eu.jpgThe redemption of P2P file sharing made headway in some parts of Europe recently. In a similar decision to the one made in a Spanish courtroom last year, the Italian Appeal Courts overturned an earlier conviction against two Turin students, stating that – the downloading of copyrighted material for non lucrative purposes, is not illegal.
Dutch politicians however are considering banning DRM outright and legalizing filesharing in exchange for an Internet tax levied to compensate the Music Industry.

Swedish company MYSQL AB, responsible for probably the most popular free data-base software used on todays websites – the open source MySQL – is to be introduced onto the stock market. A possible wake up call to the flagging European software industry say Netco.

Google finally lost their trademark wrangling with the German entrepreneur who owns GMail, a same day delivery service founded six years ago. So there will be no need to contact Erento.com, the German rent-a-protester website that opened for business recently. It seems Erento were busy anyway in Munich, where organizers of a march had hired protesters “…because its own adherents were too old to stand for hours waving banners”

In Britain, where time spent on the Net has overtaken time spent in front of the TV (for those with broadband), the publishing house Penguin are attempting to use a wiki to write a novel. A Million Penguins online since the 1st of February will be open to receive public entries for a further six weeks.