Spanish judge says P2P is the same as sharing a book + Google introduces new search indexing system - Caffeine

In 2005 Spanish authorities, rights collection society EGEDA and Columbia Tristar set out to shutdown a popular file-sharing forum named CVCDGO.com. The site did not host any illegal files it only pointed to the location of them in P2P networks.

The site, run by four people, was raided by the Spanish Intellectual Property Crime Squad, the four site operates were arrested and have been fighting a legal battle since.

After nearly 5 years of fighting the case in court the Provincial Court of Madrid has closed the case and found that no offenses have been committed. TorrentFreak says the court found that since the site didn't host any copyrighted files and no profit was generated directly from any infringements, the presence of advertising on the site did not constitute a crime.

Judges Ocariz, Gutierrez and Campillo said in their ruling, "..since ancient times there has been the loan or sale of books, movies, music and more. The difference now is mainly on the medium used – previously it was paper or analog media and now everything is in a digital format which allows a much faster exchange of a higher quality and also with global reach through the Internet."

The lawyer defending CVCDGO said, "The judges have taken a stand for freedom on the Internet." The judges decision in this case is final and cannot be appealed.

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Google introduces new search indexing system - Caffeine



Google announced the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine.

Google claims that Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than their last index. "It's the largest collection of web content we've offered. Whether it's a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before", said Carrie Grimes, Software Engineer at Google.

Google has built a new search indexing system as web content is growing in size and is more diverse in the form of video, images, news and real time updates. To keep up, Google has built Caffeine. The old index had several layers that updated at different rates to others. To refresh a layer of the old index, Google would analyze the entire web which meant there was a significant delay between when Google found a page and when it was available on its search pages for end users.

With Caffeine, Google analzyes small portions of the web and updates the index on a continuous basis. Every second, Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. Google claims you'd need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information.

Users who search on Google.com should see improvements in the months to come.