This week the verdicts of the four men accused of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’ via the popular torrent site ‘The Pirate Bay’ were announced.The four received sentences amounting to one year in jail each along with fines totalling $3,620,000.With such a harsh penalty I thought it might be worth delving deeper in to the case that one of the defendants has called ‘a theatre trail’ which was acted out with the intention of gaining media exposure which would focus on the power of the large film companies and the dangers of file sharing

The Pirate Bay was established in 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån (The Piracy Bureau) and has been acting as a separate organisation since October 2004.In total the site has 3,500,000 registered users and its purpose is to allow users to easily locate torrent files which are used by peer to peer file sharing … Read the rest

Just recently I’ve decided that the walls of our house are looking a little bare and rather than spending a small fortune on pictures and paintings I’ve started searching the Internet for images of the place in which I live.The idea is to find a number of extremely high quality and dramatic images of Torbay which I’ll then blow up on to huge canvases to be hung on the wall.

My search has been hindered by the fact that while there are many sites which offer fantastic photographs of Torbay, most the images lack a certain artistic quality and are unavailable in the kind of resolutions that would allow them to be blown up.Eventually I came across Flickr; one of the most popular photo storage and sharing sites on the Internet.

The site is free, easy to use and features various methods for sorting, categorizing and tagging along with features … Read the rest

I think I have resisted talking about Twitter (www.twitter.com) for long enough – up until now I have sidelined this popular social networking service as I never quite understood its value and considered it to just be a passing fad.

That was until this week when I was listening to the Chris Moyles show on Radio One.Despite paying a yearly TV licence fee which is designed to promote independence within the BBC and remove the financial need for advertising, they flipped to an advertisement for one of their own shows which kind of missed the point, I felt.

The ridiculous voice of Tim Westwood followed; a 51 year old Caucasian man who attempts to sound like a 20 something year old living a black rapper lifestyle.He boomed in to the mic ‘it’s ya boy, Westwood’, ‘I’m walking with the big dogs’, ‘I’m going to elevate my game’ before completely contrasting … Read the rest