Showing 198 posts tagged piracy
Pirate Bay Cofounder Indicted on Hacking Charges
The Pirate Bay cofounder Gottfrid Svartholm was indicted today on hacking charges unrelated to his one-year prison sentence for running the world’s most notorious and illicit file-sharing service.
According to Swedish prosecutors, the 27-year-old is accused of hacking into Nordea Bank to withdraw money, and of hacking into several Swedish companies and the government’s federal taxing agency.
» via Wired
Obsessed With Google, Copyright Holders Ignore The Actual Pirated Content
When it comes to online piracy, copyright holders have an obsession with Google. Every month the search engine is asked to take down links to millions of URLs to help stop the unauthorized distribution of their work. Strangely enough, many copyright holders fail to target the root of the problem as they don’t make the effort to send takedown requests to the originating websites.
» via TorrentFreak
File-Sharers Will Not Be Held Liable For Piracy, Russia Says
As Russia tries to find a balanced solution to the thorny issue of Internet piracy, the head of a government department responsible for communications and information technology says that attacking Internet users is not the solution. Speaking at the launch of a nationwide campaign to promote legal eBook purchases, Vladimir Grigoryev said that the government has no intention of holding downloaders liable or having them sent to court.
» via TorrentFreak
“It’s kind of silly that maximalists and luddites keep jumping back to this trope. The idea that if you can get something for free, no one will ever pay for it. That’s never been true and will never be true. All of the works that people pay and download to their Kindles are already available for free on unauthorized sites. But tons of people pay. All of the music that people pay and download to their iPods is already available for free on unauthorized sites. But tons of people pay. People will pay all the time for things they can get for free. Just check out the bottled water industry.”
Excellent commentary on a recent NYT Op-Ed by Scott Turow (head of the Authors Guild). I definitely recommend reading both.
(via calimae)
(via calimae)
BitTorrent Site IsoHunt Demands Jury Trial
The operator of the popular file-sharing service isoHunt is demanding a federal appeals court grant it a jury trial, two weeks after the court declared it a massive copyright scofflaw and said it’s on the hook for what could be millions of dollars in damages payable to Hollywood studios.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Gary Fung and said the Motion Picture Association of America automatically won on the merits of the case, without a trial. The decision marked the first time a federal appeals court had ruled against a BitTorrent search engine.
» via Wired
Game of Thrones Pirates Break BitTorrent Swarm Record
With a million downloads on BitTorrent in less than a day, the season premiere of Game of Thrones is breaking records on multiple fronts. Never before has there been a torrent with so many people sharing a file at the same time, more than 160,000 simultaneous peers. Data gathered by TorrentFreak further shows that Australia has the highest piracy rate of the popular download destinations, while London tops the list of pirate cities.
» via TorrentFreak
MMS Is Not an Illicit File-Sharing Service, Appeals Court Says
The Multimedia Messaging Service is not an illicit file-sharing protocol, a federal appeals court ruled, setting aside Monday a complaint from an MMS-greeting-card supplier that claimed the nation’s largest telecoms helped consumers infringe via MMS texting.
Luvdarts, which produces greeting-card style messages with text, graphics, video and musical materials that it creates and licenses, claimed Sprint, Verizon, AT&T and Verizon should have prevented the illegal distribution of its proprietary text messages.
» via Wired
eBook Pirates “Hijack” Domain Name of Anti-Piracy Campaign
This week at a grand press event the French Publishers Association announced their new anti-piracy portal ProtectionLivres.com. Through the website authors can search for and take down infringing content. An ambitious project, but the publisher group overlooked one small detail – the registration of their website’s domain. This oversight was quickly punished by an eBook pirate group who scooped up the domain to redirect it to an anti-DRM website.
» via TorrentFreak
Simon & Schuster will give authors direct access to piracy data for their books
Simon & Schuster will offer authors data on how and when their books are being pirated online, CEO Carolyn Reidy said Thursday.
Simon & Schuster, like many other publishers, works with a company called Attributor “to track and remove infringing copies of digital, audio and print titles published by Simon & Schuster from online sites.” Authors will now have access to Attributor’s data through the Simon & Schuster Author Portal, which also lets them track their book sales. Literary agents will have access to the data as well.
» via paidContent
“There is a gap in the law,” Pallante said during a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet. “If there is illegal streaming happening, especially in an egregious, willful, profit-driven kind of way, how do you get at that activity if the best that you can do is go after them for a misdemeanor?”
