While most new stories covering Internet piracy talk in terms of the entertainment industries and major associations like the MPAA and RIAA, software piracy is often part of the discussion and debate as well. While entertainment companies collectively call for extreme legal measures like SOPA and ACTA, software companies also battle piracy outside the legal arena by using extreme anti-pirating measures built into their products (and their accompanying license agreements). Microsoft is probably best example of a company that goes to great lengths to limit pirating of its products.

With digital piracy being a major issue in many countries over the past several months, the Business Software Association added user surveys to its annual piracy study. The results show that, despite measures from software makers, existing anti-piracy laws, and pending legislation, more than half of all Internet users admit to pirating at least one piece of software.

Have you heard horror stories about Sally May Blankenship who lives in Randomtown, U.S. State and got sued by the RIAA for like $17 million because she downloaded a Spice Girls album off of Shazamm? Better yet, remember SOPA, PIPA and the absurd laws being championed by Congress because they claimed piracy was costing us “$58 Billion” in lost annual income? It gets stupider: the RIAA actually claims an iPod contains $8 Billion dollars worth of intellectual property.

Just how ridiculous is that number? Rob Reid – founder of Rapsody – just gave this hilariously insightful TED Talk that reveals just how preposterous the RIAA’s claim are about piracy hurting the U.S. economy. Prepare to giggle your pants off at the RIAA and MPAA.

If you need information from Wikipedia, you’d best get it very quickly; in just a few hours, at 9 P.M. PST (5:00 UTC for our European readers), a coalition of sites across the web — including Wikipedia’s English site, Boing Boing and Reddit — will go dark for a day, displaying this page instead of their usual home pages.

It isn’t easy being Android when you’re a fugly green humanoid robot and mad as hell. These protesters braved ridicule by dressing themselves as Google’s green mascot to bring attention to a thorny tech issue.

A new corporate accountability consumer group called SumOfUs wants Google to exit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. If the CoC sounds about as uncontroversial as Main Street and apple pie, think again.

The Android-clad activists want the Mountain View, California tech colossus to pull out of the Chamber, for a number of reasons, including because the CoC “aggressively supports” SOPA.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a nasty, totally broken little power grab of a bill that would effectively end the concept of ‘safe harbor’ that has allowed the internet to grow and thrive over the last ten years by allowing the government to add websites to a DNS blacklist for posting any kind of copyrighted material, fair use or not.

The bill’s so stupid and the outrage over it so deafening that it’s doubtless it will be never make it into law. Too many people are openly angry about it, including Mozilla, 4Chan, Reddit, Tumblr, Facebook, AOL, Wikimedia, the ACLU, Twitter and Yahoo!

You know who supports SOPA, though? Apple. In fact, they are writing a check to support it, albeit indirectly. It’s a check iTunes Match might have to cash.