I've been a staunch advocate of NOT joining Facebook or Twitter or the other social networks to protect my privacy and to not voluntarily give all my personal information away to corporate America, or even the Government.

Is the payoff worth the potential trade-off for generating potential customers for your business and guiding them to your primary website?

With United States authorities leading the way, domain seizure has become quite the hot topic in recent months.

“The domains were all signed over voluntarily following contact from FACT as one strand of our ongoing strategy which gives alternatives to prosecution in certain cases,” a FACT spokesperson told TorrentFreak.

In just six months, the number of DMCA takedowns that Google receives has increased by a factor of 10 from 250,000 per week to 2.5 million.

Given how many times we see copyright maximalists complaining that Google doesn't take DMCA takedowns seriously, I wonder if anyone else out there processes so many DMCA notices in such a short period of time.

When one company is processing over 10 million takedowns per month, the system is clearly broken. Maybe it's time to look at why -- but, of course, Congress just wants to stick its head in the sand instead.

A couple of months back, Mike wrote about how Psy's relaxed attitude to people infringing on his copyright helped turn Gangnam Style into one of the most successful cultural phenomena in recent years, and that includes becoming the most-viewed video on YouTube ever.

This is yet another great example of how artists can give away copies of their music and videos to build their reputations and then earn significant sums by selling associated scarcities -- in this case, appearances in TV commercials.

Twitter users took to their accounts to tell the world that the e-mail program wasn't connecting. It appeared that both the consumer version for "gmail.com" accounts wasn't working, as well as corporate e-mail systems that use Gmail as their e-mail platform.

Search Engine Journal's Danny Sullivan is reporting that Google Drive, the company's cloud-storage service, is causing its Chrome browser to crash.

Google Inc. (GOOG) avoided about $2 billion in worldwide income taxes in 2011 by shifting $9.8 billion in revenues into a Bermuda shell company, almost double the total from three years before, filings show.

By legally funneling profits from overseas subsidiaries into Bermuda, which doesn’t have a corporate income tax, Google cut its overall tax rate almost in half. The amount moved to Bermuda is equivalent to about 80 percent of Google’s total pretax profit in 2011.

The proposal, co-signed by Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates, added to fears in some Western countries of a stalemate midway through a 12-day conference in Dubai to rewrite a longstanding treaty on international communications.

This could allow governments to render websites within their borders inaccessible, even via proxy servers or other countries. It also could allow for multinational pacts in which countries could terminate access to websites at each others' request.

Hours earlier, former Prime Minister Mr Berlusconi said he will run for office again next year.

Mr Berlusconi said he felt a "responsibility" to step back into the arena because of the severity of the country's economic problems.

The BBC's Alan Johnston in Rome says that Mr Berlusconi's critics will argue he is only interested in being in a powerful enough position to protect his own business and other interests.

Beginning in a few weeks, the nation’s major internet service providers will roll out an initiative — backed by Obama and pushed by Hollywood and the record labels – to disrupt and possibly terminate internet access for online copyright scofflaws without the involvement of cops or courts.

“It doesn’t mean you give up on litigation,” said Chris Dodd, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, speaking at an industry gathering here Thursday. “It doesn’t mean you give up on legislation.”

Details of the top secret international spy agency ring known as Echelon will have to be produced after a new judgment in the Kim Dotcom case.

The order for the GCSB to reveal top secret details came as the High Court at Auckland ruled the spy agency would now sit alongside the police in a case probing the unlawful search warrant used in the raid on Dotcom's north Auckland mansion.

The police were ordered to provide evidence from a senior New Zealand officer in the US who told an internal publication he "monitored" the raid from FBI headquarters.