MADRID (AP) – Many Spanish Internet users are furious over a government proposal that could lead to the shutting down of Web sites offering peer-to-peer file sharing of music and films without a court order. A meeting Thursday between their representatives and the culture minister failed to calm them down.

Minister Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde insists the legislation – to be brought into effect in 2010 if approved by Parliament – will not target individual Internet users who download material and in no case would anyone’s Internet connection be cut off.

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said the proposed legislation would not threaten freedom of expression.

Speaking after talks with 14 bloggers and Web site directors, Sinde said the bill is directed against Web sites that illegally offer the possibility of downloading copyright-protected material.

Zapatero said Spain, like many other nations around the world, had to find a means of safeguarding the intellectual property of the country’s creative sectors.

“If we don’t, we run the risk losing it, of being left without intellectual power and creativity,” Zapatero said at a news conference.

Under the bill, an intellectual property commission would investigate complaints about Web sites offering the possibility of P2P downloading, and if they are deemed to be making money from other people’s work they could be closed.

“It’s like a shop that sells goods stolen from the manufacturer’s warehouse,” said Sinde.

She stressed that if the commission found that in any way the Web site owners’ basic rights were likely to be affected by such a closure, a judge would have to handle the case.

But while industry groups see the anti-piracy proposal unveiled this week as insufficient, opponents of the bill accused the minister of playing Big Brother and trying to establish a “culture police” that would curtail civil liberties.

“The page with most links to copyright-protected content is Google. Are we going to close Google without a judicial order?” asked Victor Domingo, president of the Spanish Association of Internet Users.

Zapatero later said it was not his government’s intention to shut down any Web site.

Spanish National Television and Radio, whose Web site director Rosalia Lloret was at the meeting, said “the meeting concluded without any progress and showed the vast differences of opinion between both sides.”

Hundreds of entertainment industry employees, including several musicians, staged a noisy protest outside the ministry Tuesday to demand tougher legislation. Simultaneously, opponents posted a manifesto slamming the bill on the Internet, and it was picked up by tens of thousand of Web sites.

“The Internet must function freely and without political interference spurred by interested sectors trying to perpetuate an obsolete business model and to prevent human knowledge from continuing to be free,” the manifesto said.

Downloading copyrighted material is illegal in Spain but not a criminal offense, and courts consistently throw out cases on grounds that it is an infringement only if used for commercial profit.

This stance has infuriated music companies and also the U.S. government and that country’s powerful entertainment lobby.

Spain’s plans are more moderate those of some other European countries. Britain recently announced it planned to follow France’s lead to cut off Internet access to people who download illegally.

Spanish record label association Promusicae says the industry in Spain lost $1.6 billion in revenue in 2007 and 2008 because of piracy. Promusicae says the industry’s work force has declined by 70 percent over the last few years.

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RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. In October 2009, Americans conducted 14.3 billion core searches, with Google Sites accounting for 65.4 percent search market share, up from 64.9 percent in September. Microsoft Sites grabbed 9.9 percent market share, up 0.5 percentage points versus September.

October 2009 U.S. Core Search Rankings

Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in October with 65.4 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites (18.0 percent), and Microsoft Sites (9.9 percent). Ask Network captured 3.9 percent of the search market, followed by AOL LLC with 2.9 percent.

*Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

Americans conducted 14.3 billion searches in October, up 3 percent from September. Google Sites accounted for 9.4 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites (2.6 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.4 billion), Ask Network (552 million) and AOL LLC (412 million).

*Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

October 2009 U.S. Expanded Search Rankings

In the October analysis of the top properties where search activity is observed, Google Sites led the search market with 13.5 billion search queries, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.7 billion queries and Microsoft Sites with 1.5 billion searches. Bing experienced the largest growth of the top ten expanded search properties with an 8-percent increase in query volume to more than 1.2 billion searches.

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CHICAGO (Reuters) – A French court fined eBay Inc 1.7 million euros ($2.6 million) for violating a 2008 injunction that prevents French users of the online auction site from buying or selling LVMH perfumes and cosmetics on any eBay website.

EBay Inc said on Monday that the Commercial Court of Paris’ fine was too high and that the injunction blocking French eBay users from buying or selling LVMH cosmetics, including Christian Dior, Guerlain, Givenchy and Kenzo perfumes, hurts consumers.

“The injunction is an abuse of ’selective distribution,’” Alex von Schirmeister, general manager of eBay in France, said in a statement. “It effectively enforces restrictive distribution contracts, which is anti-competitive.”

“We believe that the higher courts will overturn this ruling,” he added.

EBay complied with the injunction and the fine is out of step with the company’s legal victories in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium and the United States, von Schirmeister said.

In June 2008, the Paris court ruled eBay should pay more than 35 million euros in damages over the sale of counterfeit LVMH items on its sites and ordered an injunction to block sales of genuine perfumes from the brands Christian Dior, Kenzo, Givenchy and Guerlain. EBay has appealed the rulings.

(1 euro = $1.50)

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(News.softpedia.com) In a field as new and as fast moving as social networking it’s hard to have actual real data and not just speculation and hype. Twitter may be growing exponentially and it looks like everyone is getting on the wagon these days but according to new research conducted by the Harvard Business Review most users don’t really use the service, with just 10 percent of them posting 90 percent of all tweets.

The study took place in May 2009 and used about 300,000 random Twitter users for data. The findings were somewhat surprising as it turns out that 25 percent of Twitter users don’t tweet at all, with 50 percent tweeting less than once every 74 days. However, 10 percent are the most prolific, accounting for 90 percent of the tweets.

This is very different from other social networks, where the top 10 percent make only 30 percent of the content. The researchers point instead to Wikipedia as comparison, noting that 15 percent of editors account for 90 percent of the edits. This would seem to indicate what was already somewhat apparent, that Twitter is more about broadcasting a message than it is about chatting with your friends.

Another interesting fact was the gender distribution and the way they interacted. According to the study men make up for 45 percent of Twitter’s users while women account for 55 percent. But unlike other social networks men have 15 percent more followers than women and also tend to follow another man rather than a woman. In fact, 65 percent of the users a man follows are other men while only 35 percent are women.

This is in stark contrast with most social networks where women follow other women they already know while men follow women they either know or don’t. The difference can’t be accounted for by men creating more content on Twitter as both genders tweet at the same rate.

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