ReadWriteWeb

In November, we told you about a move in the UK to monitor P2P sharing and permanently ban users who infringed on copyright from using the Internet.

In our reporting on P2P issues, it's rare these days to get wind of some good news; today, we've learned that this plan to ban would not, in fact, apply to most file-sharing fiends. After one ISP stood up to the government's proposals by circulating a petition, the government responded favorably, saying, "We are not requiring ISPs to monitor for unlawful file-sharing. Nor are we proposing that ISPs look at what users download in order to combat piracy... We will not terminate the accounts of infringers."

French president Nicolas Sarkozy recently announced the so-called Google tax, which would tax online advertising revenues and then use the money to help "legal music platforms." The tax was, among a few other ideas, suggested by a committee lead by Patrick Zelnik. (Funny enough, Zelnik is also the producer of France's First Lady and pop singer, Carla Bruni Sarkozy.) That committee's mission is to suggest ideas to boost digital music sales in France when at the same time, the controversial HADOPI law, which targets illegal file sharers, is about to take effect.

Last week, we told you about peer-to-peer and torrent file-sharing sites were being systematically shut down all over China. Not too long before that, we let you know about file-sharing being monitored by a major ISP in the UK.

Now, Israeli ISPs are throttling P2P network access, too, as confirmed in a report just released by an Israeli cyberlaw attorney and a partner news site. Whether you consider file-sharing an affront to content creators and copyright-holders everywhere or whether you see P2P networks as a permissible and valid way for users to exchange data, this trend is gaining considerable momentum around the world. Where will P2P restrictions pop up next?

Cloud storage and collaboration company Box.net has opened up its platform to iPhone apps today through a new mobile API. The API lets independent iPhone developers join its OpenBox program, and several apps have already added Box.net support in advance. The new service will let Box.net users access their files on the go, avoid storage limits, and share their content with anyone. The API currently is only available for the iPhone, but support for Palm webOS, Android and BlackBerry is in the works.

Box.net has partnered with Fuze Meeting to add real-time online meetings and screen sharing. Now the SaaS file-sharing and collaboration suite, which is going after SharePoint head on, has the added component of Web conferencing.

For those unfamiliar with it, Fuze Meeting is a fairly slick alternative to popular options like GoToMeeting, Dimdim and WebEx. The company — formerly a public one listed as Callwave — was recently revitalized and now revolves around its online software service.

A new study commissioned by the European Union has finally proven what many have suspected all along: internet users don't want to pay for content. Period. And nothing is going to change their minds. The report finds, in a surprising contradiction to what industry executives have been spouting for ages, consumers' behavior has nothing to do with the peer-to-peer technology (P2P) that has given rise to all-you-can-eat systems for free downloads of copyrighted content. In fact, many people claim that they wouldn't pay for online content even if all other free options were taken away. This finding has dramatic implications for the future of business, and not just in the entertainment industry, either. If people won't pay for content, how will companies survive?

"It was a nightmare." That's how CEO Mike Levinson described trying to organize his work with DreamIt Ventures before he set out to create the collaboration tool WizeHive. To date, WizeHive has stood out from the crowd in two ways: it's workspaces are more customizable than many collaborative suites, and it connects better to the public Web with Twitter integration and other abilities.

WizeHive's latest release has a new focus on document collaboration within your workspace. By fleshing out its capabilities and finalizing a pricing plan, the bootstrapped startup is preparing to come out of beta in September — hopefully with a round of funding.

Not too long ago, after the demise of Napster, Kazaa became synonymous with P2P file sharing. After a number of costly lawsuits and failed attempts to appease the music industry, however, Kazaa shut down its P2P network. Tomorrow, however, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, Kazaa will rise from the ashes and begin its second life as a legal subscription download service. For $20 a month, users will be able to download an unlimited number of songs. These songs, however, will be DRMed and in the WMA format, which will probably spell doom for the service in the long run.

Everyone's Robert Scoble's favorite real-time microblogging service, FriendFeed, is now allowing users to post and download many kinds of files through their site.

Sadly, video files are not on the list of accepted formats. Yet. And users can only upload three MP3s in a 24-hour period. However, other file types, from PSDs to RTFs, are accepted and up- and downloadable.

As we reported earlier this week, the retrial of Jammie Thomas-Rasset, who was accused of illegally sharing 24 songs on Kazaa, was about to come to an end this week. In an earlier trial, Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay $220,000 to the music companies, but today, a different judge and a different jury came back with a new verdict that was surely not what Thomas-Rasset was looking for. A federal jury, clearly unconvinced by Thomas-Rasset's defense, awarded the recording companies $1.92 million - which comes out to $80,0000 per shared song.

Launched earlier this month, Obayoo (pronounced oh-bio) is a private social network for microblogging and file sharing within your company. It's available for free on a SaaS basis and accessed through your company email address.

Obayoo appends a Twitter-like interface with the kind of features that Twitter itself has yet to implement, such as threaded replies, groups and file sharing (including images). Along with enterprise microblogging tools like Yammer and Socialcast, Obayoo also has the ability to draw in numerous RSS feeds, including selected Twitter accounts and searches.

Last week, we took a look at FileTwt, a file-sharing service for Twitter. After publishing that post, we heard from Bob Brinker, founder of TwitDoc, another Twitter file-sharing app. We did a couple cursory tests of his site, but were disappointed that sent files couldn't be downloaded.

We wrote Brinker with these concerns, and his response was an interesting commentary on how folks use Twitter and how apps should adapt to those user habits and patterns. "Our experience is that Twitter is for fast, real-time consumption of content, not collaboration and file sharing in the editing mode," he wrote. "We find most of our users are focused on display-only content." And for display-only files, you could hardly find a simpler solution.

Over the past week or so, we've encountered several sites that offer file-sharing services via Twitter. Though some of our commenters are dubious about the userfulness, legality, and peer-to-peer nature of the services, we generally like the idea of using Twitter to send documents, presentations, and...

Oh, let's be honest. Each for our own reasons, we want to send one another songs online, usually as illegally downloaded and shared MP3s; and Twitter seems like a more interesting way of doing that than email. We've discovered a new site that lets us send songs as MP3s on our hard drives, as MP3s hosted on a website, or even as YouTube videos or imeem audio clips plucked from the app's library. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you SongTwit!

FileTwt is a new service that enables file transfers using Twitter, from presentations and rich text documents to ebooks and music files.

At the moment, the UI is a bit clunky and the file sizes are capped at 20MB, but the service presents an exciting opportunity nevertheless. Once mobile capabilities are introduced, FileTwt would allow more freedom for the 9-to-5ers among us. And it already allows for mass sharing (either via public streams or multiple-recipient DMs) of files, which is awesome news for self-marketing musicians, who desperately need better online promotional tools.