Large textbook publishers Bedford, Freeman & Worth and Macmillan, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, The McGraw-Hill Companies and Pearson filed a lawsuit against file sharing host Rapidshare earlier this month, and today have gained an injunction, meaning the service must now proactively filter about 150 textbook titles, or face a hefty fine.

The suit cited all 148 titles to which the publishers owned the copyright, and demanded that digital copies be taken down, and not allowed to be distributed at all.

Because of the new injunction, if any of the books is ever found available on Rapidshare, the company could face a fine up to 250,000 euros.

"This ruling is an important step forward. Not only does it affirm that file-sharing copyrighted content without permission is against the law, but it attaches a hefty financial punishment to the host, in this case Rapidshare, for noncompliance," adds Tom Allen, CEO of the Association of American Publishers, via TF. "Consider this a shot across the bow for others who attempt to profit from the theft of copyrighted works online."

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Last year, in the US, a law known as PRO-IP was signed into law. It mandated the creation of a Justice Department position responsible for the enforcement of intellectual property rights. The second part of that law, requesting comments about IP enforcement issues from the public, is now underway.

Specifically, they are looking for "written submissions from the public identifying the costs to the U.S. economy resulting from infringement of intellectual property rights, both direct and indirect, including any impact on the creation or maintenance of jobs."

Comments should be emailed to the Office of Management & Budget (intellectualproperty@omb.eop.gov) and must be received by March 24.

Comments received by the deadline will be published on a government webpage, so make sure you don't include anything you wouldn't want available to the general public.

PRO-IP (the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008) is a thinly veiled excuse to divert government resources to the entertainment industry's war against P2P file sharing.

The rationale for such a law is based on the flawed premise that file sharing is responsible for billions of dollars suddenly vanishing from the US economy and the loss of nearly a million jobs.

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The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) being brokered by the U.S. government on behalf of the entertainment industry has caught the attention of the European Data Protection Supervisor, Peter Hustinx. He authored an opinion paper on several topics that include ACTA, and said he was concerned that it violated the legal rights of citizens in nations across Europe.

"The EDPS strongly encourages the European Commission to establish a public and transparent dialogue on ACTA, possibly by means of a public consultation, which would also help ensuring that the measures to be adopted are compliant with EU privacy and data protection law requirements," Hustinx writes in his opinion piece. ACTA has already found itself in the line of fire from the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation for some of its provisions.

There are fears that ACTA includes measures to enable warrantless searches of citizens and destruction of devices containing potentially pirated content. Recently in the UK, Junior business minister David Lammy said documents related to ACTA will not be put in the House of Commons library, due to the desire for other countries to keep the negotiations secret.

The European Commission said recently that ACTA will not go any further than current EU policies related to copyright infringement, and dismissed fears that ACTA will lead to border searches of iPods and other gadgets in case they contain pirated multimedia content.

"EU customs, frequently confronted with traffics of drugs, weapons or people, do neither have the time nor the legal basis to look for a couple of pirated songs on an iPod music player or laptop computer, and there is no intention to change this," the Commission said at the time.

However, Hustinx has other issues with ACTA too, such as the pact's plan to share data about citizens between nations. He writes about this:

"It can be questioned first whether data transfers to third countries in the context of ACTA are legitimate. The relevance of adopting measures at international level in that field can be questioned as long as there is no agreement within the EU member states over the harmonisation of enforcement measures in the digital environment and the types of criminal sanctions to be applied. In view of the above, it appears that the principles of necessity and proportionality of the data transfers under ACTA would be more easily met if the agreement was expressly limited to fighting the most serious IPR infringement offences, instead of allowing for bulk data transfers relating to any suspicions of IPR infringements. This will require defining precisely the scope of what constitutes the 'most serious IPR infringement offences' for which data transfers may occur."

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A look at the minimum system requirements for the upcoming blockbuster Just Cause 2 shows that the title won't work on installations of Windows XP. This would represent one of the first high profile releases not to be supported by the still-popular Microsoft operating system. The requirements specifies that an operating system newer than XP is required, and provides a hint why.

The game requires at least DirectX 10. Windows XP can only officially go as far as DirectX 9, meaning that gamers would need to be using Windows Vista or Windows 7 to play the game. A recent hardware/software survey from Steam showed that 42.15 percent of its users were in fact still running the Windows XP operating system, although Windows 7 was becoming popular very fast.

Of course, there have been several methods used to install DirectX 10 on Windows XP since it was launched, none of which are supported by Microsoft and several of which have no support from their original authors either. So maybe it is "technically" possible to run it on Windows XP, but it is a shame that users should have to install a hacked DirectX 10 package and probably patch the game files themselves to play it on Windows XP.


Amazon.com incorrectly lists XP as supported in search results.
Minimum System Requirements

• Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7 (Windows XP is unsupported)
• Processor: Dual-core CPU with SSE3 (Athlon 64 X2 4200 / Pentium D 3GHz)
• Graphics Card: Nvidia Geforce 8800 Series / ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro with 256MB memory or equivalent DX10 card with 256MB memory
• Memory: 2GB RAM
• DirectX: Microsoft DirectX 10
• Hard Drive: 10GB of free drive space
• Optical Drive: DVD-ROM drive
• Sound Card: 100% DirectX 10 compatible sound card
• Internet Connection: Internet connection required for product activation
• Input: Keyboard and mouse (Microsoft Xbox 360 controller optional)

Recommended System Setup

• Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7 (Windows XP is unsupported)
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6GHz or AMD Phenom X3 2.4GHz
• Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 Series with 512MB / ATI Radeon HD 5750 Series with 512MB or equivalent DX10 card with 512MB memory
• Memory: 3GB
• DirectX: Microsoft DirectX 10.1 with Vista SP1
• Hard Drive: 10GB of free drive space
• Optical Drive: DVD-ROM drive
• Sound Card: 100% DirectX 10 compatible Dolby Digital 5.1 sound card
• Internet Connection: Internet connection required for product activation
• Input: Keyboard and mouse (Xbox 360 controller optional)

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LG Display has increased fears of rapid supply growth of LCD panels by announcing it is considering constructing a new LCD production line to meet demands. Manufacturers of LCD television products have been enjoying a healthy level of demand for LCD flat-screens, bolstered recently by Chinese holidays and sporting events like the Winter Olympics.

However, concerns are taking root in the industry that it may return to a state of oversupply as manufacturers beef up production to capitalize on the demand. Controlling supply is important for players in the industry to maintain profit margins for the technology.

"Although demand is strong, growing capacity will become increasingly burdensome for the industry," said Jason Kang, an analyst at NH Investment & Securities. "Supply is already growing and the growth will be faster next year."

LG plans to begin operation of a separate production line in the first half of 2010, while Taiwanese rivals are increasing factory utilization. "We are considering increasing capacity because we have been unable to meet all client demand for some time," said an LG Display spokesman. "But nothing has been decided yet."

LG Display CFO James Jeong revealed to investors just last month that the company was meeting under 90 percent of orders received and that the situation was likely to continue for months.

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Cablevision is set to trial a new concept service in New York, where it serves 3 million homes. A household with both Cablevision Internet access and cable television services will be able to take part. Basically, the service will use your Internet connection to stream pretty much anything from your computer screen to your television, delivered as your own personal TV channel through your cable.

Titled PC to TV Media Relay, Cablevision is offering the service to customers in an attempt to provide innovative and useful solutions for home media consumption as sites like Hulu become more popular. In order to use the service, a user only needs to install software on a Windows-based machines. Cablevision will market it as enabling online viewing on a television with the push of a button.

Pricing for the service has yet to be decided, and users of Macs will be included as soon as software for the platform is developed. The move follows a service from Comcast called On Demand Online, launched last year to offer cable programming to subscribers of both Comcast Internet and cable TV services.

"Linear video will, no doubt, continue to exist, and even to thrive, but broadband will by then almost inarguably be the core business for the cable companies," Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffett said, referring to how the cable sector will change over the next 10 years.

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Consumer Focus, a consumer watchdog that operates in the United Kingdom, has called for the region's copyright laws to be adjusted after research showed most consumers are unaware of copyright law. Millions of people are totally unaware that they regularly break the law in the UK, according to Consumer Focus. Their great crimes? Ripping and format shifting.

Consumers regularly rip CDs to computers as MP3 or other digital file formats for convenience, a practice which could very well be illegal depending on the circumstances. The same user would then break the law again by transferring those files to a portable media player device; a practice known as format shifting (technically, just ripping to a computer is format shifting, but the CD -> MP3 player example is usually given).

Some rights holders believe format shifting should be illegal, and that consumers should have to pay again to consume the same content on a different format. In a poll of 2,026 people, 73 percent were totally unaware of what they could legally copy or record. Jill Johnstone, of Consumer Focus, said that the law does not take the advance of technology over the past decade into account and needs to be changed.

"The world has moved on and reform of copyright law is inevitable, but it is not going to update itself," she said. Of course, consumers are not being prosecuted generally for ripping CDs or putting music from a CD on an iPod, clearly, but its the implication that people are breaking the law by doing so that is bad enough on its own.

IT lawyer Nick Lockett, of DL Legal, said that law enforcement only has the will and allocated resources to tackle commercial operations, not personal use. He pointed out that the practice of recording content from television using a video recorder only became legal through a copyright law amendment some time after recorders were on the market, and recording was a common practice.

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The European Commission has set its sights on Google Inc. following a number of complaints alleging that Google unfairly indexes search results in order to bury results from competitors. Google admitted that the European Commission was following up on three complaints made against U.S. giant, and protests its innocence while pledging to cooperate.

"Though each case raises slightly different issues, the question they ultimately pose is whether Google is doing anything to choke off competition or hurt our users and partners," senior competition counsel Julia Holtz said. "This is not the case."

The complaints were made against Google by Microsoft's Ciao! from Bing, eJustice.fr (a French legal search engine) and Foundem, a British price comparison website. Google has said it is confident that its operations conform to competition laws in the European Union.

Ciao! was a longtime user of Google's Adsense platform, and began to raise complaints about the terms of the arrangement when Microsoft bought it out in 2008. "We always try to listen carefully if someone has a real concern and we work hard to put our users' interests first and to compete fair and square in the market," Holtz said.

eJustice.fr and Foundem take issue with how Google indexes results from their websites. Both have expressed concerns that their search services were intentionally given low rankings for query results.

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