Items tagged with Piracy
U2’s collaboration goes way beyond the album Apple forced on iPhone users at the launch event. According to a report in TIME, the band and tech company have been working on a project that could give bands a new way to deliver albums to their audiences. Hopefully, this new album format doesn’t involve auto-downloads. Itunes already puts album artwork front-and-center. The new album format Apple and U2 are developing is expected to make new uses of album artwork. Image credit: Apple People involved in the project are stressing that, although this new format is expected to be difficult to pirate, it’s not based on major new technology. Instead, the new format is based on presenting...
Read more...
In a new interview with Esquire, legendary rocker Gene Simmons claims that the music industry isn't dying - it's been dead for quite some time. As the interview was conducted by Gene's 25-year-old son Nick, it seems inevitable that file-sharing would be brought into the discussion, and it was. But despite that, this isn't a simple matter of an old crank complaining about the younger generation - he does make some great points. When asked about what advice he'd give starting musicians, Simmons replied, "Don't quit your day job is a good piece of advice. When I was coming up, it was not an insurmountable mountain. Once you had a record company on your side, they would fund you, and that also meant...
Read more...
There’s a complicated battle that persists between prolific copyright violators, ISPs, and rights holders who want to take the violators down. The Internet has been the ideal place to pirate and distribute digital wares, and thus managing the issue has been problematic. However, according to TorrentFreak, a privacy monitoring firm called Rightscorp has been aggressively encouraging ISPs to disconnect those subscribers who are repeat (and presumably, particularly egregious) offenders. The company identifies certain offenders and contacts them via the ISP, and it asks the ISP to send along settlement demands. In the most severe cases, Rightscorp asks the ISP to disconnect the pirate. How...
Read more...
If you're in charge of figuring out what's popular in a given market, regardless of what topic you're dealing with, you're likely to go to a place where you know you'll easily accomplish that goal. Take for example the latest video games - if you own a store need to gauge how many copies of a particular title you should be bringing in, the amount of hype you see at a specialized gaming site can help with that. Likewise, the same sort of sleuthing could be done by content delivery services to determine what they should seek out. As it appears, Netflix, is far from ignorant about any of this, and perhaps not-so-surprisingly, it knows just where to go to find the information it needs: pirate sites....
Read more...
Google has released a 26-page report detailing how it strives to balance the rights of copyright owners against fair use policies and individual users. The search giant has come under increasing fire from copyright owners over the past few years, and faced repeated accusations that it earns enormous amounts of money from the ads that run on pirate websites. Meanwhile, the company's YouTube takedown policy has been criticized at times from the other end, particularly when it's used to remove content that someone else found inconvenient, embarrassing, or just didn't like One of the changes Google made fairly recently was its agreement to begin de-ranking pages that attracted a high number...
Read more...
CBS and Time Warner have been engaged in a public battle over network access fees and the result has been a blackout in key markets that's left TWC customers unable to access certain CBS properties, including Showtime. These sorts of battles are ill-received by a public that's generally sick of paying an average of $84 a month to watch a handful of channels and now, thanks to a license dispute, finds itself unable to consume content that's been legally paid for. The predictable result? Skyrocketing piracy rates. According to data gathered by TorrentFreak, people in the affected markets of Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit and Pittsburgh, accounted for...
Read more...
Edward Snowden's leaks have shaken something loose in the IT industry. For years, companies have been afraid to talk about the requests and data sharing procedures the NSA and FBI have forced upon them as a result of the Patriot Act. Companies that went to court to fight these demands lost, and lost in silence, forbidden to even reveal that such requests were taking place. Now that the programs are common knowledge, multiple corporations have joined in to demand the right to tell us just how they participate in NSA requests. Today, a coalition of 63 companies, non-profits, and organizations issued a letter requesting the right to communicate the following: The number of government requests for...
Read more...
Companies that monitor BitTorrent traffic are a dime a dozen, but AT&T marks the first time that an ISP itself is going to be getting in on the action. The company has just been awarded a patent that will allow it to deeply monitor BitTorrent traffic, though its ultimate use seems to be up-in-the-air. The company could simply want to monitor network congestion before it happens, or figure out which pirated content is being shared the most. Both of these cases seem likely, as AT&T is one ISP that's part of the Six Strikes program, where an Internet subscriber has up to six chances to stop downloading pirated content. It's worth noting that there, it's third-parties that monitor the traffic,...
Read more...
On any given day in the United States you will find a number of really, really terrible ideas being floated as smart decisions. Flying to Hawaii to give birth in the ocean surrounded by dolphins. A drunk man repeatedly directing traffic in midtown Manhattan. And, today, from the USA Intellectual Property Theft Commission, a 90 page report on the state of IP around the world, the dangers posed to American IP by the Internet, and one remarkable suggestion on how to fix the problem. Additionally, software can be written that will allow only authorized users to open files containing valuable information. If an unauthorized person accesses the information, a range of actions might then occur. For...
Read more...
Whether it's software, games, movies or even books, piracy is rampant. There's no denying that, and there's no one that understands the harmful effects of it better than the content creators themselves. Over the years, we've seen some humorous attempts at trying to sway the pirate towards becoming a paying customer, and there's probably little doubt that some have worked. In recent memory, Serious Sam 3 introduced a monster only in the pirated version of the game that hunted you down indefinitely and was impossible to kill. There's also Take On Helicopters, which corrupted textures on purpose in the pirated version of the game. Humorously, before these mechanics were understood, some pirates...
Read more...
Pirates flocked to BitTorrent in record numbers to download the season premiere of HBO's Game of Thrones. Within an hour of the first torrent being uploaded, there were 163,088 people sharing the single file, breaking the record for the largest BitTorrent swarm ever. That's according to TorrentFreak, which notes that the previous record was held by the season premier of Heroes with 144,663 peers. Game of Thrones blew past that mark, and if you count all the different releases, it's estimated that the season opener has been downloaded over a million times already. Despite all this, HBO doesn't seem too ticked off. Just the opposite, actually. "I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but it...
Read more...
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has long sought to demonize file sharers who download, trade, and share songs illegally, noting that the cumulative impact of their deeds -- obtaining millions of songs illegally -- is nothing short of devastating. But is it really? A new study throws a wrinkle in the RIAA's argument. Before we go any further, let us be clear -- we're not condoning piracy of any kind, nor do we encourage anyone to seek out copyrighted content of any kind by illegal means. That said, we find the results of a study conducted by the American Assembly, a national non-partisan public affairs forum related to Columbia University, to be rather fascinating. AA,...
Read more...
While the country's biggest music labels all seek out a passing of a "six strikes" scheme - one that would result in your Internet being cut off after your sixth offense - BMG has found another way to both increase its revenue and instill fear in music downloaders. Typically, if a copyright holder detects an infringement on your IP address, your ISP is legally-required to forward you a letter. Usually this letter is nothing more than a warning, and can usually be brushed off. But BMG has just gotten creative. Instead of sending a simple warning letter, BMG's creatively-written letter asks for $20 to smooth things over and tries to make you believe that you have no choice but to pay it. As TorrentFreak...
Read more...
Game designer Richard Browne has come out swinging in favor of the rumored antipiracy features in the next-gen PlayStation Orbis and Xbox Durango. "The real cost of used games is the damage that is being wrought on the creativity and variety of games available to the consumer," Browne writes. "The real cost of used games is the death of single player gaming." Browne's comments echo those of influential programmer and Raspberry Pi developer David Braben, who wrote last month that "pre-owned has really killed core games... It's killing single player games in particular, because they will get pre-owned, and it means your day one sales are it, making them super high risk. I mean, the idea of a game...
Read more...
