Items tagged with Piracy
Streaming video is big business today with sites like Netflix and Hulu offering huge amounts of content that people can stream anywhere they have an internet connection. As many subscribers as Netflix and others have, two of the biggest streaming sites were illegal. Two programmers in Las Vegas recently admitted to running a pair of the largest illegal TV and movie streaming services in the country, according to federal authorities. One of the platforms reportedly had more paying subscribers than Netflix or any other legitimate streaming platform. FBI investigators arrested Darryl Polo and Luis Villarino in relation to the investigation, and both of the developers have pled guilty to copyright...
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Nintendo has been selling the Switch about as fast as it can build them resulting in some bountiful profits for the company. The Switch has been the subject of some hacks with all the consoles on the market suffering from an unpatchable exploit thanks to the NVIDIA Tegra chip inside. Hackers have been able to leverage that exploit to do things like install Linux on the device. The ability to load unauthorized software led to concerns of piracy for Nintendo. The exploit may be something that Nintendo can’t fix but it can most certainly tell if you are running pirated software. Nintendo is banning consoles running any pirated software from its network. There are a few ways that Nintendo can...
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Video game piracy is not exactly rampant on modern consoles, certainly not to the extent that is on PC. However, even though the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One have largely been able to avoid piracy from becoming a problem, a whole bunch of ripped PS4 games have found their way to the web, including Grand Theft Auto V and Far Cry 4.The good news for Sony is that unscrupulous gamers who want to grab a cracked game from the web and play it on their PS4 will have to jump through a hoops that will potentially deter a wider range of users. It starts with the PS4 firmware—as described in the NFO (information) files accompanying these games, the release group KOTF (Knights of the Fallen) says the PS4 needs...
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It's hard for many of us to trust the studies that seem to come out on a daily basis covering a variety of topics. You can find studies on the same subject that come down on completely different sides of the topic depending on who funded them. You might expect a study commissioned by the European Commission (EC) to be made public no matter what the results were, but that certainly wasn't the case with an EC study conducted back in 2015 looking into a link between digital piracy and the decline in legal sales. Why was the report unpublished to the public for two years? The reason is simple: The study found no link between illegal downloads and a reduction in legitimate purchases of digital goods...
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Mark Zuckerberg has big aspirations of expanding Facebook into the professional video space and wants to bring independent content creators into the fold. It is an appealing proposition with Facebook able to reach so many eyeballs, though the threat of piracy could scare content creators off. To address that, Facebook has gone out and acquired Source3, a content rights management startup. "At Source3, we set out to recognize, organize and analyze branded intellectual property in user-generated content, and we are proud to have identified products across a variety of areas including sports, music, entertainment and fashion. Along the way, we built an end-to-end platform to manage online IP and...
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Microsoft has just been granted a patent that could help the company to fight back against users that have been taking advantage of its OneDrive cloud storage service to share pirated materials. Now more than ever, users are storing a lot of their data outside of their homes or devices, taking advantage of services like OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox to keep that data safe on someone else's servers. That's a great perk in itself, but more than that, these services also allow users to share that data.Some patent titles are vague, but Microsoft's latest leaves nothing to the imagination: "Disabling prohibited content and identifying repeat offenders in service provider storage...
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If you live in the United Kingdom and regularly use search engines like Google and Bing to easily search for pirated wares, you might want to find another method to fuel your madness. Both Microsoft and Google have signed a pact in the UK that would in essence demote pirated content from search results. The purpose is to drastically reduce consumers’ ability to access sites that peddle copyright-protected materials. The UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has developed what it calls a Voluntary Code of Practice, which both search giants have agreed to adhere to starting June 1st, 2017. Other parties that have signed on with the Voluntary Code of Practice include the British Phonographic Industry...
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In less than a week Nintendo will release its first official Mario game for smartphones, Super Mario Run. It's a big moment for Nintendo, which is starting to embrace gaming on mobile handsets, and Super Mario Run could end up being huge. That is, if Nintendo doesn't get in its own way. The reason that is a concern is because Super Mario Run will require a persistent Internet connection. Series creator and Super Mario Run producer Shigeru Miyamoto explained the decision to require an always-on Interconnection to Mashable in an interview, along with a string of other topics. In short, the online requirement is a move that's intended to thwart piracy. "We view our software as being a very important...
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This past summer, we learned that even though the US government is adamant about fighting piracy, it found itself in a "Do as I say, not as I do" situation. So far, it's managed to - but given hard evidence, we can't imagine that it's likely to last for long. Starting back in 2011, the Department of Defense's US Navy worked with German company Bitmanagement to license 38 copies of its BS Contact Geo software, with the intent of giving the software a test run. Later, that installation number burst to over 100,000, and ultimately reached a staggering 558,466. The problem? The DoD didn't want to pay for those excess licenses; only the original 38. BS Contact Geo 7.2 Now we learn that the DoD...
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What would you do and how far would you go to eliminate copyright infringements? Warner Bros. Pictures may be hurting its own cause, as the company has inadvertently flagged their own legitimate websites for "pirating" comment. Warner Bros. and other major movie studios claims that Google does not do enough to prevent piracy. They have requested that Google remove websites such as The Pirate Bay from its search results. The company in the last year alone has flagged more than four million URL’s. Warner Bros. employs California-based company Vobile to deal with copyright issues. However, it appears that someone at either Vobile or Warner Bros. has not properly exercised their judgement or critical...
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Oculus suddenly finds itself embroiled in a game of cat and mouse as it attempts to keep titles exclusive to the Rift from running on competing VR headsets. Unfortunately for Oculus, its latest attempt at padlocking content with a DRM update backfired, and instead of stopping hacks like Revive from working, Oculus ultimately made it easier to pirate games. Let's back up a moment and see how we got to this point. At the end of last year, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey made what amounts to an open software statement by proclaiming, "If customers buy a game from us, I don't care if they mod it to run on whatever they want. As I have said a million times, our goal is not to profit by locking...
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You might not know it, but pirates in the digital age are an organized bunch. We're not talking about pirates with eye patches who sail the seas plundering ships and cities, but software pirates who rip movies and TV shows for illegal distribution on sites like The Pirate Bay and other torrent sharing portals. It's those types of pirates who are currently up in arms over recent changes made to a set of TV-release standards.Yes, even pirates have rules they abide by, and they're actually quite extensive when it comes to how content should be ripped in HD and SD format. The new set of rules contains several changes intended to modernize things, though the one that has some pirates feeling perturbed...
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Piracy is often cited a reason why many game developers don’t focus their efforts on the PC. Here at HotHardware, we believe the PC is the ultimate gaming platform and urge developers to leverage the PC to properly showcase their wares, but there is no denying that a large number of PC gamers pirate games. How that piracy impacts actual, real-world sales is a matter of debate, since many pirates probably wouldn’t have made a purchase in the first place, but the fact remains piracy is a very real thing in the PC and developers remain concerned.It turns out PC gamers aren’t alone, though. Many Android users are willing to pirate games as well, especially in China and Brazil.tinyBuild, the game...
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One of the biggest destinations on the Internet for pirated content just made watching videos a lot easier, most likely to the ire of media publishers around the globe. With the help of a plugin from Torrents Time, visitors to The Pirate Bay can now stream movies and TV shows directly from their web browser instead of downloading them using a torrent client. By skipping the often laborious process of actually downloading pirated content, this is the ultimate expression of instant gratification for pirates. Windows and OS X are currently supported along with major web browsers like Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox. After installing the plugin, streaming a torrent is a simple as clicking the...
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