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.”

The group leading the charge contends that the FBI may have violated Spanish Law, and at any rate,

Hard words to disagree with, whether you think Megaupload is a patsy being taken to school by IP mongers or a den of thieves getting what was coming to them. Either way, you have to agree that the wholesale takedown of the site harmed a lot of people totally unconnected to the alleged crimes performed by Megaupload.

The question of a grace period while the law does its work doesn’t seem to apply here: if, say, a cache of drugs was found in a public storage facility you used, you wouldn’t be surprised if the whole place shut down for a couple days while the law did its work. In this case the takedown may be permanent; having arrested the main actors in the company and seized many of their assets, chances are the site couldn’t be restored to working order without a fair amount of work. Not that that hasn’t happened before: The Pirate Bay relocated some servers last year to an actual secret cave after repeated raids and takedown attempts. And plenty of other favorite targets of law enforcement have proven more tenacious than expected.

The point is it’s not much of a stretch to suggest that files hosted on Megaupload will never again be accessible. If they are restored, it will still have been a clumsy and potentially illegal action that made them inaccessible, and the Pirate Parties hope to call out such actions for what they are and perhaps cause authorities to think twice before taking them again.

With the shift from print books to digital books come a few nasty side effects. Sure, it’s 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.

Apple certainly wouldn’t be alone in the fight. “Most publishers have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on their anti-piracy efforts,” Tom Allen, President and CEO of the American Publishers Association told me. “They take time, money, and personnel away from nurturing creative talent.”

Of course, it’s not just the big-name publishers and the best-selling authors who have to deal with this. I spoke briefly with Rick Tannenbaum, who operates a small publishing firm called Hen House Press in upstate New York. They publish around a dozen books per year, and although they’ve attempted to use DRM to prevent illicit copies from making the rounds, nothing seemed to work.

“I guess if I were a large corporation I’d have the resources to do something about it, but I’m not,” Tannenbaum told me.

Apple has taken steps to simplify the iBook creation experience with the introduction of their iBook Author application, which allows users to create rich interactive experiences (if they want to) without too much needless fiddling. With tools like that available (and a little luck) we may soon see some impressive new works coming from authors of all stripes.

Could those richer media experiences become the next target for the web’s scores of ebook pirates? Very possibly, if only because it presents an interesting new obstacle for them to surmount. There are already tools available that can transfer Apple’s existing iBooks from the iDevice in question to a computer, which isn’t much of a problem considering they’re all stored in the common ePub format. I fully expect something similar to pop up in the coming weeks and months that allows less-than-scrupulous users dump these new iBooks and share them with others.

As they say, where there’s a will, there’s a way.

But would that really be such a bad thing? The iTextbooks in particular present a unique case here — when I was in college, some students would split the cost of a textbook and make photocopies of chapters and assignments as needed. As long as they had enough dimes on hand, each student got away with an education of sorts and still only paid a fraction of the cost of a single textbook. That sharing mentality exists outside of the scholastic realm for sure, and if more people learn by being exposed to a shared iBook, isn’t the end result a net benefit?

It depends on who’s asking. As my colleague Matt notes, Apple and their partners aren’t in the business of educating people — they’re here to make money. A smarter, entertained audience is a just a handy side-effect of selling more books, be they digital or not. Someone like Tim O’Reilly sees it a little differently. His company removed the DRM from all of their books’ digital editions last year, and noted that they were “delighted when people who can’t afford our books don’t pay us for them, if they go out and do something useful with that information.”

In the end, there will be very little Apple can do to stop piracy. Look at the long history of iOS jailbreaks and unlocks — while not piracy per se, they illustrate rather nicely that there will always be people willing and able to throw Terms and Conditions to the wind to get what they want. The same applies to Apple’s iBooks — just as there will always be people who would pay to enjoy the frictionless purchase of a book, there will always be people who enjoy the thrill of getting things for free too much to resist.

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.

A pirate group called CiNEDUB has single-handedly “forced” Warner Brothers to stop releasing films in Hungary for fear of having their content recorded and pirated on the day of release. Sick of CiNEDUB preventing them access to the ouvre of Harry Potter, the police busted the ring and found a large server room, lots of cash, and a mirror and razor blade combo that suggests some high times.

The bust happened under pressure from the Hungarian National Tax and Customs Administration. Two members of the nine member team are behind bars while the rest are still at large. From Torrentfreak:

“Most of this team were responsible for the great American filmmakers blacklisting Hungary,” NAV said in a statement.

Say what you want about freedom and digital rights: these guys were, in the end, making money on pirated video. I don’t like corporations pressuring governments to do their bidding and I agree that it’s stupid to equate piracy with terrorism and gangsterism, you can’t honestly say that whatever these guys were doing in that cocaine- and shotgun-infested flat improved our digital freedoms one iota.

After names and addresses are given to the rightsholders, legal departments send out a letter demanding a sum of money up to ~$1700. The industry calls this “deep intervention.” Whether it’s a breach of privacy depends partially on Germany’s laws, what the people in question did, and how they did it, but it’s still scary as hell to think about.

They claim it has reduced piracy by 20%, a number I don’t trust for a second. Their piracy data only seems to carry them through the end of 2009 anyway, which means it’s not current with their excessive tactics. They also don’t mention how often people pay, take them to court over it, or simply ignore the cash demands.

TorrentFreak has more info.

[via HardOCP]

Ballmer ruled out the idea that software is too expensive. “If you can [afford a PC], you could afford the software,” said Ballmer, the statement clearly directed toward the Chinese government. Perhaps, if the same rampant piracy was occurring in a smaller country this issue could have been tabled a bit longer, but Microsoft stands to lose billions in the Chinese market if the same behavior continues.

Ballmer claimed that each PC sold in India generated six times the earnings than that of PCs sold in China. He said that if Chinese IP protection was as robust and enforced as India’s that the market in China would be worth “billions of dollars.”

The government in China has recognized that there is a piracy issue, and claims to have taken steps to cut down the level of piracy. There has been some progress, as 78 percent of software installed in China last year was pirated, compared to 86 percent in 2005. Still, an 8 percent decrease over a five-year period definitely isn’t enough to abate Microsoft.

[via Ars Technica]

The Pirate Bay has been the target of numerous legal threats, some of which have had recourse to physical removal of the servers operating the site, so a secret location (or three) is an important step to keep the long arm of the law (and the longer arm of the multinationals) out of striking distance.

Those are the new servers, to the right. Yes, they are inside a cave. People really do that.

They’re working on a few hardware upgrades, and I was surprised to learn that the whole site is hosted on just 17 machines. Granted they are serving mostly small files and lots of text comments, but that really is just an incredibly small number of servers for such a high-profile site. Compare to Facebook, which has tens of thousands of servers in just one datacenter.

The Advocate General of the European Union Court of Justice, Cruz Villalón, says [PDF] 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.

This all stems from a case in mighty Belgium where an artists’ rights group, the Société belge des auteurs compositeurs et éditeurs, or Sabam, took issue with copyright infringement occurring via a local ISP, Scarlet Extended SA. After a series of court actions, the ISP was eventually told to install filtering software on its network in order to prevent the continued infringement of copyright.

Today we learn that, in the opinion of the Advocate General, this should never have happened in the first place.

Get ready for a wall of text!

…the Advocate General proposes that the Court of Justice should declare that EU law precludes a national court from making an order, on the basis of the Belgian statutory provision, requiring an internet service provider to install, in respect of all its customers, in abstracto and as a preventive measure, entirely at the expense of the internet service provider and for an unlimited period, a system for filtering all electronic communications passing via its services (in particular, those involving the use of peer-to- peer software) in order to identify on its network the sharing of electronic files containing a musical, cinematographic or audio-visual work in respect of which a third party claims rights, and subsequently to block the transfer of such files, either at the point at which they are requested or at the point at which they are sent.

Stripping that down a bit, the Advocate General is saying that EU law should have prevented the filtering system from being installed, or ordered to be installed, in the first place. Such a filtering system would amount to “a restriction on the rights and freedoms of internet users” and that it could only be legal if it “were adopted on a national legal basis which was accessible, clear and predictable.”

So the idea of a filtering system isn’t 100 percent verboten, just that it’d have to be done in such a way that would happily co-exist with the laws on the books.

Again, none of this particularly means anything particularly here in the U.S., but it does show the evolution of courtroom understanding of some of the technologies involved in our lives.

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.

Why did Garry do this?

I don’t think the error isn’t going to boost GMod sales. I just like to give people that paid something to be smug about.

That’s quite excellent, giving people something to be smug about. There’s nothing wrong with smugness. In fact, it’s very much encouraged.

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.

The survey asked 4,000 artists (musicians, authors, photographers, etc.) for their views on all sorts of piracy-related subjects.

For example, only 12 percent of respondents said they believed file-sharing hurts them financially. Artists with more schooling’ under their belt tend to be among those who don’t believe file-sharing hurts them financially. So much for the claims by certain organizations that artists are being put in the poor house because of BitTorrent.

What else? Oh, that file-sharing helps spread the word about their work. So says just north of 50 percent of respondents, though this number may change as more and more streaming options break into the mainstream. A sort of, “Online music services help spread the word about my work.”

All of this being said, the Dutch artists aren’t a bunch of hippies who think everything should be free forever. Nope, with a majority saying that the penalties from illegal file-sharing should be more serious that the current penalties on the books.

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!

The game’s devs talked to Bit-tech, and argued what so many people have said over and over again, that DRM merely pushes people to piracy. Does this scenario sound familiar?

I know people that buy an original copy of the game just so they don’t feel guilty, and then they will play a pirated version which is stripped of all DRM. That’s not how it should be. Let’s treat legitimate customers with respect and they will give that back.

That was the game’s PR and marketing manager, Lukasz Kukawski, making all kinds of sense. The lack of DRM (at least from the GoG version; the retail version will include DRM because of contractual obligations) won’t create a rush to pirate the game. How many times have we seen games wrapped in 85 layers of DRM leaked online weeks before their retail release? Many times, thank you.

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.

The site generates fake torrent information. For example, let’s search for “snooki” torrents, Snooki being one of the attractions last night at WrestleMania. As you can see, it turns up several “trusted” or “full” downloads, all of which are rubbish. This is exactly what the band’s manager did, and was shocked to discover that several thousand people were torrenting the album.

They weren’t, of course, but that didn’t stop the Canadian Recording Industry Association, in the form of Balanced Copyright For Canada, from freaking out, saying that pirates are evil and that this poor band was Exhibit A of how lives are destroyed, etc.

Of course, it was nothing of the sort, but at least now the band has increased exposure, so I guess everything worked out for the best in the end.

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.

To be fair, it very much is serious business. WWE pulled in $477.7 million in revenue last year (up from $475.2 in 2009), and its flagship TV program, Raw, on the USA cable network, regularly draws [PDF] five million viewers per week. The move to a more family friendly, PG-oriented product may have upset some fans—you can’t visit a pro-wrestling message board without seeing fans clamoring for a return to the late 1990s/early 2000s Attitude Era, what with its edgy content and more adult-oriented storylines—but the shift has enabled the company to strike lucrative deals with the likes of Mattel.

The company has had a somewhat unusual relationship with technology in recent years. While it was quick to move its NXT television program from the SyFy network to WWE.com, it did so only to make room for another program, Smackdown, which made its SyFy debut last October. (NXT still airs on television networks outside of the U.S.) It made available, on YouTube and WWE.com, full episodes of some of its television programs last year, but this was long after people had been watching TV shows online on services like Hulu and iTunes.

But the embrace of social media has been a concerted effort. The company’s chief marketing officer, Michelle Wilson, told Multi-Channel News that the company’s increased use of Facebook in particular should help the company achieve its goal of one million worldwide buys. (The company currently has 4.9 million “likes” on the site.) It has promoted its talents’ individual Twitter accounts, who use the platform as an extension of on-air goings-on, as seen here:

.bbpBox53911207068975100 {background:url(http://a1.twimg.com/profile_background_images/214515143/Rock-Twitter-back-revised.jpg) #C0DEED;padding:20px;} p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px} p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block}

The fact that there are so many things working in the company’s favor this year—not coming the day after a major UFC pay-per-view event as it did last year; the return of The Rock; the presence of Jersey Shore’s Snooki—will make it difficult to pinpoint one particular reason why the show does better (if it does, indeed, do better).

Although, to be honest, we all know The Rock is the real draw here. I’d find it hard to believe even one person would buy the show to see Snooki, who’s regularly on free TV doing whatever it is she does that makes her famous. Incidentally, wouldn’t the Italian feminine diminutive of “guido” be “guidetta” and not “guidette” as Snooki claims? I’m pretty sure the “-ette” ending is French and not Italian. But then again I don’t have a fancy MTV show, so what do I know?

Another wild card: online piracy. We’re all familiar with UFC’s fight against illegal online streams, but there’s but so much a company like it or WWE can do to fight streams that are oftentimes based overseas. It’s not a problem that will go away quickly, or easily. Stream quality will only improve as bandwidth becomes cheaper and more plentiful (“peak bandwidth” notwithstanding); most everybody by now knows that with a cheap HDMI cable you can connect a laptop to a big screen HDTV in order to watch the stream there. How will these streams affect the event’s buyrate, and will UFC’s lawsuits have scared off potential pirates? Tough to say, but it’s not as if piracy is a new thing phenomenon: “black boxes” could illegally tune into pay-per-view channels on analog cable systems in the 1980s and 1990s, and WWE and boxing still had a number of events then with massive buyrates. I’m pretty sure Mike Tyson is still the biggest pay-per-view draw of all time, and he was at the top of his game when these “black boxes” could be pretty easily obtained, as anyone who read the classified ads in electronics magazines will tell you.

Getting one million worldwide pay-per-view buys is no easy feat, and we’ve already seen how just because something is popular on Twitter doesn’t automatically mean money is being made, so it’ll be terribly exciting to see if WWE’s social media push has any impact whatsoever on WrestleMania 27’s numbers. Again, if the show does do well much of that success will have to be attributed the return of The Rock, whose WrestleMania 17 main event with Stone Cold Steve Austin in 2001 led to an estimated 1.04 million worldwide buys. Outside of Brock Lesnar, The Rock’s the closest thing to a surefire (if short-term) pay-per-view draw you’ll find.

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.

There was a meeting at the end of February attended by rights holders, ISPs, and the likes of Google and Yahoo. They had gathered to discuss, in so many words, What To Do? The conclusion was the creation of a working group that would investigate the possibility of ISPs blocking access to Web sites that were deemed to be aiding in the infringement of copyright.

The idea would be that if a site is found to contain, say, a bunch of Rapidshare links for a Blu-ray rip of The King’s Speech (or whatever), the site could be flagged and ultimately the ISP could block off access to it.

Presumably you cold just use a proxy server to connect to the blocked site, then download the links using your non-proxy connection, but that’s a minor point.

The Open Rights Group, which defends “freedom, transparency and new creative possibilities” in the digital age, pretty much laughed at the idea, saying that blocking Web sites is a “bad idea,” and taking issue with it “self-regulatory basis where vital judicial oversight is bypassed.” Who will guard the guardians, that sort of thing. Do you really want to leave ultimate authority and oversight to non-accountable people?

Never mind the fact, of course, that so, so many people find their wares by way of Google. “Kings speech + torrent” or “snoop dog rapidshare.” Seems to me that’s aiding copyright infringement. Are we prepared to block access to Google, or are we willing to make an exception there?

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.

The law, which was initially passed last year, had already been delayed by various hiccups (including the fact the legislation didn’t quite gel with certain EU requirements), but this courtroom battle will be a more direct challenge on the law itself. Expect the ISPs to argue, once again, that the law simply won’t work from a practical point of view.

In any event, the UK Government now says that it will probably be spring, 2012 at the earliest before the law goes into effect, and that’s assuming everything goes its way at the High Court.

You’ll recall that the law would require ISPs to monitor all traffic traveling over their pipes, and any example of copyright infringement would have to be followed up with a strongly worded letter. The ISP has to identify IP addresses to subscribers, then send these subscribers the letter.

One of the problems is that constantly patrolling their connections for infringing content would require quite a bit of effort, and a bit of money, too. (Of course the counter-argument to that is that ISPs make money off subscriber fees from people who infringe copyright all day long.) There’s also the small but about people’s privacy rights being trampled all over.

When Wednesday comes, then.

“[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?

The main reason for piracy in these countries is that the local price of whatever is too expensive for the population to support. The study notes that the local price of Microsoft Office in countries like Brazil and South Africa is five times price, relatively speaking, as it is here in the U.S. So it’d be like Microsoft charging you $750 for the Home & Student version of Office for Mac. Who would buy that when you could just go down the street to the guy and buy it for $5? (I’ve often heard that this is the case in Brazil with video games, that prices there are crazy compared to what you’d pay here in the U.S. It’s also partially why CD Projekt was lauded for its fair pricing scheme for The Witcher 2.)

Another interesting part of the study is that it seems anti-piracy education has failed. But that probably relates to the first point: a commercial on TV saying “piracy is evil, don’t be evil!” conflicts with the fact that I’m not going to pay $750 for Office when I can get it for $5.

The study also found that lobbying efforts do a great job of changing the law to meet their anti-piracy needs, but that actually getting people to obey these fancy need laws is mighty difficult.

So, nothing too crazy, and it seems like the summation of little bits of info we’ve all read over and over again over the years, but it is useful to be able to point to a single study and say, “See, this is what I’m talking about.”

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.

So there’s two problems here, as I see it. One is that Ubisoft isn’t giving you the highest quality music in the first place. Why encode from FLAC to MP3 if you, presumably, have access to the master files? Yes, FLAC is lossless, but considering Ubisoft owns the music itself you’d think the’d have the decency to transcode from the source files rather than a fan-made FLAC.

The second problem is, obviously, the use of pirated material, and this wouldn’t be such a hilarious issue if it weren’t for Ubisoft’s insane stance vis-à-vis DRM in recent years. This is the company that bangs and bangs away about evil, evil pirates ruining civilization itself, and yet here it is, plain as day, using pirated material in its own official releases. In a sense you’re paying for pirated material.

This isn’t even the first time Ubisoft has been caught using pirated material. Remember back in 2008 when it was discovered that it used a No-CD crack for one of its Rainbow Six games?

Then again, I suppose it can be argued that, since Ubisoft actually owns the copyright here, it technically can’t infringe upon its own rights by using a illegitimate version of the soundtrack. Which just goes to show you how convoluted copyright law is these days.

Ubisoft hasn’t said why this particular incident occurred. It could just be the case of a lazy employee not wanting to ask the music department for access for the source files, or it could be that, being such a big company, things go slowly over there. Perhaps the request for the music’s source files was put in, but the mighty working of the company was simply too slow for the files to trickle down in time.

Or, of course, it could be a work designed to get heat for the company.

In any event, I sure would like to hear the company try to explain away this situation.

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.

Following the trail of breadcrumbs leads us to Wayne & Associates, a California-based private investigator. It’s owned by a man in Los Angeles.

The deal is that you go around and gather evidence of establishments illegally showing pay-per-view events.

Nearest I can tell, you go out on the town the night of a pay-per-view event, like the upcoming WrestleMania, and try to get video of the illegal broadcast.

You’d think that no bar owner on Earth would be dumb enough to connect a laptop pointed to a justin.tv stream to his HDTVs, but that’s exactly what happened in Boston about a year ago. Pretty sure that guy should have been nominated for a Darwin Award.

The payscale seems to vary. Previous informants were paid $75 if they reported on an establishment with no video, but that jumps to $100 if video is taken. You’re provided with a list of establishments that are fully licensed to show the event in question.

Mighty, mighty strange, this.

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.

The best part of a conversation is, of course, the give-and-take. The people looking out for the content side of thing—the studios and whatnot—have already had their say, and now the other side are saying: hold on a minute.

Make way for Plan B.

The idea here would be to put the onus on copyright holders to prove that a site was hosting illegal content. No more capriciously saying, “This site has bad stuff, block access to it!”

OK, you can claim that, but before we do anything we’re going to need to see some proof.

A shocking idea, yes.

How much of an impact piracy really has, who knows? There’s no accurate way of tracking it, right? Of all the BitTorrent trackers in the world, all the Rapidshare-like sites, binary groups, IRC. You’d have just as much luck trying to count each individual grain of sand in the Sahara.

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.

The MPAA, which is rumored to be led by former Connecticut senator Chuck Dodd, pats itself on the back thus:

It was a strong year at the movies in 2010. Despite a weak economy, shifting business models, and the ongoing impact of digital theft, we had another record year at the global box office driven by growth outside the U.S. and Canada. In the U.S. and Canada 3D was the driving force. Higher value entertainment continues to make a significant contribution to box office revenues.

It’s a bit like WWE, with most of its new business coming from outside the U.S. So while domestic business is more or less stagnant, thanks to more and more international penetration it looks like everything is excellent.

It also sorta contrasts to what we saw partially through 2010, that 3D movies weren’t brining the same amount of revenue as movies like Avatar. Taking a few days to convert a movie into “3D” after the fact proved to not be an especially wise move.

Even giving this two seconds of thought makes plenty of sense. As the court said, there’s no way you can ensure that John Doe 1 has done the same thing as John Doe 10.

What if John Doe 1 is a working parent whose kid illegally downloaded whatever without their knowledge? What if John Doe 10 is some kid whose roommate who downloads whatever when he’s at work, but it’s John Doe 10’s name on the cable bill?

There’s too many permutations to treat all these people as one undifferentiated blob.