Miami & The Beaches Photo Blog

A New York billionaire recently imprisoned for soliciting underage prostitution in Florida has disposed of several lawsuits from girls claiming sexual abuse.

An Alabama jury has sided with a railroad in a series of lawsuits filed by the relatives of four men killed in a train crash almost three years ago.

Florida International University reached an agreement this week to settle lawsuits by two former employees who resigned from their high-level jobs at FIU Online.

Florida International University reached an agreement this week to settle lawsuits by two former employees who resigned from their high-level jobs at FIU Online.

Millions more dollars for commuter rail. A new agency to oversee a bullet train. An agreement to spare taxpayers from some major lawsuits. <p/> All are part of the proposal for a special lawmaking session starting Thursday that Senate President Jeff Atwater and House Speaker Larry Cretul called to boost money for South Florida's Tri-Rail and to get Central Florida's troubled SunRail line off the ground.

Millions more dollars for commuter rail. A new agency to oversee a bullet train. An agreement to spare taxpayers from some major lawsuits. <p/> All are part of the proposal for a special lawmaking session starting Thursday that Senate President Jeff Atwater and House Speaker Larry Cretul called to boost money for South Florida's Tri-Rail and to get Central Florida's troubled SunRail line off the ground.

Edward Stimpson, an aviation advocate who pushed to rejuvenate struggling small aircraft manufacturers in the 1990s by limiting lawsuits against them, has died after a five-month illness. He was 75.

Whether you boldly admit to illegally downloading content from the internet or hide under a blanket with the lights dimmed urging your laptop to hurry with its download of an Eminem torrent fearful that some bootjack thug from the FCC will kick in your door at any moment, there is no escaping the controversy surrounding the appeal/disgust of illegal file-sharing.

At the center of the debate lies the notorious Sweden based peer-to-peer, file-sharing website, the Pirate Bay. The website’s operators, Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, have seen their share of lawsuits, injunctions, blockages, police-style raids, and have even been convicted of copyright infringement resulting in a sentence of a year in prison and a fine of 30 million SEK (approximately $3.6 million USD). In spite of all the opposition, the site is still in operation, openly providing copyrighted content to users for free.

In its most recent discontinuation of service, on August 24 the site complied with a court order to block access to the site from its users. The site’s service provider, Black Internet, shut down access to the site for nearly three hours before the staff announced that the site would be hosted through a different service provider and that regular operation of file-sharing would continue.

Prior to this brief period of the Pirate Bay’s inactivity, users relayed messages of the site’s disconnection and a number of different BitTorrent file-sharing sites emerged. In a third-quarter threat report by internet security company McAfee, the company stated that activity on other file-sharing sites rose 300 percent during the Pirate Bay’s disconnection. Furthermore, it was reported that the number of available sites rose from around 300 in June to nearly 1,400 in August during the time of the site’s temporary shut-down.

“This was a true ‘cloud computing’ effort, as the masses stepped up to make this database of torrents (legal, infringed and malicious) available to others,” said the report.

In response to the controversy of illegal file-sharing, England’s Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills is urging for legislation of a “three-strike” policy that will disconnect habitual file-sharers from internet access. Surprisingly, the legislation is met with opposition by certain advocates of the music-industry due to a report by Virgin Media supported think tank, Demos. The report claims that admitted illegal file-sharers spend nearly twice as much on music per year than that of users who don’t support illegal downloads.

“The findings suggest that government plans to disconnect repeat illegal downloaders from the internet…could do the music industry more harm than good by punishing core consumers.”

Federal authorities have filed lawsuits against seven people accused of promoting a bogus tax return scheme seeking a total of $562 million in refunds.

As if minimal record sales weren’t enough to effect the status of the reformed Guns N’ Roses, the band now faces a $1 million copyright lawsuit for samples on a track off of last year’s Chinese Democracy bomb.

The suit claims that the GNR song, “Raid N’ The Bedouins,” illegally sampled two songs from German electronic artist, Ulrich Schnauss, who claims that no effort was made to obtain the songs for use on the album. Schnauss’ songs, “Wherever You Are” and “A Strange and Isolated Place,” were used to produce about 45 seconds of ambient noise leading into the guitar driven track. Brian Caplan, attorney for Schnauss, said in a statement, “I can tell you that there is no paper trail authorizing the use of these songs and nobody from the plaintiff’s side authorized the use of this song.”

However, GNR manager Irving Azoff has said that the claims made against the band are false. The samples used in the song, “were provided by a member of the album’s production team who has assured us that these few seconds of sound were obtained legitimately.”

This recent trend of music copyright suits has not gone unnoticed. As the music industry struggles to pull itself out of its recession, artists have been forced to find ulterior ways in order to make a living. Lawsuits over music usages can either be acknowledged as an artist’s claim to the rightful use of their work, or some greedy scumbag who only wants to profit off the success of another artist’s creativity. With the “success” of Chinese Democracy, it’s safe to say the Ulrich Schnauss may not be looking for a quick buck.