A $368.2 million verdict against Apple has been upheld in the Eastern District of Texas, putting patent holding company VirnetX in a position to collect both royalties and damages from Apple if it continues to use its VPN and FaceTime technologies…

As you can see in the video below, when the time came for the Q&A session with Ari, I got up and asked a question that he didn’t seem to like very much (my question starts at about 16:53, but you should watch the whole thing). The gist of my question was simple: does he think that in order to fight piracy, it’s AT&T, Verizon, and Google’s responsibility to create a roadblock to that content…

The music industry wants LimeWire to pay up to $75 trillion in damages after losing a copyright infringement claim. That’s right … $75 trillion. Manhattan federal Judge Kimba Wood has labeled this request “absurd.”…

A 23-year old student from Sheffield Hallam University in the north of England is bound for America. That wouldn’t be unusual—except that Richard O’Dwyer won’t go voluntarily. The UK Home Secretary has today agreed to extradite O’Dwyer over US copyright infringement charges for running a “linking site” called TVShack…

When Wikipedia and Google purport to be neutral sources of information, but then exploit their stature to present information that is not only not neutral but affirmatively incomplete and misleading, they are duping their users into accepting as truth what are merely self-serving political declarations…

This is a great satirical piece that illustrates just how crazy stupid current copyright laws are…

You know what’s funny. I don’t see piracy anywhere on that list. Surely he must have just missed it… yeah, that’s it…

No doubt piracy is costing the content industries something—or they wouldn’t be throwing so much money at Congress in support of this kind of legislation. If we could wave a magic wand and have less piracy, obviously that would be good. But in the real world, where enforcement has direct costs to the taxpayer, regulation has costs on the industries it burdens, and the reduction in piracy they’re likely to produce is very small, it seems important to point out that the credible evidence for the magnitude of the harm is fairly thin…

But today, I can’t leave a movie theatre without paying $50. My wife and I both need to get in, and now tickets are over $10. Popcorn prices have been going up for years as has drinks, so now I’m paying even more for the same thing. I get into the theatre, and it’s the same experience I had 20 years ago — which would be fine, but my 1080P TV at home sure does look a lot better, and I don’t have to deal with Smokey McTextingpants in the next row live tweeting the event from his BlackBerry. Plus I’ve got to get a babysitter (and I understand that it’s not your fault that I decided to procreate), deal with that whole nonsense and in the end, it’s just not worth the cash. Too much friction…

The US government dropped a nuclear bomb on “cyberlocker” site Megaupload today, seizing its domain names, grabbing $50 million in assets, and getting New Zealand police to arrest four of the site’s key employees, including enigmatic founder Kim Dotcom…

Federal prosecutors in Virginia have shut down notorious file-sharing site Megaupload.com and charged the service’s founders with violating piracy laws. The Associated Press broke the story on Thursday, reporting that the indictment accuses Megaupload.com’s owner with costing copyright holders including record labels and movie studios more than $500 million in lost revenue…

It’s painful, expensive, time-consuming, stressful and ultimately pointless to work overtime to preserve your dying business model…