Archive for April, 2011
Saturday, April 30th, 2011
Geremi Adam, the movie cammer for the Scene release group ‘maVen’, will go down in history as a grand master of his art. Despite difficulties in pinning a crime on him, eventually Adam was arrested. According to a cable released by Wikileaks, that arrest was carried out as “a personal favor” to a movie industry official, setting off a tragic chain of events which would ultimately lead to Adams’ death.
Source: Wikileaks: Police Arrested Movie Pirate As “A Personal Favor” To Movie Official
Posted in CMPDA, Hot Off The Press, Maven, RCMP | Comments Off
Saturday, April 30th, 2011
When the copyright monopoly and its future development is discussed, parties called “stakeholders” are frequently invited to discuss its wording and principles. Yet, current lawmakers have forgotten the reason the monopoly exists in the first place.
Source: Why The Copyright Industry Isn’t a Legitimate Stakeholder in Copyright
Posted in copyright, opinion | Comments Off
Friday, April 29th, 2011
A brand new BitTorrent-related project entered Mozilla’s MoJo contest this week. Named SPARKD, the P2P-powered video streaming platform promises the public a novel anti-censorship tool. It’s intended to give citizen journalists the ability to avoid censorship and stream video to millions of people anonymously, but the underlying library of tools might have other interesting use-cases for the P2P community too.
Source: SPARKD: Anonymous BitTorrent Powered Video Streaming
Posted in anonymous bittorrent, Bittorrent Software, SPARKD | Comments Off
Friday, April 29th, 2011
When trying to obtain elusive evidence to help formulate a legal strategy, most organizations tend to go through the court system. IFPI, the international music industry group, has just done it rather differently. When they needed a torrent site’s data recently they just called up their host, implied they might sue and then simply picked up the hard drives. Case in point, the Internet’s 10th biggest torrent site, LimeTorrents.
Source: IFPI Seizes Control of LimeTorrents Hard Drives
Posted in Copyright Issues, Hot Off The Press, IFPI, Legal Issues, LimeTorrents | Comments Off
Thursday, April 28th, 2011
Lithuania’s most popular torrent tracker Linkomanija has endured its fair share of copyright related troubles in the past, such as the multi-million dollar lawsuit launched by Microsoft last year. Nevertheless, there are also copyright holders with a more positive view towards the tracker. Today the local movie studio Iron Cat chose the site to become the official distributor of an upcoming movie.
Source: BitTorrent Tracker Becomes Official Movie Distributor
Posted in Hot Off The Press, Iron Cat, Linkomanija | Comments Off
Thursday, April 28th, 2011
In 2010, Russian authorities seized the domain of the country’s biggest BitTorrent tracker, Torrents.ru, in copyright related action. Now, just over a year later, police have swooped on its sister site, Pornolab – Russia’s biggest porn tracker – and seized its servers. With the recent demise of two other huge adult trackers, it’s possible that Pornolab was the largest adult torrent site in the world.
Source: Police Raid Russia’s Largest Porn BitTorrent Site
Posted in DEMONOID, Hot Off The Press, Legal Issues, Pornolab, rutracker, Torrents.ru | Comments Off
Wednesday, April 27th, 2011
The U.S. Government is celebrating the importance of intellectual property by educating visitors to the domain names it seized in previous months. These visitors are now redirected to an anti-piracy video instead. The viral video is running on 65 of the seized domains which have now become property of the Government, and shows how illegal downloads can financially ruin innocent workers.
Source: US Govt. Uses Seized Domains for Anti-Piracy Video
Posted in Copyright Issues, Domain Seizure, ICE | Comments Off
Wednesday, April 27th, 2011
Last week uTorrent rolled out the first Beta version of their 3.0 release. Among other things, uTorrent 3.0 allows users to rate and comment on the torrents they’re downloading. It’s a feature that many people have requested, but for the more privacy conscious user, it also begs the question where these comments and ratings are stored.
Source: Where Are uTorrent’s Comments and Ratings Stored?
Posted in Bittorrent Software, Utorrent | Comments Off
Tuesday, April 26th, 2011
After years of reading intellectual property law blogs from some of the greatest legal minds, I’m finally ready to admit that I was wrong. The fight against illegal copying is one that cannot be won. I can no longer deny the simple truth that it is ultimately futile to try to create artificial scarcities in what would otherwise be non-scarce goods.
Source: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Copy
Posted in copyright, Copyright Issues | Comments Off
Tuesday, April 26th, 2011
Tomorrow a week will have passed since Sony took its Playstation Network completely offline. The company has given only the most token of updates in that time and in the meanwhile the rumor mill has been churning. However, new information has surfaced which points to Sony’s action being prompted by an unprecedented piracy threat.
Source: Playstation Network Shut Down To End Piracy Free-For-All
Posted in Anti-Piracy, Hot Off The Press, PSN, sony | Comments Off
