File Sharing

Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Judiciary committee, today said he expects the debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act to resume sometime next month.

"To enact legislation that protects consumers, businesses, and jobs from foreign thieves who steal America's intellectual property," Smith said in a statement, "we will continue to bring together industry representatives and [members of Congress] to find ways to combat online piracy."

Smith suggested that further debate in the U.S. House of Representatives over the bill, which is designed to speed up the legal process involved with getting an … Read more

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch is talking nonsense, according to Google.

Murdoch, a Twitter user for only the past several weeks, used the service to fire a barrage of accusations Saturday night against President Obama and Google.

He accused the White House of being in the employ of "Silicon Valley paymasters." Murdoch claimed Google was profiting from advertisements sold against pirated materials. He also called the search company a "piracy leader." (Read more about Murdoch's Twitter tirade here).

In an e-mail sent to CNET on Sunday afternoon, Google responded to Murdoch's statements.

"This … Read more

The White House raised concerns yesterday about controversial antipiracy bills being debated in Congress and one way to measure how furious some copyright owners are with President Obama is to read the Twitter posts of Rupert Murdoch.

"So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery," wrote an obviously angry Murdoch, chairman of News Corp., one of the biggest media conglomerates in the world.

The Senate is debating the Protect IP Act (PIPA) while the House is doing the same with a similar bill, the Stop Online … Read more

The broad support in the U.S. government for two controversial antipiracy bills appears to be evaporating.

The latest string of setbacks for supporters of the bills came Saturday when Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the Oversight committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, said that he was promised by Majority leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) that a vote on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) will not occur "unless there is consensus on the bill."

"While I remain concerned about Senate action on the Protect IP Act [a similar bill to SOPA introduced into the Senate … Read more

In a move the technology sector will surely see as a victory, a controversial antipiracy bill being debated in Congress will no longer include a provision that would require Internet service providers to block access to overseas Web sites accused of piracy.

Rep. Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), one of the biggest backers of the Stop Online Piracy Act, today said he plans to remove the Domain Name System requirements from the Stop Online Piracy Act.

"After consultation with industry groups across the country," Smith said in a statement released by his office, "I feel we should remove … Read more

LAS VEGAS--A phalanx of deals involving the commanding general of torrent protocols, BitTorrent, and next-generation hardware marched into CES 2012 today, the unofficial Day Zero of the show. BitTorrent also announced that more than 150 million people used sibling programs BitTorrent and uTorrent last month, making them by far the most popular torrent clients around.

Following up on the announcement from CES 2011 that it would partner with hardware manufacturers to ship their devices with torrent support built in, BitTorrent revealed four companies based in Europe, Russia, and Asia that have prepared new hardware that automatically works with the current BitTorrent program. BitTorrent-certified devices from these companies will carry the BitTorrent logo. … Read more

Were you lucky enough to receive a new Mac laptop or desktop this holiday season?

Once you've booted up that shiny new Mac for the first time and have had a chance to look around, check out our Best apps for Mac to get the lowdown on great apps you can download. We feature both free and paid software in our collection and there's something from just about every category.

Whether you want a different browser than Safari, want to discover and listen to new music, or just need a multiservice chat client, this collection has got you … Read more

Two new paid torrent-managing programs have launched today from BitTorrent, Inc., as the 100-million-user base of uTorrent also earned an update.

First announced in July, uTorrent Plus 3.1 (download) debuted with an unexpected counterpart, BitTorrent Plus 8 (download). Both mark the first time that a paid selection of features the company calls "premium" have been added to either client. Accompanying them is the version 3.1 update to uTorrent (download).

People with the free version of uTorrent will be able to play media files directly in the uTorrent interface, thanks to the newly-baked in media player. The … Read more

In a copyright lawsuit filed today, Universal Music Group says it has obtained e-mails and other records that show Grooveshark's leaders led an effort to post more than 100,000 pirated songs onto the music service.

"[The business records of Escape Media Group, Grooveshark's parent company,] establish unequivocally," Universal's lawyers wrote in the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, "that the sound recordings illegally copied by Escape's executives and employees, include thousands of well known sound recordings owned by UMG."

Grooveshark has long said that it is not liable … Read more