Plagiarism Today points us in the bold new direction the entertainment industry will be heading in the future. More specifically, a bold new direction the entertainment industry's lawyers will be headed.

[A]t a charity luncheon for the Entertainment Law Initiative, which was raising money for the Grammy Foundation, there was a thunderous applause from the audience, mostly comprised of attorneys, over a paper regarding Android applications the promote piracy wondering why no lawsuits had been filed against Google for secondary liability. Though most of the other papers admitted only received scattered applause, that one seemed to whip the crowd into a frenzy, indicating the possibility that industry lawyers are considering such a tactic in the near future.

[T]he room went nuts during videotaped remarks by Ryanne E. Perio, a student at Columbia Law School, who wrote about Android smartphone apps that facilitate piracy.

During remarks describing her paper, Perio wondered aloud why offering those apps hadn't generated lawsuits against Android parent Google, for "secondary copyright infringement" - i.e. facilitating piracy.

It may not change the world today, but it could lead to some pretty cool stuff.

Per Electronista, electronics maker SanDisk set a record today after the company claimed to have the world’s smallest 128-gigabit (16GB) memory chip. The 19 nanometer, three-bit-per-cell storage has a footprint of about 170mm square (0.26in square), or less than that of a penny. It’s also relatively quick for its capacity and size at 144Mbps (18MB) per second.

Chips built on the newer storage were considered ideal for smartphones, tablets, and solid-state drives for computers. Many such chips can be stacked on top of each other or side-by-side and give more reasonable capacities without having a physically larger device than they do now.

SanDisk has just recently started making 128Gb flash in large quantities on a basic level, although it has yet to say how quickly it expects the shrunken-down design to reach the market. Other companies have 128Gb chips in development, but these have been larger and usually haven’t reached into mainstream devices.

Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.

The disk is intended both for thin regular notebooks as well as for ultrabooks. Although not fast enough by itself to match a solid-state drive, including an SSD as a cache theoretically offers a best-of-both-worlds design where the responsiveness of an SSD and the lower prices of a rotating hard drive are combined. It consumes more power, but at 1.8W peak and 0.8W idle is relatively efficient.

Hitachi has had test versions of its newer Z7K500 drives since January and is already expecting mass production for March, with 250GB and 320GB editions already available. It hasn’t named the customers that will be using it, although it conspicuously mentioned that “all major PC OEMs” had already qualified the pre-500GB drives and implied that Apple, Dell, HP, and others were either using or planning to use the new Travelstars.

Final pricing details for the Z7K500 drives also have yet to be announced.

Stay tuned for additional information as it becomes available.

Late Wednesday, the Camino Project released version 2.1.1 of Camino, its free, open source web browser.

The new version, an 18.5 megabyte download, adds the following fixes and changes:

- Upgraded to version 1.9.2.27 of the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine, which includes several critical security and stability fixes.

- Blocked versions of Adobe Flash Player 10 older than 10.3.183.15 and Flash Player 11 older than 11.1.102.62 on Intel Macs due to severe security issues.

- Tweaked the autocomplete algorithm to reduce the weight of visit count.
Added a hidden preference to allow turning off autocomplete’s use of page titles in matches.

- The location sheet once again shows an autocomplete window.

- It is now possible to clear the “Recently Closed Pages” menu with the “Clear History…” menu item even when history is disabled.

- Improved the appearance of the bookmark toolbar in background windows on Mac OS X 10.7.

- On Mac OS X 10.7, Camino now appears in the “Productivity” category when sorting Finder windows by category.

- Camino now correctly checks for the presence of a Java plug-in on Mac OS X 10.7.

- The “open location” AppleScript command now supports optional “referrer” and “loading in background” parameters.

- Camino will now display an error message when the “open location” command’s direct parameter is empty or missing.

- A new “reload” command allows AppleScripts to reload browser windows and tabs.

- The status of Camino’s offline mode is now available to AppleScript, and scripts can toggle offline mode on and off using the application object’s “online” property.

- The AppleScript “visit count” bookmark property once again works correctly.

- Pressing Escape will now cancel Tab Overview.

- “Fill Form” no longer fills disabled hidden form controls.

- The “Block Flash animations” checkbox is no longer enabled if Flash is not installed.

- Camino now correctly resolves Bonjour services that do not include an initial forward slash in their “path” information.

Camino 2.1.1 requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later to run.

If you’ve tried the new version of Camino and have any kind of feedback about it, let us know.

Netzpolitik.org points us to leaked internal minutes of a meeting of the European Commission the day before the massive Europe-wide demonstrations against ACTA. They reveal the EU's top politicians taken aback by the scale of the planned demonstrations, but dismissing them with almost the same words as the IFPI (German original):

ultimately it will be hard to convince civil society organizations [about the benefits of ACTA]. Represented among them are interests that do not reflect the wider community. Specific activities were observed that do not always live up to the supposedly democratic intentions.

And the Commissioners are just shocked that the opponents of ACTA, who have been denied any meaningful transparency about what was being agreed to in their name during those now-concluded negotiations, are desperately trying to make their voices heard by the only institutions left that can listen: the EU nations that haven't signed ACTA, and the European Parliament that must still ratify it.

This suggests that the European Commission is completely out of touch with the people it supposedly serves, and still doesn't understand the growing anger that its arrogant approach and condescending tone continues to generate on the streets.

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In the North Shore District Court this morning, Justice Nevin Dawson said that after a long time where officials could investigate the Dotcom's potential access to funds - none of significance had been found. Justice Dawson said it was "highly unlikely" that he had other financial resources available to him that had not already been seized.

Prosecution acting for the United States Government had said that because Dotcom was "very wealthy" it was probably he had more bank accounts.

However, Justice Dawson said that put Dotcom in the position of having to "prove a negative" and that assertion was not enough to imply his flight risk.

Four new bank accounts were discovered in the Philippines, but they were empty, he said.

"The suspicion that Mr. Dotcom is very wealthy is not evidence of further assets and cannot be used against him."