For decades, almost no one challenged the General Public License in legal matters. In fact, no one has even dared to try to break it in court. That record remains unsullied as the biggest company to date--Verizon--that had been accused of a GPL violation opted to settle out of court.

Despite more than 20,000 lawsuits filed against music fans in the years since they started finding free tunes online rather than buying CDs from record companies, the recording industry has utterly failed to halt the decline of the record album or the rise of digital music sharing.

«When record companies make a fuss about the danger of "piracy", they're not talking about violent attacks on shipping. What they complain about is the sharing of copies of music, an activity in which millions of people participate in a spirit of cooperation. The term "piracy" is used by record companies to demonize sharing and cooperation by equating them to kidnaping, murder and theft...»

Basking in glory after orchestrating a record punishment for a petty file-sharer in the US, the RIAA takes its legal campaign to the next level. Many may want newsgroups to stay under the radar but it’s too late - major labels have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Usenet.com and it won’t be going away.

Legal payouts of $511 million in one year would be enough to sink many companies. But for Microsoft, it amounts to a small victory.

Free software license backers win key legal victory against consumer electronics vendor, with 13 other vendors set to fall in line for compliance.

Second in the Linux server business to leader Red Hat, Novell is continuing to strive for major server wins. In its latest significant victory, Novell announced that Office Depot has elected to consolidate its server infrastructure on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Service Pack 1.

It seems that a full scale mutiny and rebellion against the music labels has begun. Several major bands, including Oasis, Jamiroquai and Radiohead as well as rock band "Throwdown" have gone together to encourage their fans to download their music. The bands are doing this because they've realized that by allowing the fans to share music, they're selling more music in the end.

By putting legal and monetary pressure on Internet service providers (in a most subtler way than in previous versions of the text), ACTA will give the music and movie industries a weapon to force them to police their networks and users themselves.