The MPAA continues to reach out and send armies of lawyers to the owners of any website making use of BitTorrent and or other file-sharing systems.

The latest victim is Canadian-owned search engine website isohunt.com, which has been sued and labelled a pirate by the association.

As we noted in March, here, IsoHunt attempted to create a coalition in preparation to fight the evil empire on the grounds that the website was a mere search engine, and not a willful pirate site, and thus is doing nothing illegal.

Within the IsoHunt forums Gary Fung, the 23 year-old operator of IsoHunt, said, "the MPAA's allegation that our service is for the sole purpose of helping copyright infringement of their movies is plainly wrong."

The All Party Parliamentary Internet Group looked at how copy protection systems restrict the way digital movies and music can be enjoyed.

For instance, a DRM system may allow a CD to be played on a PC but would not let tracks from that album be copied so they can be listened to on a portable player such as an iPod.

The MPs' report made several recommendations and called on the Office of Fair Trading hasten the introduction of labelling regulations that would let people know what they can do with music and movies they buy online or offline.

The report also called for the makers of DRM systems to be made aware of the consequences of using aggressive copy protection systems.

This recommendation was made because, as the report was being drawn up, information was emerging about the controversial copy protection system employed in the US by Sony BMG.

She said that DRM was less about protecting copyright and more about creating a system in which people rent rather than own the media they spend money on.

Apparently at the behest of Jack Thompson, some sheriff's deputies in Louisiana have seized some video games from the home of a teenage murder suspect as "evidence". Evidence of what? That the kid has a games console or PC? Thompson says that he told the police to look for games because reports of the crime fit the scenario of the Grand Theft Auto games -- which would also indicate that any kid with a paper route must be an avid Paperboy player, though we've missed all the reports of Frogger driving people to play in traffic. All Thompson's trying to do (apart from drum up some publicity for himself) is shift the blame for the crime from a sick, stupid killer onto video games -- just the latest in his line of attempts to let people abdicate any responsibility for their actions. One other question -- why do law-enforcement officers in Louisiana now need an activist lawyer from Florida to tell them how to do their jobs?

The Swedish web operators behind raided site Piratebay.org will seek damages from the Swedish authorities if they can prove their innocence, according to a statement on the site earlier today.

The statement, which promised that the site would be functional again within a day or two, said that those behind the site "can receive compensation from the Swedish state [if] the upcoming legal processes show that [Piratebay] is indeed legal".

"[Anti piracy group] Antipiratbyran has clearly misled the police in this case," said Tobias Andersson of Piratbyran, a spin-off of Piratebay.org dedicated to promoting file-sharing. "They seem to have convinced incompetent police that the servers in question are filled with copyright protected materials." The Piratbyran statement said that there is "no illegal material on the actual server".

Yesterday we wrote about the new effort to "educate" Canadian children with a one-sided view on copyright laws using the mascot Captain Copyright. Since then, plenty of people have noticed some fun things about Captain Copyright, such as the fact that the disclaimer on the site bans anyone who says anything negative about the site from linking to the site (whoops!). Also, the terms of use apparently forbid people from cutting and pasting any content from the site. Specifically, their site reads: "You are not permitted to copy or cut from any page or its HTML source code to the Windows™ clipboard (or equivalent on other platforms) onto any other website." (which, yes, we cut and pasted here). Apparently, Captain Copyright does not believe in fair use. However, perhaps the most egregious, is that Captain Copyright may be violating copyrights himself, by failing to follow the license on republishing certain Wikipedia content. It sounds like Captain Copyright may need something of an educational campaign himself.

"The New York Times is reporting that American trade negotiators may demand the shutdown of AllofMP3.com as a condition of Russia joining the World Trade Organization." From the article: "Music industry officials say AllofMP3, which first came to their attention in 2004, is a large-scale commercial piracy site, and they dismiss its claims of legality. "It is totally unprecedented to have a pirate site operating so openly for so long," said Neil Turkewitz, executive vice president of the Recording Industry Association of America, who is based in Washington ... AllofMP3.com says on the site that it can legally sell to any user based in Russia and warns foreign users to verify the legality within their countries for themselves. The site features a wide selection of Russian music, but is written in English with prices listed in United States dollars."

ThePirateBay.org's seizure was a welcomed turn of events for the entertainment industry. For three years, attempts to force ThePirateBay.org to comply with international copyright standards were met with mockery, contempt, and ridicule. With ThePirateBay.org offline, the various entertainment industries that assisted expressed their satisfaction.

During the raid, each and every server that was hosted by PRQ was seized, despite the proper labeling of each domain. Not only did the Swedish National Police succeed in removing ThePirateBay.org, but every other domain hosted by PRQ.

The seizure of these domains, which total between 200 and 300, affected a wide range of websites. While some were smaller, personal websites, many were business oriented websites that depend on advertising for the owner's personal livelihood. Either way, virtually all servers confiscated had absolutely nothing to do with piracy, ThePirateBay.org, or the online copyright wars.

"Antipiratbyran has obviously mislead the police in this case" said Tobias Andersson from PiratByran. "They seem to have told the incompetent police that the servers in question is filled with copyright protected material, this is a huge misuse of the tax payers money."

It's interesting to note the motivation behind the raid was to secure the economic interests of the entertainment industry. Yet to this day, no clear connection has been established between downloading a copyrighted work and a dollar lost.

"The tragic circumstance, (probably typical of illegal actions by legal authorities), is that the most damage is done to people and companies who have nothing whatsoever to do with the matter at hand. I am thinking of the customers of PRQ. The least damage was done to TPB. As I take it, they have bought new servers, installed back-ups and are already up and running tests in at least one foreign server centre. Perhaps their down time is shorter than any of the other PRQ customers affected."

The Government is to examine ways of strengthening the law on possessing knives in the wake of a string of vicious stabbings, the Home Office has announced.

Speculation had been rife that Home Secretary John Reid was considering increasing the jail term for those caught carrying a knife from two to five years.

Mr Reid met his ministerial team to discuss the nationwide knife amnesty as well as the enforcement and education campaign police forces will be leading after June 30.

"A decision on sentencing will be made before the Violent Crime Reduction Bill reaches its next stage in the Lords."

Denny Klein just patented his process of converting H2O to HHO, producing a gas that combines the atomic power of hydrogen with the chemical stability of water. "it turns right back to water. In fact, you can see the h20 running off the sheet metal." Klein originally designed his water-burning engine for cutting metal. He thought his invention could replace acetylene in welding factories. Then one day as he drove to his laboratory in Clearwater, he thought of another way to burn his HHO gas. "On a 100 mile trip, we use about four ounces of water." Klein says his prototype 1994 Ford Escort can travel exclusively on water, though he currently has it rigged to run as a water and gasoline hybrid.

In their native Sweden, ThePirateBay.org enjoyed a level of immunity from copyright prosecution rarely seen in the file-sharing world. Often defiant in the face of those wishing to enforce their intellectual property rights, ThePirateBay.org would go on to become one of the premier BitTorrent indexing and tracking sites.

The seizure of ThePirateBay.org's entire server farm will guarantee this BitTorrent tracker will remain offline until the police complete their investigation. Whether this will keep ThePirateBay.org offline indefinitely is another matter.

"We are not sure when it will return, but we are moving it to another country if necessary," brokep said.

According to The Pirate Party, a Swedish copyright reform organization, the raid also seized Piratbyran's (the Pirate Bureau) servers. In addition, The Pirate Party reports "...the servers where located in a protected area, to which the police had no legal right to enter..." Approximately 50 police participated in the raid, which placed into custody two PirateBay.org personnel.