In 2003 a group of friends from Sweden decided to found Piratbyrån (the bureau of piracy), a lobbying organization to promote the sharing of information and culture. A few months later the group took a decision that would change the Internet – the launch of a BitTorrent tracker named ‘The Pirate Bay’. Today marks the end of an era with the announcement that Piratbyrån has disbanded.
This week Swedish police arrested three individuals on suspicion of copyright infringements. The trio are suspected of having connections to ‘Scene’ warez servers known as ‘Darkside’. According to anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån, the servers carried huge amounts of data making the case the biggest so far in Sweden, and possibly in Europe.
The UK Government has discovered that BitTorrent is the cheapest and most effective method of sharing large files with the public. As part of the UK Prime Minister’s transparency initiative, the Treasury has today released several torrents with details on how the Government spends the public’s money.
In common with many websites, several torrent sites have their own Facebook fan pages that are used to interact with users. These pages usually update fans on site news and do not link to torrent files. Despite this, Facebook does not seem tolerant of all torrent site fan pages, and has just removed one of the popular ones.
According to an eagle-eyed game buyer, Rockstar could have caused themselves quite a bit of embarrassment when they made Max Payne 2 available on Steam. A close examination of the game’s executable reveals that it contains the ASCII text logo of game piracy group Myth.
The MPAA, RIAA and other entertainment industry groups want people to believe that piracy is the result of people’s greed and refusal to pay. A recent experiment by Wolfire Games sheds another light on this argument, as they found out that even a penny can be too much.
Two nights ago, LCD Soundsystem played a secret show in New York. On stage, frontman James Murphy said that fans could copy their new album, but pleaded with anyone in the audience who may have an advance copy not to leak it before the release date. Unfortunately the plea either fell on deaf ears, or was just made in the wrong place to the wrong people.
An Italian minister has stirred up controversy by not only criticizing the efforts of the French to disconnect file-sharers from the Internet, but by also admitting he’s a pirate himself. Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, a musician in a band, believes the solution to online file-sharing lies in a compromise, where music is paid for by advertisers and sponsors
Geremi Adam, a member of the movie release group ‘maVen’ who was sentenced to two and a half months in prison recently, has died from a suspected drugs overdose. According to his partner, Adam started taking morphine while trying to cope with the stresses of prison life. The signs are that his habit could have killed him.
As mass file-sharing litigation lawsuits go inter-continental, not everyone is proud to be associated with this type of work. Lawyers Tilly Bailey & Irvine in the UK have been hard at work this month, editing large chunks of their own Wikipedia page in an attempt to hide their involvement and also earning themselves a copyright infringement warning.
