Michael Speck, a representative of Music Industry Piracy Investigations, told a federal court hearing on Tuesday that the antipiracy unit had been "tailing" Nikki Hemming's premises on a "continuous basis" for several months until 11 a.m. on May 24.

"She personally wasn't a subject, rather the premises associated with her were. Conducting an investigation into a shadowy organization hiding behind a veil of secrecy and surveillance is a normal practice," he said.

"Given the nature of Kazaa, we conducted a range of investigations aimed at getting to the bottom of who controlled Kazaa. We stopped the surveillance when we confirmed her new address. We're not conducting any surveillance at present," he said.

Are you addicted to email? According to the Opinion Research Corporation, the odds are pretty good that you are. Their study of 4,012 adults in the twenty largest U.S. cities found that 41% of respondents start the day by checking their email. On the average, respondents admitted to checking their email five times a day. Respondents also mentioned email features they wish were available. Examples included the ability to retract unread messages (45%) and a way to track the forwarding of their own email (43%). Just how addicted are the email-dependent among us? So heavily that one quarter of respondents won't go more than two or three days without it. Of course, by those standards, most Americans must be addicted to work, sex, and TV as well.

Since March the company has released at least 10 commercial titles - more than 1 million discs in total, featuring technology from UK anti-piracy specialist First4Internet that allows consumers to make limited copies of protected discs, but blocks users from making copies of the copies.

Early copy-protected discs as well as all Digital Rights Management (DRM)-protected files sold through online retailers like iTunes, Napster and others offer burning of tracks into unprotected WAV files.

Under the new solution, tracks ripped and burned from a copy-protected disc are copied to a blank CD in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format.

The Bush administration asked a federal appeals court Friday to restore its ability to compel Internet service providers to turn over information about their customers or subscribers as part of its fight against terrorism.

U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero of New York last year blocked the government from conducting secret searches of communications records, saying the law that authorized them wrongly barred legal challenges and imposed a gag order on affected businesses.

The administration said the judge's ruling was off the mark because the company did mount a legal challenge to the demand for records. "Yet in this very case, the recipient of the national security letter did precisely what the NSLs supposedly prevent recipients from doing," the filing said.

But ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer said the law does not contain a provision to challenge the FBI's demand for documents. The ACLU and the firm filed the lawsuit to challenge the law's constitutionality on the grounds that it doesn't contain such a provision, he said.

The British Medical Journal has discovered something which may have escaped the attention of the less well-informed reader: that long pointy knives are sharp and can be stuck into people thereby causing them damage or even provoking a death-related incident.

The solution? Oblige long pointy knife manufacturers to make the knives less pointy by rounding off the tips.

Yes indeed, that's the conclusion of docs Emma Hern, Will Glazebrook and Mike Beckett of the West Middlesex University Hospital in London, according to a NY Times report. They note with concern that "the rate of violent crime in Britain rose nearly 18 per cent from 2003 to 2004, and that in the first two weeks of 2005, 15 killings and 16 nonfatal attacks involved stabbings".

Dr Hern says: "We came up with the idea and tossed it into the pot to get people talking about crime reduction." She adds: "Whether it's a sensible solution to this problem or not, I'm not sure."

No further comment from us is required, but suffice it to say we look forward to proposals for the rubber housebrick (a common bludgeoning weapon), the papier mache baseball bat (ditto) and the soft plastic claw hammer (ditto).

John Stedman, a lieutenant in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department in charge of IP violations, testified in front of the Senate Homeland Security committee that some associates of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah may be involved in copyright violations. According to CNET's Declean McCullagh: 'Even though Stedman's evidence is circumstantial, his testimony comes as Congress is expected to consider new copyright legislation this year. An invocation of terrorism, the trump card of modern American politics, could ease the passage of the next major expansion of copyright powers'.

Motion Picture Association of America head Dan Glickman has an opinion piece up at CNET explaining why, even after they and the FCC lost the legal case to force the Broadcast Flag on us, we should still as consumers be advocates for it. The gist of Glickman's argument boils down to the old 'we're taking our ball and going home' game as he tries to convince us that without this incentive good TV and movies won't get shown on broadcast television. 'Our companies want to continue to show their movies and television shows to viewers who don't or can't subscribe to cable or satellite systems. But without the broadcast flag, that option will look less and less appealing. In the end, it will be the consumers who suffer the most if the broadcast flag is not mandated for the digital era.'

With the news that losses due to software piracy have risen in 2004, the US Senate this week warned against the dangers of allowing copyright violations overseas to continue unchecked. A recent US Trade Representative report found that Russia and China headed the "priority watch list" of copyright offenses, with Brazil, Israel and Indonesia included among the top offenders.

Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican who chairs the Senate copyright subcommittee, made one of the most ominous statements to date about what might happen if unfettered piracy continues. "Before Russia enters the (World Trade Organization), many of us will have to be convinced that the Russian government is serious about cracking down on the theft of intellectual property," Hatch said during a hearing.

Homeland security agents from several divisions served search warrants on 10 people around the country suspected of being involved with the Elite Torrents site, and took over the group's main server. The agency said it was the first criminal enforcement action aimed at copyright infringers who use the now-popular BitTorrent file-swapping technology.

"Our goal is to shut down as much of this illegal operation as quickly as possible to stem the serious financial damage to the victims of this high-tech piracy--the people who labor to produce these copyrighted products," Acting Assistant Attorney General John Richter said in a statement. "Today's crackdown sends a clear and unmistakable message to anyone involved in the online theft of copyrighted works that they cannot hide behind new technology."

According to the investigators, the "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" movie was made available though the site before being shown in theaters, and was downloaded more than 10,000 times. The site had 133,000 members and distributed more than 17,000 individual movie, software and music titles, investigators said.

"Today's actions are bad news for Internet movie thieves and good news for preserving the magic of the movies," said Motion Picture Association of America Chief Executive Officer Dan Glickman in a statement.

Two young Star Wars fans were critically ill in hospital last night after a homemade "lightsaber" blew up and showered them in burning petrol.

The 17-year-old girl and a man aged 20 were believed to have filled a fluorescent light tube with petrol before setting it alight.

However, their stunt went tragically wrong when the device exploded in their faces, setting their clothes alight and leaving them with horrific burns.

The horrific accident was revealed when firefighters were called out after reports of a blaze in woodland in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire.

When the crew arrived at the wood, the fire was out and they discovered the pair lying in agony on the ground.

Specialists said the burns were so horrific that each of the patients had only a 50 per chance of survival.