Los Angeles - TorrentSpy, the BitTorrent tracker that was ordered by a federal judge this week to pay the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) $111 million in copyright infringement damages, has filed for bankruptcy protection in England and will not pay up, the company's attorney, Ira Rothken, told Wired.com.

Philadelphia - Comcast (NASD: CMCSA), the nation's largest cable TV operator and provider of high-speed Internet to 14.1 million subscribers, is considering placing a 250GB monthly cap on the amount of bandwidth that subscribers may use for downloading content, a source from the company tells BroadbandReports.com. For those who exceed the limit, Comcast would reportedly charge $15 for each 10GB they use over their allotment; 250GB is roughly equivalent to 6,000 songs, or 250 movies.

Los Angeles - TorrentSpy, a BitTorrent tracker site that lost a copyright infringement suit filed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) last year, has been ordered by a federal judge to pay a massive $110 million in damages. "This substantial money judgment sends a strong message about the illegality of these sites," said Dan Glickman, chairman and CEO of the MPAA. "The demise of TorrentSpy is a clear victory for the studios and demonstrates that such pirate sites will not be allowed to continue to operate without facing relentless litigation by copyright holders."

San Jose, Calif. - Qtrax, the developer of a free, ad-supported music download service, has reached a deal to license Universal Music Group's catalog, the company's first major label signing.

Mountain View, Calif. - Kontiki, the developer of a managed peer delivery platform for video and digital content, said on Tuesday that it has completed its split from parent VeriSign.

Los Angeles - A federal judge has rejected a pillar of the recording industry's argument in the copyright infringement lawsuits it has filed against file-swappers, ruling that simply "making available" songs in a shared folder on their computers does not equate to infringement. In Atlantic v. Howell, Judge Neil V. Wake has dismissed the label's motion for summary judgment against Pamela and Jeffrey Howell, saying in his ruling that "merely making an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work available to the public does not violate a copyright holder's exclusive right of distribution."

Dublin - Ireland's largest Internet service provider, Eircom, has been sued by the major record labels under the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) on charges of aiding copyright infringement, RTE Business reported.

Los Angeles - The Pirate Bay, the notorious Sweden-based BitTorrent tracker site, has announced that it now serves more than 12 million peers, TorrentFreak reports. Furthermore, the site said that the ratio of "seeders," or those who allow uploads from their computers, to "leechers," who only download and do not share their bandwidth, is now 50/50. The ratio climbed from 20% seeders in 2004, to 35% in 2006 and 40% in 2007.

Los Angeles - Notorious Sweden-based file-sharing hub The Pirate Bay has launched an uncensored blogging service, after one of the service's founders saw a friend's blog removed from Wordpress for linking to copyrighted material, TorrentFreak reports. The Baywords service uses Wordpress as its blogging engine. "Many blogs are being shut down for uncomfortable thoughts and ideas," reads a note on Baywords.com. "We will not do that. Our goal is to protect freedom of speech and your thoughts. As long as you don't break any Swedish laws in your blog, we will defend it."

Philadelphia - Comcast (NASD: CMCSA), the nation's largest cable TV company and a provider of high-speed Internet to 13.2 million subscribers, on Tuesday announced that it will lead an industry-wide effort to create a "P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities," which would "clarify what choices and controls consumers should have when using P2P applications as well as what processes and practices ISPs should use to manage P2P applications running on their networks." The company said it partnered with Pando Networks, a provider of peer-to-peer based content delivery network services, on the initiative, and will work with the company to help migrate to a protocol-agnostic network management technique by the end of the year.

Minneapolis - While a majority of U.S. teens still use illicit file-sharing services to download music, their numbers decreased slightly over the past year, with 61% reporting they download music illegally, compare with 64% a year ago, according to a recent survey from Piper Jaffray.

Brussels - Members of the European Parliament voted 314 to 297 this week to approve a measure that asks member nations not to enact laws whose penalties would interrupt users' Internet access, such as France's recent policy that compels ISPs to disconnect the accounts of repeat file-swappers. The wording calls for the European Commission and member states to "avoid adopting measures conflicting with civil liberties and human rights and with the principles of proportionality, effectiveness and dissuasiveness, such as the interruption of Internet access."

New York - A federal judge in New York has ruled that a user's "making available" of songs or other copyrighted files using file-sharing software does not in and of itself construe infringement, in what could prove to be a setback in the record industry's legal campaign against such activities, CNET News.com reported.

Stockholm, Sweden - The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) yesterday filed a $2.5 million copyright infringement lawsuit in Sweden against The Pirate Bay, the notorious file-sharing tracker site. Pirate Bay co-founder Gorrfrid Warg responded to the lawsuit in Sweden's The Local thusly: "the record companies can go screw themselves."

Last week, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were able to listen to a play back of what is believed to be the earliest mechanical sound recording. Made in 1860 by the French typesetter Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, the "phonautogram" features the voice of a woman, believed to be Scott's daughter, singing a line from the French folk song, "Au Clair de la Lune." It was made with a device invented by Scott that used a stylus to etch patterns onto paper coated with smoke from an oil lamp.

New York - Lime Wire, a provider of peer-to-peer file-sharing software, this week announced an agreement with independent music aggregator and distributor BFM Digital, to sell the company's tracks in its DRM-free LimeWire Store. The deal adds 50,000 tracks from BFM's catalog to the LimeWire Store, which now offers nearly 1 million songs.

Los Angeles - TorrentSpy, a site that indexed files available for download from the BitTorrent file-sharing network, and was the target of a lawsuit from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), has permanently closed down the site for all visitors worldwide, TorrentFreak reported.