The Swedish Prosecution Authority website said the chief prosecutor had come to the decision that Mr Assange was not suspected of rape but did not give any further explanation.

Wikileaks, which has been criticised for leaking Afghan war documents, had quoted Mr Assange as saying the charges were "without basis".

Earlier, Karin Rosander, communications head at Sweden's prosecutors' office, said there were two separate allegations against Mr Assange, one of rape and the other of molestation.

While we've seen that copyright infringement -- which really should be a civil issue dealt with between private parties -- has suddenly become a major priority for the FBI, it appears that the FBI has stopped caring about things that seem a lot more important.

Now, a new report notes that another thing the FBI appears to not care much about are missing persons cases.

Copyright cases are really just business model issues, where the only "harm" is caused by copyright holders refusal to adapt to a changing market.

The Irish Red Cross is taking Google - one of its biggest donors - to court today in an attempt to silence an anonymous critic who has posted comments on the internet which have criticised the organisation.

The blogger writes: 'As all our readers will know, the Irish Red Cross has decided to wantonly squander money in attempting to sue Google and force it to close our original blog site. The leadership of the Irish Red Cross has made a serious tactical and financial mistake, one that will ultimately be very damaging to the organisation.'

By itself the mere existence of this settlement portal wouldn't really be newsworthy, but this changed when we realized that they had copied it from a competitor.

Instead of coding the site themselves, they had simply copied the code (including the copyright statement) and images from a company in the same line of work.

They are so incompetent and probably blinded by the dollar signs in their eyes, that they can't even put a website together without breaking the law themselves - copyright law.

Ray Beckermann has done some digging and is pointing out just how big a money pit it really was. In looking through the RIAA's financial statements, he notes over $17.6 million spent on big name law firms who were the key players in the lawsuit campaign. And all those settlements? In 2008, they brought in $391,000.

Over a three year period, the RIAA spent over $64 million on this lawsuit campaign... which brought in about $1.4 million in settlement money. We're talking about getting back about 2% of the money spent.

According to Gertner, they trampled the Constitution's "Due Process" clause. In a ruling today, the judge slashed the $675,000 award by a factor of 10, to $67,500.

If it sounds like a familiar result, it should. In Minnesota, Judge Michael Davis used a different legal approach called remittitur to lower Jammie Thomas-Rasset's liability from $1.9 million to $2,250 per song.

In addition to irritating the RIAA, the ruling can't be good news for the US Copyright Group, which has filed 14,000 similar lawsuits in 2010 alone, targeting those who swap independent films online.

Twitpic, an online service for easily posting pictures to Twitter, is apparently quite upset that Posterous, an online blogging platform, has set up an automated system to export your own photos from TwitPic to Posterous. As soon as the exporter was announced, Twitpic not only blocked Posterous's tool, but got the lawyers involved.

We've actually noticed a growth in both the number of hilarious conspiracy-midned "attack blogs" from people tied to ASCAP, as well as an increase in the number of "anonymous" commenters on the site coming from IP addresses used by a few law firms that have connections to ASCAP.

Now it appears they're stepping things up to stage two: they've sent around fundraising emails that specifically ask for money to fight Creative Commons, EFF and Public Knowledge. What's amusing (but really sad) is that this proves that the rhetoric out of ASCAP about protecting "artists' rights" is bunk.

ASCAP's blatant attack on Creative Commons (and EFF and PK; both of whom focus on consumer rights, but not undermining artist's rights at all) shows their true colors. They're not about artists' rights at all.

"We have identified the following links that are available via Google's search engine," the BPI wrote to Google in a June 11 letter, a copy of which was obtained by the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse. "[BPI leaders] request the following links be removed as soon as possible, as they directly link to sound recordings owned by our members."

There appears to be few, if any, recent requests made by a large copyright owner for Google to remove links to accused pirate sites.

Fifa is considering legal action against a Dutch brewery it accuses of using women fans to advertise its beer at the World Cup.

All were dressed identically in tightly hugging short orange dresses, sold as part of a gift pack by a Dutch brewery.

Bavaria board member Peer Swinkels told Reuters news agency that Fifa's reaction was "ridiculous".

"Fifa does not have the monopoly on orange and people have the freedom to wear what they want," he said.