A new poll’s revealed more money is being spent on legal downloads by illicit file-sharers than law-abiding folk. According to the Digital Music Survey, fifteen per cent of the British population uses peer-to-peer software – and nine per cent will even admit to doing so in order to obtain copyrighted material they haven’t paid for. At the same time, it’s been shown that shutting down a major P2P site may only lead to a boom in alternatives as file-swappers try to fill the vacuum.

The Government’s outlined new proposals that include cutting the Internet connections of persistent file-sharers of movies and music, bulldozing through the framework it had laid down in its own Digital Britain report. As recently as June, disconnecting people had been seen as going too far and was ruled out. Now, with the apparent personal involvement [...]

A man who downloaded over three thousand copyrighted movies on the Internet has been let off the hook in the Spanish courts. Meanwhile, police in Russia – previously seen as a safe haven for file-sharers – have launched what could be their first ever raid on a BitTorrent tracker.

There are around seven million people engaged in illegal file sharing in the UK and, while they may be downloading songs and movies for free, the British economy is paying the price. That’s according to a new study from the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property (SABIP), which estimates the cost as being in the tens of billions of pounds.

Four men representing The Pirate Bay have been sent to jail for a year and handed a bill for £2.4 million in damages after losing what could be a landmark piracy case. Peter Sunde, Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Carl Lundstrom have all been found guilty of accessory and conspiracy to break copyright law [...]