Thirteen movie studios including Disney, Columbia Pictures and Universal Studios are suing to shut down The Pirate Bay saying that the site is continuing to infringe their copyrights. Peter Sunde, a co-founder of high-profile file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, says new legal action against the site is nothing more than “harassment”. Read more here
German government plans to ban violent videogames will have to be put on hold, after a successful internet petition by German gamers. The e-petition, hosted on the official forums of the Bundestag, the German parliament, has passed the 50,000 signatures necessary to force a government review. Last month the country’s 16 interior ministers called for a ban on the creation and distribution of games involving violent acts against human or human-like characters. Read more here
Catalina Botero, of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), has reported receiving 12 complaints of media shut-downs and information about at least 25 journalists currently at risk. “Public media outlets which had favored president Zelaya were taken over, and the workers were fired,” she added. Read more here
A Dutch court has determined that phone-taps carried out by the secret service (AIVD) on journalists at newspaper De Telegraaf were illegal and must stop immediately. Furthermore, any information gathered by AIVD cannot be submitted as evidence in an ongoing investigation into from whom journalist Jolande van der Graaf received classified government information for an article she wrote in March. Read more here