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When users first began to share music online, the music label's first reaction was to sue them. While this did little to deter music sharing, it ruined the public's opinion of these labels. Given how easy it is to copy and share text online, the newspaper industry currently faces similar problems, but instead of just sharing the content with their friends, a lot of sites simply appropriate a paper's articles - often in order to sell advertising next to the pirated text. A new study from Attributor, however, shows that news organizations have more effective means of fighting these pirates than suing them.

As the popularity of e-books and e-readers continues to increase, e-book piracy is also growing rapidly. According to Attributor, a company that develops anti-piracy and content monitoring solutions, the daily demand for pirated books can be estimated at up to 3 million people worldwide. The company's latest study also highlights that the total interest in documents from file-sharing sites has increased more than 50% over the course of the last year. Interestingly, e-book piracy is moving away from large sites like RapidShare to smaller sites and those that specialize in pirated e-books.

An iPhone application called "iPA God," which supposedly aids in the distribution of pirated applications, is now up for sale along with its source code. The app, whose name refers to the file extension for iPhone applications (.ipa ), made waves in the hacker community last week, when it was revealed to be the first ever tool for downloading paid applications to your phone that didn't first require you to jailbreak your device. Instead, the app is said to use an exploit found in the latest versions of the iPhone operating system.

The piracy rates for apps on the iPad may be much higher than on the iPhone, if one developer's report is any indication.

Developer Vladimir Roth said 50 percent of copies of the game Aqua Globs HD were pirated on the iPad, compared to an estimated five percent on the iPhone. Those figures come from comparing app downloads to the number of users registered on the OpenFeint leaderboards.

First they helped prolong the existence of The Pirate Bay by donating bandwidth to its servers, and now Sweden's Pirate Party - a political group focused on copyright and patent reform - has announced it has created a safe haven for Swedes seeking privacy online. The party isn't just going to host The Pirate Bay's bandwidth on government servers with Parliamentary immunity; it has launched a private, no-questions-asked internet service provider (ISP) for the pirate community.

The music and movie industries have been on a quest to place blame ever since they realized they were losing sales to Internet piracy. The RIAA in the United States went as far as to sue and fine individual users for downloading songs on peer-to-peer services like Napster and Limewire, or websites like The Pirate Bay or SendSpace. Others went after the services themselves, and in most cases were successful, though many others still exist. Now, BPI (British Recorded Music Industry), the U.K.'s version of the RIAA, is going after the middle man, Google, by serving the search giant with a DMCA take-down notice.

According to an independent analysis performed by investment-watching blog 24/7 Wall St., Apple's iTunes App Store has lost $450 million due to iPhone app piracy since it opened for business back in July of 2008. Although that number sounds high, they note it is small in comparison to the overall size of the App Store marketplace and the millions it generates in revenue each quarter - revenue that ranges from $60 million to $110 million according to previous estimates from a Bernstein analyst report cited in 24/7 Wall St.'s post.

However, in order to generate the $450 million figure, the author of the post uses some questionable back-of-the-envelope calculations that raise some flags. Our sources say that the real number is closer to $15 million to $20 million instead.

Over the past 10 days, Chinese downloaders have flooded - and in some cases, crashed - major P2P and torrent sites after rumors that the government would be effectively disabling all media downloads in the country.

The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) has closed hundreds of file-sharing sites since last week as part of an ongoing effort to fight piracy and porn. However, many users say these sources are one of few ways to access films, books, and music banned in China, whether the media is lewd or merely politically dissident. What will media-seeking Chinese citizens do when their links to the wider world are finally severed?

Jailbreaking, the act of hacking your iPhone or iPod Touch so that it allows for the installation of unapproved third-party applications, is a popular activity among the tech community. But in addition to allowing you greater control over your mobile device, there's another - ahem - benefit, if you will. Jailbreakers can install free versions of paid applications. These pirated, or "cracked" apps as they're called, are distributed through online repositories for easy download to your device. The whole process is as simple as snagging the latest box office release or popular album from the file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay.

Black Internet, the Pirate Bay's largest bandwidth supplier, just shut down the notorious BitTorrent tracker after a court ordered it to pay a fine of 500,000 kroner ($70,800). Since about 9:30am PT, the site has been inaccessible. Just a few months ago, the Pirate Bay announced that it had been acquired by Global Gaming Factory (GGF). This sale, however, started to fall apart over the last few days. Unless the Pirate Bay can find another ISP, it will remain inaccessible until the outcome of a civil suit against the company can be resolved.