"A New York teen, dubbed a pirate by the Record Industry, is counter suing them for defamation, violating anti-trust laws, conspiring to defraud the courts and making extortionate threats.

In papers responding to a lawsuit filed by five record companies, Robert Santangelo, who was 11 when he is supposed to have downloaded music, has come out fighting. He denies sharing music using P2P technology and says it's impossible for the record companies to prove that that he did." -- Read more and digg it.

"Adobe Systems Inc. on Jan. 29 announced that it has released the full PDF (Portable Document Format) 1.7 specification to AIIM, the Association for Information and Image Management. AIIM, in turn, will start working on making PDF an ISO standard.

In this release, Adobe is opening up the full PDF 1.7 specification as defined in Adobe's PDF Reference Manual. According to Sarah Rosenbaum, Adobe's director of product management, this is the next logical step for Adobe with its PDF formats. In th

Way to go Africa! - "Microsoft Corporation's products have been locked out of the on-going World Social Forum (WSF) in Nairobi Kenya.

With over 300 computers provided for participants and the press, organizers of the WSF have preferred to provide open source software products and blocked all Microsoft related products for the forum's usage and its related activities.

Participants attending WSF, which for the first time is entirely taking place in an African country say that this was a gesture done as a way of promoting the free social movement at the same time also as a way of fighting M

Harold Feld writes about the falling revenues of the music industry being attributed to the increase in competition brought by new technologies:

"As reported by the NYT, legal music downloading for which record labels received royalty payments more than doubled last year. Nevertheless, the industry is still not making as much money as it would like. Unsurprisingly, the industry and sympathetic trade reporters attribute the difference between the huge profits the industry actually makes and the obscene profits to which they believe they are entitled to ‘piracy.’

Allow me to proffer a different explanation: we should expect that technology that shifts power to customers and makes the industry more competitive will lower the profit margins for incumbents.

"In the US, France and a few other countries it is already forbidden to play legally purchased music or videos using GNU/Linux media players. Sounds like sci-fi? Unfortunately not. And it won’t end up on multimedia only. Welcome to the the new era of DRM!" - Borys Musielak writes in an excellent article on DRM at PolishLinux.org.

"In this article I would like to explain the problem of Digital Rights (or restrictions) Management, especially in the version promoted by Microsoft with the new Windows Vista release. Not everyone is familiar with the dangers of the new “standard” for the whole computer industry.