Institute for Internet Policy & Law @ Beijing Normal University

A Hong Kong man convicted of sharing pirated movies lost his final appeal on Friday in the territory’s highest court and will now have to finish serving a three-month prison sentence.

The court of final appeal held, “He plainly succeeded in distributing copies of the films in question,” the court said in its judgment. “The appeal must accordingly be dismissed.”

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/05/18/tech-bittorrent-hongkong.html#skip300x250

In May, Symantec antivirus program wrongly identified two system files in Windows XP Chinese version as Trojan and paralyzed the users’ system by removing these files. Some Chinese users have filed complaints against Norton and sought for compensation.

However, network security experts in China have already suspected that Symantec got it right that these two files are indeed intentionally-installed backdoor by Microsoft to spoof the Chinese computer system.

http://www.fengnews.com/article/2007/0524/news_5489.html

Thailand government issued compulsory licenses against the patents for HIV drugs, which make its country into the Special 301 priority watch list of the USTR.

http://news.findlaw.com/ap/o/51/06-07-2007/fe89006df9516353.html

Italian authority did the same thing to reduce the costs of medicines for the reason of antitrust. If high prices of patent products could be deemed as a cause of unacceptable monopoly, developing countries would enjoy much more flexibility in coping with technical innovation and public health crisis.

http://www.twnside.org.sg/title2/health.info/twninfohealth086.htm

The users of MSN v.8.1 discover that they can actually access the information of their friends’ friends. By clicking the icon of a contact, a user may access the circle of the friends of that contact. MSN denied this and insisted the loophole can be fixed.

http://tech.sina.com.cn/i/2007-06-07/04221549563.shtml

With only 10% of the Internet penetration in the whole population, China is now developing the broadband network to bridge the digital divide. One interesting characteristic of the Chinese broadband traffic is that peer-to-peer transmission occupies almost a half. The Chinese peer-to-peer traffic has become several times of American broadband traffic. These features means, on one hand, China has a great potential for Web 2.0 services; on the other, Internet piracy has become extremely serious.

http://tech.sina.com.cn/t/2007-06-06/00401547188.shtml

The MII officials have announced that P2P transmission will not be blocked but should be utilized reasonably.

http://tech.sina.com.cn/t/2007-06-07/04131549559.shtml