The Sidney Morning Herald reveals that “Canada has joined China and Russia on the US software, music and movie industries’ annual list of countries with the worst record of fighting piracy of copyright goods. ‘While there has been a few positive developments in these key markets over the year, the bottom line is that piracy levels have not come down at all or only marginally, and in some countries the situation has grown worse,’ Eric Smith, president of the International Intellectual Property Alliance, said in a statement today.”
Also on the subject of piracy, The Times writes that, in the UK, “[p]eople who illegally download films and music will be cut off from the internet under new legislative proposals to be unveiled next week. Internet service providers (ISPs) will be legally required to take action against users who access pirated material, The Times has learnt. Users suspected of wrongly downloading films or music will receive a warning e-mail for the first offence, a suspension for the second infringement and the termination of their internet contract if caught a third time, under the most likely option to emerge from discussions about the new law.”
AFP reports that, according to Chinese state media, China’s software industry saw an increase in revenue of more than 20 percent last year, boosted by particularly swift growth in income from services. The Chinese software industry generated revenues of 580 billion yuan (81 billion dollars) in 2007, up 20.8 percent from the year before. […] China, the world’s fourth largest economy, has vowed to raise the contribution to growth from technology-intensive industries such as software.”
BusinessWeek points out that “[t]he battle for Internet turf is no longer just a figure of speech. Nokia on Feb. 11 announced a quartet of new handsets designed to more closely link global positioning systems (GPS) with the mobile Internet, bringing the Finnish company into more direct competition with Google Maps and staking a bigger claim to the emerging market for so-called location-based services. The announcement came on the same day that Google encroached on Nokia territory by demonstrating a prototype of its Android operating system for mobile phones. Both companies are betting that where people are located will become an important part of how they use the Net.”
The International Herald Tribune reports that “[t]he European Commission has raided the Munich offices of Intel. […] The Commission also raided retailers including Germany’s Media Markt, a unit of trading company Metro, the company said. ‘I can confirm that Commission officials have carried out unannounced inspections at the plants of a manufacturer of central processing units,’ said Jonathan Todd, a spokesman for the Commission in Brussels. He said retailers were also raided. Todd said the raids were conducted because of possible violations of EU rules covering restrictive business practices and abuses of market power.”