The Megaupload troubles make for interesting discussion because there is much to be said on both sides. Whether the illegal aspects of the network “outweigh” the legal aspects is a question that will be discussed for months and perhaps years.
But one thing can’t be disputed: after the two-year investigation by the FBI, the site’s takedown was swift and perhaps over-thorough. Thousands and thousands of users who had legitimate and often critical files hosted on the site have been left behind, their legal files hosted on a simple file-hosting service. A coalition of Pirate Party organizations, led by Pirates of Catalonia, are planning to sue the FBI over what they say are “huge personal, economic and image damages to a vast number of people.” → Read More
With the shift from print books to digital books come a few nasty side effects. Sure, it’s much easier much easier to acquire and read books when you don’t even have to get out of your chair, but those digital copies can be cracked and disseminated for free with only a little more effort.
As ebook sales expand, so does ebook piracy, so I have to wonder if Apple’s concerted efforts in creating a new kind of iBook experience will open them up to unwanted attention from digital pirates. → Read More
If you had any misconceptions about the noble pirates fighting the nasty, dirty MPAA, put those to rest now. Here’s the inside of a pirate’s lair in Budapest where we find a 70TB disk array (the article claims it held “5000 movies, 4000 songs, 6000 games and 500 pieces of software,” which is a ridiculously low number), blow, and what appears to be a shotgun.
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As ridiculous as the copyright battles are here in the states, it’s a bit surreal when you see them exceeded elsewhere by an order of magnitude or two. According to German internet industry association ECO, ISPs in that country are giving up their subscribers to rightsholders at the mind-boggling rate of around 300,000 per month. To put that in perspective, you remember that big kerfluffle about The Hurt Locker pirates? Total people served: just under 25,000. → Read More
Despite the fact the number of PCs in China and the U.S. are pretty similar, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer claimed on Wednesday that the company sees 95 percent less revenue coming from China than the States. Why, you ask? Piracy, of course. Other tech companies have had the same problem in China, which could indicate that the Chinese government hasn’t done enough to stop the acquisition of costly products for free. → Read More
The Advocate General of the European Union Court of Justice, Cruz Villalón, says that national courts there should not have the ability to tell Internet Service Providers to filter their connections in order to prevent copyright infringement because such a move would conflict with the Charter of Fundamental Rights. That was a mouthful, yes. It should be noted that the Advocate General’s opinion isn’t binding in the least, so this shouldn’t be read as EUROPE BANS INTERNET FILTERING. Hardly. It’s more for the Court of Justice to consider as it goes forward than any sort of official, or even unofficial, ban. → Read More
This is pretty great. You know Garry’s Mod, right? It’s basically a sandbox “game” built on the Source engine. It’s only $10, but apparently there are people out there who feel the need to pirate it. The mind boggles. Anyhow, the developer of the mod, Garry Newman, created an error message that would only manifest itself in pirated copies of the game. Go ahead and search Google for the “unable to shade polygon normals.” The people complaining are using pirated copies of the game. For shame. → Read More
You may have heard that the Dutch Government now plans to outlaw music and movie (and whatever else) downloading. That seems pretty prosaic: since when was it legal to infringe on someone’s copyright? Isn’t that the whole point of copyright? No matter, for in the lead up to the Dutch announcement’s announcement a survey was taken. “What about the survey?” you may ask. Well, said survey reveals that a good number of artists believe that they’re not hurt financially by piracy, and that it’s about time to re-think the artist-fan relationship with respect to DRM. → Read More
The next big PC game will be The Witcher 2, which should be released on May 12 (and if you’re cool like me you will have already pre-ordered). Unlike a certain other big RPG this year, it actually looks like it was developed within the past few years. If you order it from Good Old Games (the company behind GoG, CD Projekt, also developed the game) it will be completely DRM-free. That is to say there will be no DRM whatsoever. No having to worry about limited installations, no having to worry about your Wi-Fi connection dropping and thus cutting you off from the all-powerful authentication servers, none of that nonsense. What a concept—treating your customers like customers and not potential evildoers! → Read More
The Internet is a cruel, mysterious mistress. What we have here is the story of a Canadian band called One Soul Thrust, a phony baloney (I refused to believe “bologna” is the proper spelling here; that’s not even how you’d pronounce the town name in Italian…) BitTorrent site, a misguided manager, and a lobbying group that apparently does little to no research. The story goes that this band’s manager wanted to see if any pirated copies of its debut album were available via BitTorrent. His sleuthing led him to LimeTorrents, a site we all know (or at least should know by now) that deals in trickery. → Read More
Well, maybe not “save” WrestleMania, but help ensure it does better than last year’s edition, WrestleMania 26, which, at well under one million pay-per-view buys worldwide, was considered a bit of a disappointment. What’s different this year is WWE’s use of social media—that is to say they’re actually using it this time around. But even if this year’s edition, WrestleMania 27, which airs from Atlanta tomorrow on pay-per-view, does better than last year’s, how much of that can be attributed to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and how much of that can be attributed to the return of The Rock? Serious business, etc. → Read More
There’s a plan in the UK that would, if enabled, lead to ISPs blocking access to specific Web sites in order to cut down on piracy. It takes all of two seconds to understand why this is a silly idea, and thankfully a prominent consumer rights group there has come out against it. → Read More
The UK’s Digital Economy Act, designed to, among other things, stomp out Internet piracy once and for all, has run up against the High Court. Two of the country’s ISPs, BT and TalkTalk, will argue on Wednesday that the law is basically an unenforceable load of nonsense, and that it should be torn up and completely forgotten about. We’ll see. → Read More
“[P]iracy is better conceived as a failure of affordable access to media in legal markets.” So says the just-released Media Piracy in Emerging Economies study, which looked at the hows and whys of piracy in countries like Brazil, India, Mexico, and Russia. Shocking, right? → Read More
Ubisoft consistently brings the funny. The publisher will release the PC version Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, also known as Assassin’s Creed II 2, next week. The “deluxe” edition edition of the game contains an mp3 version of the soundtrack. So far, so good. Ubisoft has made the “deluxe” items available to download for people who’ve pre-ordered the game, that is, if you’ve pre-ordered this edition you can download the mp3 soundtrack right now. Upon inspecting the metadata of those mp3 files it was discovered that they’ve been re-encoded from a readily available pirated FLAC version of the game’s soundtrack, available at your friendly neighborhood BitTorrent site. Hilarious. → Read More
You are the sword and shield of the party! In this case, the party is a California-based private investigator looking to bank a few dollars by fighting piracy. An ad recently popped up on Craigslist San Antonio looking for “piracy surveillance investigators.” Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to sneak about town, seeking bars and other establishments that are illegally showing sporting events, like UFC or WWE or boxing. You stand to make up to $500 per night → Read More
The UK is much further along with having adult discussions about Internet piracy. The result of those discussions may be controversial, such as that subset of the Digital Economy Act that requires ISPs to monitor all traffic sent over their infrastructure for infringing content, thereby exposing themselves to “you didn’t do enough to stop this” lawsuits, but at least they’re having a conversation about it. → Read More
The Motion Picture Association of America says [PDF] the movie industry had its biggest year ever last year. This, despite the fact that folks like the “US Copyright Group” have gone after people for ruining said industry. Down is up, black is white, and the New York Mets are a well-run organization. → Read More
In a setback for adult film studios looking to make a quick buck (by fighting piracy), a court in Dallas has ruled that one such studio, Serious Bidness, cannot sue a group of John Does in one lump sum. If it wants to pursue legal action it has to sue each John Doe individually. → Read More
