Reversed Ruling in the Trial Opposing Sabam and the Belgian ISP Scarlet

ISPs cannot filter illegal file-sharing. Indeed, it finally hit a Belgian court that filtering copyright infringement may not be technically possible for ISPs... at least not with Audible Magic.

If you've been following the trial opposing the music copyright group Sabam and the Belgian ISP Scarlet, you already know that in 2007 the court had ruled in favor of Sabam and sentenced Scarlet to prevent any piracy activity on its network.

In order to follow the ruling, the Belgian ISP was asked to use the Audible Magic system, said to have proved its efficiency. Besides, in case of an incapacity to do so, Scarlet was to pay a €2,500 fine per day of non-compliance.

Well now, not only has the court realized that the demanded task was impossible to realize using this system but it has also reversed its ruling as a consequence.

So, even though the trial is not over yet, the outcome is now looking much better for Scarlet.

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Learn, Share and Assess at the P2P University

P2P is the new learning device as testifies the creation of a P2P University. Indeed we already covered that BitTorrent is an education tool at the Stanford School of Engineering and it turns out it is becoming more than that.

That is to say that learning online and sharing courses will soon seem normal and common. In that sense, the Stanford School of Engineering and MIT are two examples that will be remembered as the pioneers in this movement towards a world-wide sharing education.

With a similar goal, the P2P University, which is said to launch in early 2009, presents itself as follows:

"The Peer 2 Peer University is an online community of open study groups for short university-level courses."

For more information on this P2P University, you can watch this video:

What's so interesting about all of these Websites is their will to share content with a non-commercial aim, via Creative Commons licenses, which probably represents the best application of P2P as of today.

Get 1TB Hard Drives For 100$

1TB hard drives are now within your reach for only $100. Indeed, the 9to5Mac Website reported that the prices went down for these huge storage device and can now be found on several Websites at this price. For example, you can find one on Newegg.com for 99$ after a 30$ mail-in rebate.

One Tetra Byte can seem like a lot (well because it is!) but I'm sure that it can be filled up in no time with all the media content now available to us in high definition, which may mean better quality but also bigger files.

So making 1TB hard drives more accessible to the public is nothing but good news. Besides, when we see how fast the prices are being cut down, storing files on your hard drive may one day not be an issue anymore... :-)

BitTorrent is an Education Tool at the Stanford School of Engineering

The Stanford School of Engineering decided to make some of its courses available via free BitTorrent downloads.

The courses, which deal with Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Linear Systems and Optimization, can be found on the Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) Website and downloaded with BitTorrent (but only using the Vuze DTH Network, that's too bad, we're gonna try to reseed them with proper torrents).

This approach was made because:

"Stanford and the School of Engineering believe that technology transfer is an important part of its mission. This includes research and teaching. SEE is an important step in making important pieces of its curriculum available to a broad audience."

This vision translates in the following process:

"Anytime and anywhere access to complete lecture videos via streaming or downloaded media" as well as "full course materials including syllabi, handouts, homework, and exams." 

The first figures are really encouraging since 200,000 people have already visited the Website. Besides, when we know how expensive education can be, we understand why this decision was so well-received.

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Radiohead's Experiment With the Release of "In Rainbows" Was a Huge Success Both For the Artist and the Fans

For the release of their latest album, In Rainbows, Radiohead experimented a new distribution method  fans were asked to pay... if they wanted to, the amount of their choice.

And all we can say is that it was a clear success, both for the artists and the fans. Indeed people were finally given the option to appreciate the music for what it is and to put their own price on it. And that's exactly what they did.

Actually, contrary to what the music industry may think and fears, people voluntarily paid to download the album in order to show their gratitude to the music group. Not only that but the free download did not hurt the sales of physical CDs either, which have already been sold up to 1.75 million copies.

We can salute such an initiative and see if other artists will follow the same path...

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The Therapeutic Effects of Video Games

What if video games had a deeper function than just pure amusement and could even have a psychological utility? That is exactly what Yann Leroux is trying to demonstrate in this article (in French).

Indeed, video games are often criticized when judged too violent, too addictive... but they are much more than just a fun experience and can be used to help children, like a therapy. That is to say, as explained in this paper, video games can be used to stimulate the intellect, to externalize the subliminal mind or as a relationship tool.

As for the author, he insists on the censorial aspect of video games which he claims to be the key to access a person's mind through the first levels of symbolization.

If you want to study the topic of video games from another angle, you can go to the symposium entitled "video games, the cross between social, art and culture", that will occur on the 10th, 11th and 12th in June 2009.

So, are you convinced or skeptical about the therapeutic effects of video games?

Edgios Searches the Web Differently As a P2P Search Engine

Everyone knows Web Search Engines but not so many are familiar with  the term "P2P Search Engines". And yet, many of us use them without  necessarily realizing it.

Indeed, as it is explained on SearchTools.com, Napster and Gnutella represent two current models of Peer-to-Peer Web searching. But they are far from being the only actors in this sector: Edgios will be joining the list as soon as it will be launched.

But we can already get a preview of this P2P Search Engine thanks to the Dragan Varagic Blog which describes briefly some of its characteristics. But as well as any P2P-based utility, the real test of Edgios will start with its release since it will bring more users and really use the P2P technology.

Besides, on its current main page, Edgios claims to be "bringing the future of search" and describes itself as follows :

"Do any of the big search engines let you control what goes into the search index? Do they rank search results according to what real people want? No, they don't. But Edgios does. (...) Our entire approach to web search is based on you being in control, and on maintaining your anonymity."

Sounds promising, right?

Another Look at ipoque With the Preliminary Results of its Internet Study 2008

Ipoque's study about Internet traffic is something everyone is looking at right now. As we talked about last week, ipoque's Internet Study 2007 offered us an analysis of the evolution of the Internet and more specifically of that of file sharing protocols.

The ars technica Website gives us another approach to the subject by looking at the preliminary results of the Internet Study 2008 which seems to focus more on the development of Direct Download Links (DDL) and on its impact on P2P traffic.

Indeed, what we can see for now is that DDL and streaming are currently experiencing the biggest growth with services like Rapidshare for DDL and Hulu for Web streaming being the main actors.

We will have to wait for the complete ipoque's analysis to talk more about  the matter, so we will keep you posted as soon as the 2008 study comes out.

The Subscription to the RSS Feeds of Google Web Search Results May Become a Reality

We used to type Web searches over and over again until what we were looking for came up in the results. Then "alerts" were invented which enabled us to buy some time by receiving new results directly into our mail box.

But in our 2.0 era, we have new Internet tools that saves us even more time such as RSS feeds that centralize the info we need in one place, the RSS feeds reader.

Google has understood that and is said to complement its existing Google Alerts service with a RSS syndication for its Web search results, the same way it has already done it for its Blog Search.

So let's hope this new service will be operational really soon, because email alerts are already outdated! ;-)

Assessment of the P2P File Sharing Protocols

From time to time it is good to sit and look at what is going on in the P2P environment. That's exactly what FileShareFreak did with its assessment of P2P file sharing protocols.

Its study, which takes the form of a listing of all the major file sharing methods, points out the positive and negative aspects of each of them. This list includes BitTorrent (public), BitTorrent (private), Gnutella Network (Limewire), Direct Connect (DC), eD2K/eMule, Usenet/Newsgroups, IRC, and DDL/RapidShare Sites.

Though you may recognize many of these tools, I don't think that you've tried them all. So this is why the assessment may come in handy. Indeed, even if you're satisfied with your current download experience, check it out. You never know, something even better may be out there...

So, have a great (and legal!) download. ;-)