This is mainly an update of the lawsuit between Universal and MySpace, where Universal has laid forth its claims… And they are mad, simply mad! They are demanding 150.000$ per pierce of material shared over MySpace… like in reality they loose that amount of money on lost sales if the material had not been available on MySpace?! Well, I guess Universal and the rest of the big companies in the cartel business doesn’t sue unless they can write really big numbers on the claim – after all when one claims it doesn’t have a real source of income anymore because of “piracy” it needs a lot of money from the courts … and its customers!

In China things are a bit different. Here the record companies tried to sue the Chinese search engine, Baidu, but lost the case… It is never easy to win a case against a Chinese company in Chinese courts! Perhaps the big Internet companies will all move to China shortly

And finally a lot of criticism has reigned down upon the proposed law-change in Australia – happily paid by the music and movie industry – which would make almost every single Australian a criminal…

Microsoft have found a new way to ensure that their competitors cannot keep up the pace with Microsoft’s products. In their upcoming Office, Office 2007, they have licensed their new interface, the Office 2007 UI, allowing persons that work on products not competing with Microsoft’s to freely use its “new” UI design, but not competing products, such as OpenOffice… How can a company keep a UI design for themselves? How is that even possible? I want to license the save-button, the new-button, the close-button and the open-button.. that will teach them!

And in the good news an American court has declared it safe to write practical anything – as long as its on the Internet! Finally a judge with an understanding of the basic rights of a democracy (he probably won’t last long in the American legal system )….

The world is still a strange place to be in these days, when digital rights are ill-understood by the content-providers! These clashes are bound to keep happening and be a daily event for at least a couple of years to come – until they finally start to wake up and smell the coffee that has been brewing (and even served) for the last 10-15 years!