What's amazing is that no one in the US government (or at GoDaddy) seems to be willing to explain what happened. When GoDaddy completely shut down JotForm.com with no notice, the folks at JotForm had to inquire as to what the hell happened to their entire website. They were merely told to contact a Secret Service agent.

Almost everything about this sets off alarm bells about over aggressive (and potentially illegal) censorship by the US government of protected free speech.

The Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, formerly called the Lawful Access Act, would require ISPs to install monitoring equipment giving the police and other government authorities access to internet user’s online history and communications, as well as their physical and email addresses, IP information, and other identifiers.

His remarks, and the Conservative government’s intransigence over the issue, led to accusations that Toews was hiding behind the abuse of children to justify a bill that is massively unpopular.

This year, Public Knowledge requested an exemption that would allow people to copy movies they own on DVD onto other devices. On Friday, the MPAA submitted its comments to our request.

In the comments, the MPAA said that it was “a mere inconvenience” that people who paid for a movie on DVD cannot transfer that movie to another device. Furthermore, the MPAA insisted that no DMCA exemption was necessary because people who want to watch their movies on the go have other options. What options? Pay them more money, of course.

But instead of reverence in the wake of Houston’s passing, Sony chose to raise the price of one of her most popular hits collections. The Ultimate Collection album in the U.K. jumped in price by more than 60 percent from £4.99 to £7.99 within 30 minutes of Houston’s death, according to Digital Spy.

Sony Music and Apple did not immediately respond to queries about the price hike.

If the now 25-year-old had indeed removed his torrents as he had claimed then things might have turned out differently, but he didn’t and the court found him guilty of the willful copyright infringement of 60 movies between February 2010 and December 2010.

The court, however, did not consider the offenses to be serious enough to warrant a prison sentence so instead imposed a fine of 6000 kronor – approximately $900.

Prosecutor Frederick Ingblad expressed his deep displeasure at the decision saying that the offenses were tantamount to “going into a store every week for a year and shoplifting” and should not have been considered as a single act.

The roots of the blue evergreen hydrangea (Dichroa febrifuga) have been used for centuries in traditional Chinese medicine to treat malaria. Now Tracy Keller and colleagues at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine in Boston have found that halofuginone – a chemical based on the roots' active ingredient – blocks immune reactions that can cause disease.

Animals that receive only just adequate nutrition are known to live longer, partly because diseases which involve inflammation are prevented.

The motion, Mueller says, is based on four patents: a "data tapping" patent, a patent involving Siri and unified search, a new slide-to-unlock patent, and a word-completion patent for touch-screen entry of text.

The "data tapping" feature, which, for example, lets users tap on a phone number in an e-mail to automatically make a phone call, got Android-handset maker HTC into hot water last year.

Slide-to-unlock is currently at play in an Apple legal action against the Galaxy Nexus in Germany, where a resolution of some sort is expected in March.

If its .music is approved by ICANN, the domains will be limited to members of accredited music industry associations and will be regularly patrolled for copyright infringement.

“We’re definitely looking at content, and besides the vetting process, in the registrant agreement there’ll be a warrant you’re not going to violate anyone’s intellectual property rights,” said Styll.

“We’re retaining the right to conduct searches. If we find evidence of infringing activity we’ll give you the opportunity to correct that, or we can take down the site,” he said.

The Syrian army has launched fresh mortar and rocket attacks in the city of Homs, as the government continues a push aimed at crushing rebel forces.

The international community is struggling to find a way to resolve the crisis after Russia and China blocked a UN resolution drafted by Arab and European countries on Saturday.

The UN resolution vetoed by China and Russia backed an Arab League peace plan that would have seen President Assad hand power to a deputy to oversee a transition.

So, did shutting down MegaUpload cut a big chunk out of the flow of illegal files as pro-SOPA advocates predicted?

No, but the distribution pattern has changed.

Jan. 18, the day of the raid, MegaUpload's MegaVideo was the biggest supplier of video online, with 34.1 percent of all traffic. Its closest competitor was Filesonic with 19.1 percent.

On Jan. 19, the day after MegaUpload went away and Filesonic swore off third-party downloads, Putlocker was the No. 1 source with 27.5 percent of all downloads. NovaMov and MediaFire follow, with less than half that market share.

So "instead of terabytes of North America MegaUpload traffic going to US servers, most file sharing traffic now comes from Europe over far more expensive transatlantic links," according to Deepfield.