The court finding that iiNet’s role in giving access to copyright infringers to BitTorrent does not mean that it is authorising the infringement, and is protected by a section of the Copyright Act – known as the “safe harbour” section.

“The mere provision of access to the internet is not an authorisation of infringement,” Justice Cowdroy, who served as the judge in the trial, said in his judgement.

“”iiNet is not responsible if an iiNet user uses that system to bring about copyright infringement.”

“The law recognises no positive obligation on any person to protect the copyright of another,” he added.

Justice Cowdroy also said that BitTorrent could be used for legal purposes – like Revision3 and BitTorrent itself.

Unlike the Kazza trial, iiNet was not promoting and encouraging infringement – unlike Kazza with its P2P network. Kazza was forced to shut its operations within Australia or face criminal proceedings.

He also said that the proposition of a notification system to notify users of copyright breaches by suspending or terminating their internet service was not reasonable. If that judgement was in favour of AFACT, that would let AFACT be the judge and would force ISPs to suspend or terminate service as they would fear a lawsuit against AFACT.

Justice Cowdroy however said that the Telecommunications Act would not have prevented iiNet from acting on the notices of infringement given to them by AFACT, but this wasn’t relevant to the case.

The application was dismissed and AFACT has been ordered to pay the legal costs.

Mininova was planning to install a filter under compliance with a  ruling by the Court of Utrecht that decided in favour with BRIEN, the industry group representing the recording and movie industries in the Netherlands before scrapping the idea as it found that it was impossible to filter 100% of all copyrighted material, and remove all material and allowing those on its Content Distribution Network to be listed.

“We would like to thank you for your support. Especially everyone that contributed to Mininova receives a big “thank you!” for the effort!” the administrators wrote in a blog posting.

The news also shuts down the largest tracker after The Pirate Bay, which also announced that it will switch off its own tracker in favour of DHT.

As well as the Skype functionality, Fring will also allow you to chat (and call) your friends over on MSN, Google Talk, AIM, Yahoo, Twitter, ICQ and its own service. While there are many VoIP applications out there in the App Store, this one shows much promise, since it uses different services, including its own.

VoIP applications are allowed on the iPhone, but they cannot be used on the 3G network – since it uses too much data to travel the call. It supports both iPod Touch and iPhone, but we will have a review as soon as I find a pair of iPod ready headphones with a microphone.