Over at Techdirt, Mike Masnick has some big news for the ongoing Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) debate.

FORBES: Germany Won't Sign ACTA, At Least Not Yet

Based on response to the linked story on TechDirt, Google has resolved the case, but not before revealing a blind spot in its automation.

FORBES: Google AdSense Bots Gone Wild: Author In Violation For Torrenting His Own Book!

Mike Masnick (who, full disclosure, has paid me to contribute to his Techdirt blog in the past) has a great new study out today about the growth of the entertainment industry.

FORBES: Why We Shouldn't Worry About The (Alleged) Decline Of The Music Industry

But what Streisand and others fail to realize, says Michael Masnick, the tech consultant and writer who named the Streisand effect in his blog, Techdirt, is that the rules of privacy and information control have changed.

FORBES: Magazine Article

The Techdirt blog has described the law as being "vague" and noted that the charge had previously been unsuccessfully levelled against the owners of Oink and tv-links.co.uk - sites which had also offered indexes of links to pirated material.

BBC: Surfthechannel owner sentenced after piracy conviction

We'll leave that to the federal courts to decide (we've heard they're good at that sort of thing), but Mike Masnick over at TechDirt nailed this one: basically Apple is getting sued because the tools they've been using to protect other people's intellectual property (namely that of the record industry) supposedly violate some other person's intellectual property.

ENGADGET: Apple's