The treaty pushed South Korea to implement new copyright laws that are perhaps the most draconian around, getting the country to be the first to kick people off the internet based on accusations of file sharing, and putting so much liability on third parties that various user-generated content services have had to turn off the ability to upload all sorts of content (no videos on YouTube, no music on blogs) and has resulted in ISPs even banning any kind of advertising that might make them liable for copyright infringement.

Yet, because the American record labels and movie studios don't want to change with the times, they're pushing through these laws, outside the judiciary process, sneaking it through via a secretive international treaty they had a hand in writing.

A document, apparently a 'confidential House ethics committee report,' was recently leaked through file-sharing software to the Washington Post.

Reader GranTuring points out that the RIAA took the opportunity to make a ridiculous statement of their own. They said, "the disclosure was evidence of a need for controls on peer-to-peer software to block the improper or illegal exchange of music."

Under the new scheme copyright holders will need a court order before they can punish persistent illegal filesharers.

This differs from the action that had been suggested by business secretary Lord Mandelson earlier this year, coincidentally just after having spent time as a guest of music publisher David Geffen in Greece.

Edwyn Collins has been barred from streaming his own song through MySpace. Management for the former Orange Juice frontman have been unable to convince the website that they own the rights to A Girl Like You, despite the fact that they, er, do.

"I naturally blew my stack and wrote to MySpace on his behalf demanding to know who the hell was claiming copyright of Edwyn's track? ... Eventually, after HUGE difficulty, I was told Warner Music Group were claiming it."

While Collins has worked to make A Girl Like You freely available to his fans, she alleges that the same track is sold illegally "all over the internet". "Not by Edwyn, [but] by all sorts of respectable major labels whose licence to sell it ran out years ago and who do not account to him."

A New York-based anarchist has been arrested by the FBI and charged with hindering prosecution after he allegedly used the social networking site Twitter to help protesters at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh evade the police.

Twitter has rapidly established itself as an important tool in the armoury of protest groups and demonstrators. During the summit, the police openly monitored Twitter to listen in to the protesters' communications.

The Informed P2P User Act (PDF), put forward by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, sets out rules aimed at curbing the inadvertent sharing of illegal and sensitive information by providing a "clear and conspicuous notice", and requiring the "informed consent" of the user before files are shared.

A student who sued Amazon for deleting George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four from his Kindle ebook, rendering his notes useless, has won $150,000 along with protection for other Kindle users.

Fewer than 2000 copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm had been sold, so Amazon reversed history by deleting the work over the Kindle's whispernet and crediting the accounts of those who had bought a copy.

That was, according to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, "stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles", not to mention being very bad publicity indeed.

In a highly unusual move, a federal judge has ordered Google to deactivate the email account of a user who was mistakenly sent confidential financial information by a bank.

The ruling stems from a monumental error by the Wilson, Wyo.-based Rocky Mountain Bank. On Aug. 12, the bank mistakenly sent names, addresses, social security numbers and loan information of more than 1,300 customers to a Gmail address.

"It's outrageous that the bank asked for this, and it's outrageous that the court granted it," says John Morris, general counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology

The attorneys that filed the lawsuit are at the head of Camara & Sibley, the Houston-based firm defending Jammie Thomas-Rasset against copyright claims made by the music industry.

In an interview for a story published in July, Sibley said he and Camara could see themselves working for copyright owners, if they believed in the issue.

They claim that the book had been downloaded more than 100 times from Scribd, which her attorneys called the "YouTube for documents."

Villarreal contacted MLB to request "express written consent" to provide an "account" of the game he had watched to a friend. To its credit, MLB responded and asked him to call someone in its business development department... who (perhaps reasonably) thought it was a joke and did not provide the written consent (and stopped responding to calls and emails).

Copyright holders are pretty regularly claiming significantly more rights than they actually hold over content, and many people simply assume that they can do this.