If the third strike is ignored, Hadopi can take legal action, and as of July 1, only 14 offenders have had a case filed with a French court as a result of Hadopi, and none have yet been to trial.

If someone is convicted of illegal downloading of copyrighted materials they can face a fine of up to 300,000 Euros (about $378,000) and 3 years in prison.

President Hollande appointed a new French Minister of Culture, Aurélie Filippetti, who seemed to suggest that she'd push to shut the anti-piracy agency down. "In financial terms, [spending] €12 million euros ($14.86 million) and 60 agents—that’s expensive [just] to send a million e-mails," Filippetti said in August.

You may recall the Rojadirecta case, where two domains have been held by the US government on a highly questionable legal theory for over a year and a half -- well, the government just dropped the case, and it appears that the domains will be returned.

What's unfortunate, of course, is that the government might now get away with this blatant censorship and disregard for basic due process, without a court ruling showing that it was an illegal move by the feds. In other words: without punishment, the feds may feel free to do this again.

Sometimes it's crazy stuff like taking down a video because of birds chirping in the background, but other times it can result in public domain music being pulled down.

Musician Dave Colvin appears to be dealing with the latter, as he noted in a frustrated Facebook post about how the publishing arms of the major labels keep claiming copyright on public domain cover songs that he's been recording and posting to YouTube. The end result is that, even though all of these claims are bogus, YouTube is threatening to take away his ability to monetize his account, and have already disabled it on a public domain song.

We've written about judge Beryl Howell a few times before. She's the recently-appointed judge whose immediate job prior to that was as a lobbyist for the RIAA. Before that, she worked for the Judiciary Committee and was apparently a key player in drafting the DMCA.

While most courts have been throwing out copyright trolling lawsuits for improper joinder, Judge Howell had no problem with the practice and ordered various ISPs to cough up names based solely on IP addresses.

The specific case involves well known trolling firm, Prenda Law, which is connected to one of the larger jokes in the copyright trolling business: John Steele. Steele's lawsuits have been laughed out of court and he's even been told to stop filing these bogus lawsuits, where the clear purpose is to use the judicial system as a weapon to force people (innocent or guilty) to pay up.

The owner of Surfthechannel.com - a site that provided links to illegally copied TV shows and films - has been sentenced to four years in jail.

Surfthechannel.com had acted as an index of professionally made online videos - both legal and illegal - encouraging its users to send in new links and check that they worked.

However, it did not host the video files itself, but instead pointed visitors to other sites including Megavideo and China's Tudou.

He was arrested after Fact and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) hired a private investigator who took photographs of Mr Vickerman's home and computer equipment in July 2008 after pretending to be interested in buying the property.

The court actually ruled that the feds violated wiretapping laws, but then there were questions of what the court could actually do about it. It turned into a wrist slap for the government, with it being ordered to pay $20,400 to each of the two lawyers who represented Al-Haramain.

That got overturned. The appeals court has basically said that even though Congress passed a law that said the feds could not eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant, it didn't waive sovereign immunity rights for the government, which lets the government basically wave away any lawsuits. And thus, the government can ignore wiretapping lawsuits -- even in the one and only case where there's clear evidence of it violating the law.

In his August 6 order, Judge Webber confirmed the jury verdict that DuPont/Pioneer willfully infringe Monsanto's GMO roundup-ready seed patent.

The asserted patent was Monsanto's reissue No. RE 39,247 and the accused product was DuPont's Optimum GAT soybean line that has never been released to the public.

Unlicensed use of the Monsanto genetically modified soybean seed counts as infringement, even if that use was only for the development of a commercial product.

Dotcom said if authorities had knocked on his door instead of banging it down he would have happily co-operated, despite a sign in his gatehouse saying "do not let the police in".

"And then they were all over me. I had a punch to the face, boots kicking me down to the floor... a knee to the ribs... one man was standing on my hand."

The Crown is seeking for all images and CCTV footage from the raids to be suppressed.

It was made clear that the New Zealand government and the US FBI broke the law in sending data from Megaupload's hard drives overseas, and ordered them returned. Megaupload's lawyer, Ira Rothken is out reminding the world that the US has failed to comply with the order to return the data that was illegally taken, and has shown no signs of planning to comply.

The court awarded the damages to compensate artists and rightsholders for their losses. However, it now turns out that artists won’t see a penny of the money, as the labels have allocated it to IFPI to fund new anti-piracy campaigns.

The RIAA previously told TorrentFreak that the ‘damages’ accrued from piracy-related lawsuits will not go to any of the artists, but towards funding more anti-piracy campaigns. “Any funds recouped are re-invested into our ongoing education and anti-piracy programs,” we heard.