Displaying items by tag: Piracy

Jollyroger-1So Google is now adding a listing of takedown requests to their transparency report to show that they are working with copyright holders and the government in the war on piracy. If you remember back in the days of SOPA and PIPA Google was one of the only companies that was allowed to speak at hearings about the terribly written law. At the time Google was accused of only being interested in search revenues and of hindering efforts to combat piracy online.

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Jollyroger-1One of the things that has always bothered us with the way that many companies involved in the “war on piracy” behave is that while they talk about the amount of money they lose every year to piracy they are always willing to dump even more into schemes that have almost no chance of doing any real good. It also bothers us that many of these companies stretch the laws and legal guidelines (to put it mildly) to achieve their goals.

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news_pirate-bay-logoIn not so shocking news another country has followed Britain’s example and has ordered the site The Pirate Bay blocked at the ISP level. This is the second time a “democratic” government has imposed an outright ban on the Torrent and Magnet Hosting Web Site. It represents a major win for the Entertainment industry that sees The Pirate Bay as their arch nemesis.

Published in Editorials
Sunday, 06 May 2012 20:06

It's All About Control

bill-of-rightsSOPA, PIPA, ACTA, TIPA, and more acronyms than most people care to think about are what is in the news. All of these pieces of legislation are designed with one thought in mind; to control the Internet. Now this may sound like little more than a crazed conspiracy theory, but it is not. You see right now the Internet represents a real threat to many businesses (and governments).

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Jollyroger-1Well we all knew it had to start somewhere. The possibility that some democracy would forget the concept of free speech and free and open communication was always there. I do not think that anyone thought it was going to be the UK though. Unfortunately a judge in the UK has ordered all ISPs in the UK to manually block access to the Pirate Bay website.

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17The war for and against SOPA has once again heated up. We have already told you that the entertainment industry, content owners, and lawmakers are working very hard to push through legislation to get what they want (control of the internet as a means of distribution of their content). It does not matter that the simple act of do this violates many Civil Liberties or that it represents a violation of the very basic tenants of the existing Anti-Trust laws that we have. Now only a few days after Chris Dodd let slip that the MPAA is working to reopen SOPA (or something worse) we find that a new power lobby has sprung up from the ground to take the banner of censorship and wave it.

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animal_farm-pigsIf you ever needed evidence of how badly laws like PIPA and SOPA (and of course ACTA) could and would be abused you have to look no further than some of the laws that are already in place. We have shown you how the lawyers for the entertainment industry have (and continue to do so) violated due process and circumvented even court orders to get what they want. Now we have Spain’s Sinde Law as a direct show of how eager the content “owners” are to pull down sites or simply make complaints.

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despdMicrosoft is in the news again today as they are officially admitting to blocking any links to The Pirate Bay on their Messenger Software. The possibility that Microsoft was blocking links was first raised last week as more than a few people reported being unable to send or receive links. Microsoft and other messaging companies have always used filtering software to make sure that people are not bothered by spam or malware.

Published in News

90Today is a busy day on the Internet (it usually is on a Monday morning). There are multiple articles and comments that are all related to the freedom of the Internet and how the world is evolving to embrace it while some in power are de-evolving to tray and restrict it. At this point there is no clear winner, but the sides are being firmly drawn in the sand and it is clear that things will get worse before they get better.

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anonThere are just some things that you should not do. One of those is never start a land war in Asia… um sorry wrong article; well one of the others you should never think that dealing with Anonymous is all fun and games, or that the collective can be bought or treated with the same type of disregard as a common criminal. We have been following the spat between Anonymous and Symantec for some time and the feud actually goes back farther than many people think.

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