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Golden Eye appeal may go in its favour

golden-eye-letter-to-o2-customers-accussing-them-of-downloading-ben-dover-videos

Sitting in the Court of Appeal today it was hard not to get the impression that Golden Eye may well get a decision in its favour and be allowed to have the details of over 6,000 O2 and Be customers, who are allegedly guilty of copyright infringement.

Far be it from me to second guess the judges' ruling before they hand it down and I may be completely wrong. Hey it has been known sometimes! And this was only the feeling I got from the remarks made in court, so no one should take my musings as gospel. But chatting after the hearing I was not the only person to have reached this conclusion and by that I mean those who have far more legal expertise than me.

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Piracy in the UK: why do we all want to listen to Ed Sheeran?

Ed Sheeran - image courtesy Flickr user ausnahmezustand

Over 345 million songs were illegally downloaded in the first half of 2012 in the UK alone.

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Spectre of speculative invoicing just won't give up the ghost

A set of Ben Dover-branded underwear

When I sat in the court room on 9 March this year to hear Golden Eye International's case for obtaining a Norwich Pharmacal Order to allow it to get the personal details of O2 customers it said were illegally downloading its films, I was pretty sure they would win.

Mr Justice Arnold is known to be sympathetic to rights holders who are battling illegal file sharing. He has after all been instrumental in setting precedent which is now forcing major ISPs BT, Talk Talk, Sky and pretty soon Virgin Media to block access to Newzbin2 website.

The only amusing thing about this case is the publicity boost given to Newzbin2 because so few ordinary people in the UK had even heard of it. And listening to Mr Justice Arnold  earlier this month,I got the strong impression that he felt that Golden Eye was putting forward a pretty strong case on behalf of itself and Ben Dover Productions.

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Speculating on the demise of speculative invoicing

A lawsuit document

With the news that Andrew Crossley has been banned from practising law for two years, plus Golden Eye, yet another firm engaged in speculative invoicing failing to convince a judge of the merits of its cases, is this the end of speculative invoicing?

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Five quid a month for Spotify is chicken feed

Cover of the eponymous album from The Band

I got an email this weekend pointing out that my Spotify subscription had lapsed because of a payment problem. As my debit card expired at the end of May, that was no surprise. I'd been in two minds about whether to continue the subscription as I'm house hunting at the moment and every penny counts. At £5 per month for the basic premium service, it's not really much and my temptation to cancel probably had more to do with boredom at my collection of playlists.

Office music, delivered into well-shielded headphones, is an important part of my job - the music enables me to concentrate on proof-reading pages or working on projects without the distraction of the background hubbub that characterises an office full of journalists.

The beauty of Spotify is the chance to instantly wrap your ears around pretty much anything, so I decided to have a listen to some of the seminal albums of the past, which I'd simply never got around to listening to before. If that didn't grab me, then Spotify would be history.

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Music industry tries to sue Limewire for $75 trillion

gavelandscales

The music industry has been trying to work out damages owed due to piracy for some time. To say their approach has been somewhat disorganised would be an understatement. Back in 2009, a woman from the USA was ordered to pay $1.92m for downloading 24 tracks from file-sharing site Kazaa - that's $80,000 per song. But it gets far siller.

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