From Branislav Pekic in Rome Italian consumers association Altroconsumo has lodged a complaint to the country's Communications Authority (Agcom), the Antitrust Authority, and to the European commissioners for Competition and the Information Society, regarding the issue of encryption of the satellite broadcasts of Italian public broadcaster RAI. According to Altroconsumo, in the period between April […]

BT Ireland and UPC Ireland are being taken to court by the big four music labels Universal, Warner, Sony and EMI, over illegal downloads and file sharing. The operators have been issued with a plenary summons by the four main record labels with a hearing for both scheduled on July 6th. The case stems from […]

Ben Bradshaw, the new Culture Secretary, has diluted a pledge to cut the volume of Internet music piracy by 70 per cent in the next two years. A promise had been made in July 2008 to reduce "file sharing by 70 per cent in two to three years" as part of a three-way agreement between […]

The new owners of file-sharing website The Pirate Bay say users will be paid for sharing files. Global Gaming Factory's (GGF) CEO Hans Pandeya told the BBC that the only way to beat illegal file-sharing was to make something more attractive. “We’re talking about next-gen file sharing so you can create revenue from storage and […]

Publicly listed Swedish software company Global Gaming Factory X (says it wants to buy The Pirate Bay for SEK60 million (£4.7 million) and will begin compensating copyright owners for material its users find and download. The Bay's founders get half the money in cash and half in new GFF shares. This comes a day after […]

The world’s highest profile file-sharing website, The Pirate Bay (TPB), has lifted the lid on its new video sharing website, The Video Bay. Billed as a rival to YouTube, the service will offer unrestricted video content, in violation of copyright. In April, a court in Sweden jailed four men behind The Pirate Bay and ordered […]

A woman in Minnesota, USA has been ordered to pay $80,000 a song to record companies for illegally downloading tracks and violating copyright laws. A federal jury ruled that Jammie Thomas-Rasset wilfully violated the copyrights on 24 songs, and awarded record companies $1.92 million. She was found liable for using the Kazaa peer-to-peer file-sharing network […]

Eight per cent of consumers across the UK, France, Germany and the USA admitted to downloading video content illegally from file sharing websites, a consumer research study by Futuresource Consulting reveals. The study, 'Living With Digital: Consumer Insights into Entertainment Consumption', used a representative sample in each country and provided respondents with a list of […]

Verimatrix has revealed that CANTV is the latest Americas customer to select the Verimatrix Video Content Authority System (VCAS) for IPTV. Through a reseller partnership with ZTE, VCAS for IPTV has been integrated with ZTE's ZXBIV IPTV Eyewill solution for the CANTV deployment. In this initial deployment phase, CANTV plans to offer IPTV services with […]

In 2008 Conditional Access technologies earned revenue of nearly $1.3 billion worldwide and will continue to grow, adding nearly $105 million more in annual revenue by 2014, according to a new study from ABI Research. Cable generated the bulk of the revenue, followed by satellite and telco. This can be largely attributed to new deployments […]