Can you image working together with your husband or wife? Spending all hours of the working day working with him or her on your home based business and then spending the evenings together in the same house too? It might sound like a nightmare to some but it is a dream come true for Matt and Stacy Williams.

They believe that the flexibility they enjoy is essential to help some people to maximize their potential. This is why their home based business employs six part time staff who all work from home. “They all work out of their homes, and they seem to appreciate the flexibility we offer them.” said Stacy. A truly home based business – just not all in the same home!

Matt’s view on sharing their home based business is clear: “I mean, who can you trust as your business partner more than your spouse?”.  And while many couples would unfortunately not be able to answer that in the same way that Matt and Stacy can, it is a nice sentiment.

We don’t know how they managed it, but filesharing service Qtrax now has the full support of the big four record labels. Filesharing visionary QTrax first launched in January, claiming to have the support of the big four. The legal filesharing website actually had no such thing.

It’s taken until now for QTrax to finally achieve the support of Universal, EMI, Sony and Warner, but now that it has the support, the legal filesharing service is now starting to take shape as a serious contender.

QTrax also has support from a number of smaller labels. After launching so disastrously at the start of year, QTrax has defied its critics and come up with the filesharing good for legal music downloads.

Has anyone tried getting music downloads with QTrax? Is it a decent filesharing service? Let us know how you’ve been getting on with QTrax.

It was recently announced that Pownce had introduced filesharing to its list of features. This was interesting news. Even more interesting is a new web browser that promises to not only incorporate Pownce’s filesharing facilities, but also a whole bunch of other services, including everything from Twitter to Facebook.

Flock is, supposedly, a social web browser. Gimmick or the real deal? We’ve been trying it out. The filesharing ability of the browser is what we’re most curious about, but the other features are kind of cool, tool.

We’re unsure if this is anything revolutionary because you can get most of this stuff added onto your browser already with plugins. The filesharing thing is new to us, though.

It’s difficult to imagine life beyond Firefox, but Flock is a pretty impressive utility. We’ve been messing around with the Flock browser tonight and it’s definitely worth checking out. The filesharing stuff is neat and you can share stuff with your friends easily enough.

Is it all just a gimmick though?

Dutch-filesharing website TorrentSpy took an almighty beating this week. Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures and several other studios have been awarded more than $110 million by a US judge after pirated films were distributed through TorrentSpy.

TorrentSpy owner Valence Media Ltd has been found guilty of 3,699 copyright violations of movie and television downloads. Not surprisingly, the site has been shut down since last month.

Filesharing and other Internet piracy costs the movie industry about $7 billion a year in lost revenue — and now the movie biz wants that money back. Filesharing sites are now being targeted in the hope of eradicating filesharing.

TorrentSpy had argued that the website was nothing more than a search engine, but the argument didn’t hold up in court and this could have serious implications for future court cases against filesharing websites.

Cases like this will start occurring more frequently now.

One of the most interesting places to find news about filesharing in the US is on the websites of universities. With the onslaught of pre-litigation letters being sent to students for filesharing on campus, uni websites often contain responses to the actions of the RIAA.

The website of Middlebury College contains a story this week about how there have been 90 possible incidents of copyright infringement by filesharing at the college in the past three weeks alone.

The majority of cases involved students looking for free music downloads with filesharing programs like Limewire and Ares. The college has received filesharing infringement notices in the past, but never in as high a volume as it is receiving now.

This signals increased levels of technology and resources being utilized by the RIAA to track down people engaged in filesharing activities. It’s certainly bad news for students across the US.

Nokia’s move last year to offer music downloads to its customers was a brave move and one which won it plaudits within the free music community: not only were the unlimited music downloads free, they were also devoid of the fun-wrecking DRM. Hurrah for Nokia.

Hurrah indeed, as the mobile giant announced recently that its “Comes With Music” campaign will include tracks from Sony BMG’s catalogue. The music downloads that we once dreamed about may be here.

This comes at the same time as Sony’s agreement with Peter Gabriel’s We7 online music store (offering (almost) unlimited music downloads, again without DRM) which will allow its users to stream the entire Sony back catalogue.

While it is a step from Sony offering music downloads to the entire industry model changing for good, it is a step in the right direction for what is one of the major opponents to file-sharing and other forms of free music.

What others are saying:
Music downloads will surpass CD sales in four years
We7 gets support from Sony to offer free music downloads