Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing has the news that author Neil Gaiman has gotten approval from his publisher to offer one of his books online for free — perhaps inspired by the story of Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, who started pirating his own books and noticed that sales of actual physical copies of his books [...]
In one of the least-surprising legal moves in recent memory, Swedish authorities have laid charges against The Pirate Bay, one of the largest trackers of BitTorrent downloads in the world (it recently passed the 10 million peers mark), on behalf of several movie studios and record labels. This isn’t surprising for a number of reasons. [...]
TorrentFreak has the news that The Pirate Bay has passed a somewhat amazing landmark: 10 million “peers,” or individual BitTorrent servers that are indexed by the site’s “tracker.” Although it’s not directly comparable to The Pirate Bay because of the way that BitTorrent works, I started wondering how those numbers stacked up against Napster, the [...]
Several weeks ago, Amazon introduced the latest in a long line of “e-book” readers, known as the Kindle. Available for $400, it comes equipped with an easy-to-read “E Ink” screen and a wireless connection that allows users to download books that they purchase from the online retailer. Kindle users can also upload their own files [...]
You have to hand it to The Pirate Bay. No, really — you have to hand it to them, because they’re just going to take it anyway. (sorry, just a little peer-to-peer humour there; is this thing on?) The BitTorrent site, which has made a career out of thumbing its nose at just about every [...]