegally – i.e., without paying for it – is at the heart …

TorrentFreak, a news site devoted to all things BitTorrent, has published the results of an investigation they conducted into downloads via BitTorrent software at IP addresses owned by some of the entertainment industry’s biggest companies. Using Russian site YouHaveDownloaded.com, which …

Just two weeks ago, a lawsuit targeting the Sylvester Stallone action flick The Expendables set the record for largest file-sharing suit ever. It targeted roughly 23,000 BitTorrent users who downloaded the movie between February and March of this year. That …

According to a ruling made by United States District Court Judge Harold Baker, identifying the address assigned to your computer when it’s connected to the Internet is not the same thing as identifying the person who’s using the computer. Such …

Today, the first studio film to be released via torrent just received a launch date.  The blog for the Australian horror film “The Tunnel” sets the date for both torrent and hard copy as May 19th .  It will be …

Early in December, Google vowed to distance itself from piracy. To do so, the company agreed that it would remove terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in their Autocomplete and Instant services.

Google is blocking searches originating from torrent sites using Google Custom Search to find .torrent files, according to TorrentFreak.com, a move the founder of the site calls “censorship.”

Buckcherry’s manager decided to give his band a little boost by leaking a single onto the Internet via BitTorrent, and got caught.

Only two countries in the world have ISPs actively blocking or interfering with BitTorrent transmissions: Singapore and the United States. Only one kind of ISP in both countries, though, is doing the blocking: cable.

An independent test conducted by Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Software Systems showed that Comcast and Cox are both currently interfering with BitTorrent despite recent public and regulatory outrage.

Comcast CTO Tony Werner gets the last laugh on the most ardent BitTorrent users on his network, as the company plans to slow down all Internet traffic for them.

Taking a less heavy-handed approach than the outright blocking of BitTorrent traffic, Comcast announced the company has begun negotiating ways for simultaneous existence. The announcement comes at a time when Comcast desperately needs to diffuse public, regulatory, and legislative concerns about Network Neutrality.

There’s also the Time Warner WiMax deal to think about.

Back in November, we mentioned how Free Press and other groups wanted ISP/cable company Comcast brought before the FCC for the way the company imitated users on BitTorrent to terminate downloads. And now, the FCC will be looking into it—at least according to Chairman Kevin Martin, speaking at CES.

Torrents and peer-to-peer networks have had a rough couple of weeks lately. In addition to Cox and Comcast’s recent blocking of torrent sites, file-sharing has been under assault in France and Canada, not to mention from billionaire Mark Cuban.

Comcast’s BitTorrent snafu set off another investigation of a cable provider and yielded similar results. This time it’s Cox’s interference with file-sharing service eDonkey setting Net Neutrality alarms.

A California Comcast customer called the company’s claims of fast Internet connections fraudulent due to their use of traffic shaping technology that hinders torrents.