The Regional Court in Hamburg, Germany, has ruled that file-hosting service Rapidshare must proactively filter certain content. Music industry outfit GEMA asked the court to ban Rapidshare from making 5,000 tracks from its catalogue available on the Internet.

"The decision of the Hamburg Regional Court is a milestone in GEMA's fight against the illegal use of musical works on the Internet," said Dr. Harald Heker, Chief Executive Officer of GEMA.

Just days after Norway's data protection department told ISPs they must delete all personal IP address-related data three weeks after collection, it's now become safer than ever to be a file-sharer in Norway. The only law firm with a license to track pirates has just seen it expire and it won't be renewed.

Earlier this month we reported that since Norway's Personal Data act prohibits the storage of unnecessary data, ISPs in the country must delete all IP address-related personal information they hold on their customers which is more than three weeks old.

As a whole bunch of you have sent in, the musician Moby has put up a blog post where he suggests the RIAA should be disbanded for its $1.92 million win over Jammie Thomas.

"maybe the record companies have adopted the 'it's better to be feared than respected' approach to dealing with music fans. i don't know, but 'it's better to be feared than respected' doesn't seem like such a sustainable business model when it comes to consumer choice."

Gadget makers, also known as hackers and tinkerers, have created an underground network that stretches from Argentina to New Zealand.

"By design, today's gadgets are not supposed to be fixed. They are meant to only work for two years, and then you throw them away," says Mr Rodgers, who would like to see more technology companies build products that are easier to fix and customise.

There is also a special kind of satisfaction in making or repairing a gadget, one that I can personally vouch for.

The German lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, has adopted a new set of laws making it possible to block child pornography Web sites.

Internet users will still be able to access child pornography sites even after the stop sign appears, but they will have to click through the warning, which informs them that viewing child pornography is a crime.

Little more than a month after acquiring Virtual Iron for an undisclosed fee, Oracle is effectively killing the company's virtualization product.

As many expected, Oracle intends to meld Virtual Iron's product with its own Oracle VM.

But Oracle has not said when the combined product will arrive, and Virtual Iron's partners and customers may feel that Oracle has left them out to the cold in terminating the company's product so swiftly.

"So basically, anyone that built their hosting infrastructure on VI...is now totally in the shit," that partner tells us.

"We value your investment and expertise in server virtualization, and encourage you to begin your partnership with Oracle right away," the letter reads.

Windows 7 Starter Edition not only blocks end-users from swapping the original Windows-provided wallpaper, colors, and sound schemes - OEMs and partners aren't allowed into the personalization options either.

At least Microsoft no longer plans on limiting the number of applications Starter Edition can run at once - so extremely desperate users can always fall back to running Notepad in the background for makeshift ASCII art.

In a surprise decision, the jury imposed damages against Thomas-Rasset at a whopping $80,000 for each of the 24 songs she was accused of stealing.

In 2007, the Recording Industry Association of America claimed in a lawsuit that Thomas-Rasset pilfered 1,700 songs. The RIAA eventually culled that number down to a representative sample of 24.

Stephen Garrett from Kudos, the firm behind Spooks and Ashes to Ashes, warns that illegal file sharing threatens the existence of hit TV shows.

His comments come as the government outlines its strategy for broadband, broadcast, and digital content in the Digital Britain report.

Tough new restrictions have been imposed on foreign media reporting.

Iran's police chief, Gen Ahmadi Moqaddam, has warned action will be taken against any unauthorised protest, and "will quell any unrest".

Journalists have also been banned from attending or reporting on any "unauthorised" demonstration - and it is unclear which if any of the protests are formally authorised.