When you think of BitTorrent, you probably think of movies, music, and games being shared illicitly. Well, one man by the name of Greg Maxwell is turning all of that on its head by uploading a cache of 18,592 scientific papers to the torrent site The Pirate Bay. This is, according to Maxwell, a protest against the prosecution of programmer Aaron Swartz for theft of data.
In some ways, life was easier as a teen before ubiquitous broadband Internet connections made file sharing an all too accessible past time. Just ask one 15-year-old from Sweden who now faces prosecution for sharing movies online. According to translated text from Swedish website 
France instituted a controversial “three-strikes” law earlier this year and according to some numbers release by Hadopi, the agency that implements the system, they’re getting swamped. More than 18 million copyright complaints have been filed since the system was opened up to content owners. 
Industry trade groups like the RIAA and the MPAA have been beating on Congressional doors for years now in a fruitless attempt to restrict Internet access for rampant file-sharers. Thanks to a tangled web of possible political and legal ramifications, the government's been hesitant to drop the banhammer on everyday pirates. Sick of the foot-dragging, the content associations just went Dirty Harry. No, they didn't take the law into their own hands – they bypassed it completely by forging a deal with the largest ISPs, who will now take a "graduated response" against file-sharers at the copyright owners' command.
It might seem like the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is on a wild goose chase if it 
In their ongoing quest to punch every puppy they can find, rights holders have turned to suing those most rapacious of pirates, professors. Academic publishers are asking a judge in Georgia for an injunction against Georgia State University for a liberal fair-use policy. What these publishers are objecting to is unapproved and unpaid-for book and article excerpts in class materials—essentially quoting and anthologizing. They want everything that can be paid for to be paid for.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency believes it has the authority to shut down any and all .com and .net websites that run afoul of copyright law, even if the site's servers are hosted overseas. Erik Barnett, the agency's assistant deputy director, told the U.K.'s Guardian
Time was that if you wanted to see a movie, you went to a theatre or you waited a few months to rent a VHS tape or DVD at five bucks a pop. That's just the way it was. An artist/performer/writer would create something and you would pay real money to buy a copy. But in the purely digital, networked era, old school routines have been forever altered. And while that's theoretically great news for the end user, who can now buy selectively and at his or her convenience, it also presents us with a whole new set of hassles. Hassles such as copy protection.
With the first e-G8 meeting this week, we suspected that Internet issues would come up at the real G8 conference attended by world leaders. French president Nicolas Sarkozy is known for his desire to “tame” the web, which he sees as a threat to content owners. Imagine our surprise when a memo leaked to the Financial Times indicated wide support of the principals of freedom that made the Internet the force for good it has thus far been.
Did you know the Pirate Party is the sixth largest in Germany? Neither did we, but the German authorities certainly know who they are, and where they keep their servers. In the early morning today, German police 
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