Displaying items by tag: Piracy

Late last night there was an interesting tweet from the flamboyant owner of Megaupload, Kim Dotcom. The tweet announced in excited tones: “BREAKING NEWS: The High Court just ruled the release of restrained assets to cover our legal fees in New Zealand.” This is a major victor for the besieged Dotcom and Megaupload. It means that the High Courts in New Zealand are seeing the same thing that many legal experts are seeing; the US with the backing of Hollywood has been trying to prevent Dotcom and Megaupload from offering a proper defense.

The latest IRS tax filling for 2010 shows that the MPAA's revenue has been falling for a few years and it continues to do so. Over the last 3 years their anti-piracy budget has been reduced from $92.8 million to $49.6 million. This is a result of major Hollywood studios lowering MPAA funding. Membership dues precipitated from $84.7 million to $41.5 million, making it more than 50% decline in the same period.

Joel Tenenbaum, the guys who was hit with a $675,000 bill for sharing 30 songs though the Kazaa network has had a major setback (again). After being found guilty of infringement back in 2009 the courts ruled that he owed the RIAA (Recording Industry Artists of America) cartel $22,500 per track which amounted to 675,000 in damages. We have talked about the interesting math that the MPAA and RIAA use (which is starting to trickle over into other areas), but still could not find out how they arrived at this figure for their original request for “statutory damages”.

There is certainly something going on in the software/gaming industry and from all of the information we have been able to get our hands on it is not looking good for the consumer. After showing you the reports that indicate a push for stronger control over mobile apps and that the US Government is becoming more and more interested in that space we are seeing  more companies cite fantastical numbers claiming rampant piracy. This time it is our friends over at Ubisoft and the claim is that 95% of their titles are pirated.

Originally this article was to be a stand alone item to show how the mobile world is catchin up to the desktop. However, now that we have the news of domains being seized that offered pirated versions of Mobile Apps it seems there is certainly a new push to secure this highly profitable sector in play. The company that produced the report (Arxan) is not associated with this push, but timing of the publication of the report is very interesting. So let's take a look at how sad the state of the mobile app market is in terms of securing apps from hacking.

The mobile world has exploded in much the same way that the PC world exploded back in the mid to late 90s. It was a time when everyone was selling cheap computers for the masses. Unfortunately the hardware and software that was being used by everyone was also very open to attack. The thought of malware protection, hardened operating systems and edge protection (in the form of a firewall) were still very new in the consumer market. These things were also still in their infancy in much of the corporate market. Now we are seeing the same thing happening in the mobile world. The introduction of the smart phone and the mobile “app” have created a new offshoot which is still very immature and which due to its rapid growth and perceived security has become a target for malware and piracy, just like the PC did in the 90s.

Two days ago, (8-20-2012) we highlighted a new push by the copyright industry to stomp out piracy. It was something that we noticed with recent filings from the MPAA, RIAA and other companies that are interested in maintaining their copyright monopolies around the globe. This was the habit of adding in the words fraud, conspiracy, and anything that can make the case a larger issue and allow for asset seizure and harsher penalties against sites that the entertainment industry has targeted for removal. All of this started with the Megaupload case, which was the apparent test bed for this new push.

Anton Vickerman, the owner of Tvstreaming links site SurfTheChannel was sentenced to four years in jail at Newcastle Crown Court. He was found guilty of consipracy to defraud for facilitating copyright infrigement. The operation was prosecuted by the MPAA (Motion Pictures Association of America) together with UK FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft). They were able to acquire evidence against the site operator. The site itself was one of most visited streaming link websites, averaging 400,000 visits daily. You could see many of the popular TV-shows on the site for free, illegally of course.

Although not specifically related to technology we have some interesting information on the Kim Dotcom case. One of our Forum members Euonia posted a very interesting video that includes some new footage of the raid on Kim Dotcom’s home. When watching it we were more than a little shocked by the number of police vans, helicopters and other assets that were used to arrest Dotcom. Considering I can remember looking back on the raids I was on when working for DirecTV and I am shocked that they would use this level of force for a “low-level threat”

Ubisoft is not one of the better loved game distribution shops out there. Even going back to the Windows XP days they were unpopular with their very oppressive DRM that users were forced to deal with. I can vividly remember the days of not being able to play certain games because of installing a service pack, or using a 64-bit OS. Ubisoft’s refusal to do anything about these issues pushed many legal game owners to resort to cracked executables just to play the games they had paid for.

So Madfinger games is claiming that piracy is behind a move to drop the price of a $.99 game to zero. For some reason this claim just does not make sense. It is a well-known trend that low cost games are rarely pirated in fact the biggest reason that games a pirated is due to the cost of the game so we are having a hard time believing that a $0.99 game is being pirated in large amounts. I would believe it if they said that something like Shadowrun was being pirated as it is a $4.99 game on both the iPad and Android. So, if piracy is not the cause then what is?