A collection of stuff with an odd sort of a common thread running through them:

Jail time for The Pirate Bay? The 4 leaders of the file-sharing site were found guilty of violating copyright by a Swedish court and sentenced to a year in prison. They’ll appeal, of course, so the drama will continue. And as they say in Hollywood, there’s no such thing as bad publicity — the site’s more popular than ever. I’ve largely ignored this case, except for one brief post.

Time Warner Cable bails on metering customers. TWC ended an experiment with charging customers for the bandwidth they consume due to — surprise, surprise — lots of cranky customers. And objections from politicians such as Senator Chuck Schumer and Congressman Eric Massa. Last summer I blogged about Comcast’s similar efforts.

Looks like Amazon’s gonna have to charge me tax soon. Next week a bill to force online retailers to start charging state sales tax is expected to be introduced in Congress by Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY) and Representative Bill Delahunt (D-MA). This has been an on-again-off-again issue ever since Web commerce took off, but the recession is making it a nice, juicy target for state governments looking for additional revenue.

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
on April 17, 2009 - 9:52 am

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