Displaying items by tag: Piracy

For a number of years we have talked about the way the copyright industry (and the laws they have fostered) have been the number one source of the growth of piracy. These groups, designed to “protect” rights holders are so blind in their efforts to maintain a high (and growing) revenue stream that they often forget the impact on legitimate users. When these impacts and restrictions become too great these legitimate users will turn to alternative means to get the items they want. One very widely published incident was with EA and their DRM (Digital Rights Management) software on the popular game Spore. The DRM was limited to three installs and often locked people out during their first installation. Because this DRM was so restrictive people that legally purchased the game went out and downloaded copies just so they could install it when they wanted.

After having their ideas shot down by popular displeasure the Copyright lobbyists are now trying to make aggressive tactics ok. They have put together a report on the state of American Intellectual property theft and have managed to build up some of the old boogeymen like they always do. This time, they are starting to make more open suggestions about fighting fire with fire. In the past these reports have always centered on the commercial market and the state of individual piracy, product copying and other more economic concepts. These were enough to get higher mandatory fines, to criminalize certain fair use tactics and more. Now by subtly changing the report to show highlight the national security aspect the industry hopes to be given considerably more power to act.

Not only that they are struggling with the fragmentation of operating system, the authors of applications for Android are faced with another problem - piracy.

A Certain Jens R., a 33 years old German citizen, who owns the site torrent.to, normally located on servers in Russia, received three years and 10 months in prison at the court in the German city of Aachen. As owners of The Pirate Bay, in his case, he is charged for illegal distribution of copyrighted content. In addition, Jens is still under investigation for false report of bankruptcy and embezzlement.

A video game developer has decided to use an interesting approach to piracy. Instead of trying to prevent their game from being downloaded illegally they actually pushed out their own release for people to download. Now this may sound counterproductive, but they have a plan and one that they hope will help to stop future piracy. They have decided to add piracy and its “effects” to the torrent release.

Dust around the hated always-on DRM can not seem to settle. After the internet rumors that Microsoft's new gaming console could require a constant connection to the Internet, the head of Ubisoft Montreal, said that the market is ready for such an outcome. When given a question were users ready for this move Yannis Mallat said „Well, that's a question you should put to Microsoft and Sony! I would say that a lot of people are already always online through other devices – I would suspect that the audience is ready "

March 31st was a very important day for anyone that likes to watch tv-series. You could see the finale of The Walking Dead third season, and first episode of the third season of the series Game of Thrones. After the official presentation on Saturday GoT reached the milestone of one million illegal copies in just two days.

It seems piracy may not be the bane of the music industry after all.  A study called the Copy Culture Survey was recently completed by the American Assembly, in affiliation with Columbia University.  Consisting of thousands of telephone interviews in the U.S. and Germany, the study revealed an interesting trend.

Every once in a while a producer of pornographic content starts trying to take legal action against pirates. They typically focus on users of BitTorrent and similar protocols. Practically any person who has downloaded any content through BitTorrent could automatically be considered a pirate [Although this is far from reality as there are many legitimate uses for BitTorrent – Ed]. However, due to procedural and other errors they are somehow unsuccessful in their intentions.

The election is over and nothing much has changed as far as the balance of power in the US, which makes us wonder if we should be concerned about a free and open internet more than ever. We know that the head of the MPAA Chris Dodd has close ties to the Whitehouse and also to many members of Congress. To make things worse Dodd will be free to openly interact with all of his former buddies sometime in February of 2013. We know that he has, and still is, pushing for laws to monitor and control the internet to protect the interests of the other members of his cartel. However, there is more to this dynamic than we first saw last year during the barrage of ignorant and oppressive laws trying to limit communication (and technological advances) and it has to do with a particular mindset.