It looks like Pirate Bay’s legal drama has finally come to a close in Sweden, where the Supreme Court today turned down the site’s final appeal. At the center of the case are the file-sharing site’s founders — Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström — who have been battling Swedish prosecutors for quite a few years now.

After being convicted of facilitating copyright infringement, the trio was initially sentenced to prison. They appealed the ruling in 2010 and, though they failed to overturn it, managed to see their 12-month sentences reduced by between two and eight months. Today, though, their final attempts were shot down, with the Court’s dismissal.

The fines and prison terms remain the same: ten months for Neij, eight months for Sunde and four for Lundström. There’s also a fourth co-founder involved, Gottfrid Svartholm, who has been absent from several hearings. Under today’s ruling, his original 12-month sentence will stand, and the four men will have to pay a total of $6.8 million in damages.

Because the case has dragged on for at least five years, however, there’s a chance that the sentences could be reduced by 12 months (bringing them down to zero), as is common in the Swedish legal system. The decision on this matter, however, remains with the court. TorrentFreak reports that at least one defendant intends to appeal to the European Court of Justice, though the results wouldn’t have any effect on Sweden’s decision.

SOURCE via TorrentFreak

The rumor, speculation and awkward Winklevii jokes can end (at least for now) as Facebook has officially filed for its public offering. Underwritten by Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs amongst others, the internet’s most popular site seeks to trade under the stock symbol “FB” when it goes public later this year.

The company is seeking to raise $5 billion, according to this early filing, amounting to a lofty (and still tentative) valuation north of $50 billion. If that turns out to be accurate, though, Zuck will be one (especially) rich man: with a nearly thirty percent share in the company, his net worth would balloon to almost $30 billion.

The process of going public also provides a rare glimpse into internal stats previously kept private, with documents revealing the service has 845 million active users each month — nearly half of which log in and actuate 2.7 billion likes and comments each day. The filing also sheds light on the company’s balance sheet, with revenues of $777 million, $1.97 billion and $3.71 billion in 2009, 2010 and 2011, respectively. All told, it logged profits of $229 million and $606 million in those years — earnings that were bested by the $1 billion it netted in 2011.

The majority of its revenue comes from advertising, yet a sizable chunk (12 percent) of last year’s figure comes courtesy of Zynga. All in all, that’s enabled the company to stash away nearly $4 billion in cash — a sizable nest egg for a company only eight years old.

As for Mark, his 2011 salary of $500,000 will be cut to $1 as of January 2013, but he’ll be more than comfortable, thanks to that 28.4 percent stake in the company.

SOURCE via Wall Street Journal

IPO filings aren’t just a great way to raise money, they’re also a perfect place for young CEOs and idealistic internet companies to grandstand and proclaim their altruistic motives. Whether or not you buy what they’re shoveling selling is something different. Google had “do no evil,” now Facebook has its own mission statement, though, it’s admittedly quite scatter brained. Buried deep in the IPO filing is a letter from Mark Zuckerberg to investors in which he lays out Facebook’s mission and role in improving the world. Zuck doesn’t think his social network is about poking cute girls and tilling virtual fields, he “hope[s] to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.” And, lest you think every move is some calculated ploy to free you from the burden of cash or personal information, the billionaire CEO explains, “we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.” For the complete letter head on after the break. Trust us, whether you trust and like Zuckerberg or not, it’s an interesting read. Read more…

Megaupload’s digital doors may have been closed due to the presence of pirated materials, but there’s still the matter of all that legal content residing on its servers. Naturally, folks want their files back, but now that the government’s gotten what it needs, the hosting companies no longer need to keep the data around because Megaupload’s no longer paying them to do so. Carpathia Hosting and Cogent Communications, however, have decided to preserve the data for another two weeks while a deal is brokered with the DOJ for its release. In the meantime, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has teamed up with Carpathia to create a website that puts folks in touch with EFF attorneys so users can try to retrieve their data. No word as to what legal wrangling the EFF can do to make it happen, but those affected can get the wheels of justice started at the source below.

SOURCE via MegaRetrieval.com

Facebook could file papers for its IPO, or initial public offering of company stock, as early as next Wednesday. This according to the Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.

Facebook itself has not commented, nor have Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs, which have been vying to handle the offering. The Journal said Morgan Stanley was in the lead, and cautioned that the filing for the IPO may not come for a few weeks.

Jonathan Thaw of Facebook sent an email to ABC News: “Our position on this is that we don’t participate in IPO-related speculation.”

Reports before today said Facebook would likely be valued at $75-100 billion.

“If it comes to pass, this will be the largest tech IPO in history, yielding around $10 billion for the social network,” wrote Chris Taylor of Mashable. “Google’s 2005 IPO, as big a deal as it was, didn’t even reach the $2 billion mark.”

To put it blandly, an IPO would not be a surprise. It has been talked about for months. There is a secondary market for Facebook shares among the investors who have backed the company up to now, and it has been widely reported that trading in privately-held shares has been halted.

You know the story by now: Facebook began in 2004 with Mark Zuckerberg, then a student at Harvard, who joined with a couple of friends (some of them now ex-friends) to find a way for schoolmates to connect online. The idea caught on. Facebook now claims more than 800 million active users worldwide.

SOURCE via ABC News

Things went icky when the Federal Bureau of Investigation took down one of the largest file sharing sites on the internet – MegaUpload – just before the Chinese New Year break. The Feds also shut down 18 other sites in the Mega network, and put the site’s founder Kim Dot Com behind bars.

But up till today, the true nature of the massive swoop is still vague to laymen like you and I. While it would be easy to blame everything solely on the recent heat around SOPA, it seems that the FBI’s operations went deeper than the proposed (and subsequently overturned) legislation had us believing.

According to the folk over at TorrentFreak who took a closer look at the incidents surrounding the recent swoop and the 72-page indictment which followed, it seems that the authorities had already planned this operation months ago.

Story continues after the jump. Read more…

Well that didn’t take long. Pirate Parties International is assembling a list of users who had lost data in MU’s shutdown last week as it builds a case for an upcoming lawsuit against the Feds.

The gist of the lawsuit is that users who had been using the file-storage service of legitimate reasons were unfairly denied access to their personal files due to the FBI’s actions. “The widespread damage caused by the sudden closure of Megaupload is unjustified and completely disproportionate to the aim intended,” said Pirates of Catalonia in a press statement.

PPI is currently setting up a complaint submission system and is also looking into whether the FBI’s actions potentially violated US law (though you’d figure the FBI would have checked on that first).

While Facebook’s Open Graph might have exposed you as a Belieber way back in September, you couldn’t chat and stream that questionable musical taste to your friends, Turntable.fm style, until now. Listening to tunes on music services that integrate with Facebook’s API — like Spotify and presumably Rdio, amongst others — populates the ticker adjacent to the news feed and the chat overlay with clickable “Listen with” buttons (as seen above). Upon clicking those, you’re slung into a group chat window whereupon you can listen and discuss those beats with your friends. Don’t fret if you can’t see it just yet, as it’ll roll out in the following weeks, but while you wait a link explaining all awaits at the source.

SOURCE via Facebook

On Thursday, ICANN opened up the doors for companies to step up and apply for a domain that replaces the typical .com, .org, .info, .gov or other extension with their actual company name. ICANN expects to see up to 2000 applications within the small three-month window it’s currently permitting, and will likely not take additional .yournamehere domain applications for years to come.

The first wave of applications will probably come from big-name brand owners who are currently struggling to keep their names out of the .xxx domain. A brand-based domain like .kraft, .burgerking, and .macys would boost brand awareness online for the owners. Yet said companies may be forced to reserve their domain — even if there are no plans to use it — just to keep them out of the hands of cyber-squatters or other questionable parties.

According to Reuters, an application for the new domain isn’t cheap, costing $185,000 per entry. The estimated start-up costs will be around $500,000 and annual costs will be around $100,000. For the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Google, that’s pocket change. Other companies down the totem pole of popularity might not have the additional funds to support a specialized domain, thus could lose their “space” to someone less “qualified.”

In addition to brand holders, ICANN expects to see applications from well-known cities or regions like .london or .newyork or .lasvegas. There may even be community identifies like .gay, .eco and perhaps even .gamer. There may also be applications received from companies aiming to build a business based on new domains.

Stuart Durham, the European sales director for Melbourne IT, claims that the consultancy firm is currently preparing 100 applications for its customers who are looking at the domain opportunity as a second weapon. “Banks are looking at it for online authentication, to prevent fraud and build trust, while consumer goods makers believe they can use this to become more effective in their online marketing and consumer engagement,” he told Reuters.

So far only a handful of companies have made their application known including Canon, Deloitte and Hitachi. Others are keeping quiet in fear of unwanted competition. ICANN said it will disclose the full list when the application window closes in April. To qualify, applicants must demonstrate that they have relevant intellectual property rights, and detail how they will operate the domain.

To learn more about the new domain, read the full story from Reuters here.

On Friday, News Corporation chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch admitted on Twitter that he and his company killed MySpace. In fact, his very words were that “we screwed up in every possible way.” He added that News Corp walked away from the destruction having learned “lots of valuable expensive lessons.”

Expensive is a pretty accurate description. News Corp purchased MySpace back in 2005 for $580 million as it was growing in popularity — that time period before the Internet halted and gave birth to Facebook, the current center of the social world. Having lost a good chunk of business to Zuckerberg and Co., Murdoch sold MySpace for $35 million last year, taking a 94-percent loss.

Quite an expensive lesson.

Murdoch reportedly joined Twitter at the start of the year, but this is the first time he’s tweeted about MySpace and the difficult six years before its sale. His current topics outside the MySpace blunder have centered on the show in Las Vegas.

“Big three, Apple, Google and Amazon, and maybe Facebook dominant now and growing,” he said in one tweet, referring to the show. “Plenty of others good, but not in same league.” Eventually he reports that it seemed like more innovation than ever, “some great, all disruptive.”