Tagged: piracy

Oh, dear, major labels - don't you realise that copyright theft is a SERIOUS CRIME? Do we need to send Britney Spears over to remind you that illegally streaming a football game at a VEVO party is no different from stealing a CD from a store? Tut. Tut. Tut. TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid saw ESPN streaming from an unlicensed feed: My hunch is that the team hooked up a computer to the TVs throughout the venue so that they could accomplish this synchronized star-caressing — then, rather than rework their entire setup just [...]

Andy Baio just published his annual look at the piracy of Oscar-nominated movies . First, the good news: "A record 37 films were nominated this year, and the studios sent out screeners for all but four of them. But, so far, only eight of those 33 screeners have leaked online, a record low that continues the downward trend from last year." But, wait: "While screeners declined in popularity, 34 of the nominated films (92 percent) were leaked online by nomination day, with 25 of them available as high-quality DVD or Blu-ray rips. Only three [...]

To start with, let me state that I am not a piracy advocate. I do however believe that things are not always as obvious as we would like them to be, and the case of MegaUpload has many lessons we can learn from. Without a doubt, MegaUpload's closing-down is good ...

Dan Seitz, over at Uproxx, offers media companies five easy steps to help curb piracy . Seitz' five steps are fairly obvious to anyone following the trend of technology/piracy/media consumption, which someone in the music/movie/publishing industry has already thought of them. That, however, begs the question of why has no one implemented a decent plan? Seitz argues media industries just need digitize everything as quickly as possible, move to a tiered pricing model, reject DRM or anything else restricting the use of digital content, and work with customers. Look, not to put too [...]

"Give people a choice, and they might pay for digital music, after all." — Peter Kafka, All Things D, January 23, 2012. Damn, that Peter Kafka at the Wall Street Journal is fast. He beat me to the much-anticipated IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) 2012 report on the state ...

Megaupload has been around for ages. Why, then, did the copyright industry suddenly decide it had to act? Shauna Myers ran an interesting post on her Google+ page . Linking to a DMN story , Shauna suggests it was less about what Megaupload had done, and more about what they were about to do: I present to you... MegaBox. MegaBox was going to be an alternative music store that was entirely cloud-based and offered artists a better money-making opportunity than they would get with any record label. "UMG knows that we are [...]

Guardian: Although company documents show Beatz, real name Kasseem Dean, owns no part of Megaupload, the hip-hop star was listed as CEO on the site and had advocated the service [...]

There's some interesting figures in the IFPI report into digital music , reported by Music Week. You remember piracy, don't you? According to Nielsen/IFPI figures from November 2011, the percentage of internet users accessing at least one unlicensed site monthly stood at 27% in Europe and 28% worldwide – with around half using peer-to-peer networks. That doesn't really sound very much, does it? Over 70% of internet users not even visiting an "unlicensed site" (whatever that is) at all. But that's averages. What's happening in piracy hotspots? In some countries, the rate of [...]

CLICK IMAGE TO VIEW VIDEO Anthony Fantano runs his own music blog/youtube channel called "The Needle Drop". This week he has decided not to review another album but to protest against Sopa. His short speech is straight to the point, but vital for all music lovers to understand. Sopa is not about stopping piracy, it's about stopping your freedom. The Needle Drop: Twitter • Website PADDY Tags: Anthony Fantano , freedom , Pipa [...]

Choppy waters this week. On Wednesday, the web went largely black, as prominent sites and the denizens of the web at large protested Capitol Hill's consideration of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its sister Protect IP Act (PIPA). A mere 48 hours later, the world has shifted. Again. ...

Gizmodo: "There are plenty of players in the no-questions-asked online storage game: HulkShare, MediaFire, YouSendIt. They're all staples of web sharing—and they're all still up and running today. Partly because [...]

I suspect the RIAA will be secretly delighted at having been included on Anonymous' attacks on various copyright industry sites; they've been so long eclipsed by the MPAA in the 'trying to shore up a business model that no longer exists' lobbying that they'll just be delighted anyone bothered to take them down. I'm picturing the RIAA trying to look cross while thinking "oh, this is like the good old days when our site was booted offline every three or four days. We've still got it..." On a more serious note, the loss of [...]

Here's a quick exercise. Log on to Megaupload. Can't get on, huh? Ars Technica reports the site has been shut down by federal prosecutors in Virginia. The same group of [...]

It doesn't appear to be connected to yesterday's SOPA protests , but this is pretty significant anyway : The Federal Bureau of Investigation moved against a group of suspected online pirates Thursday, targeting the popular file-sharing website megaupload.com a day after Washington lawmakers were besieged by complaints about legislation designed to crack down on the online sharing of pirated copies of music, movies and other material, people familiar with the matter said. Investigators said there was no connection between arrests in their two-year investigation and the political firestorm that erupted this [...]

As part of the internet sort of went dark yesterday ("I can turn something called javascript off to see Wikipedia. What's javescript, thought? I know, I'll check Wikipe... nooooo...") Tom Dickins made his own protest , sending an open letter to remind Congress that the copyright industry doesn't actually speak for everyone who makes things: This is the economic reality of being a musician in the 21st century. The people who can and want to spend money on your music, will. The people who either can't or won't spend the cash will ALSO support you! They will [...]

There are likely more black pages, icons and avatars appearing on the web today than at any time in its history. Why? Two pieces of legislation being considered on Capitol Hill: The Stop Online Piracy Act (a House bill commonly called SOPA) and the Protect IP Act in the Senate ...

Fight For The Future | Sign the petition "PROTECT-IP is a bill that has been introduced in the Senate and the House and is moving quickly through Congress. It gives the government and corporations the ability to censor the net, in the name of protecting "creativity". The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites-- they just have to convince a judge that the site is "dedicated to copyright infringement." The government has already wrongly shut down sites without any recourse to the site owner. Under this bill, sharing a [...]

You know those stories of 12-year-olds being arrested for downloading mp3s? Or that family who were nearly sued because they uploaded a video of their baby dancing to a song on the radio in their kitchen? If this bill passes in the US, expect that sort of thing to increase. It is essentially proposing to give the entertainment industry the power to censor the internet. The entertainment industry already has the law on its side in fighting piracy. They don't need carte blanche to put a gag order on - or more specifically, put into prison - [...]

The most useful thing about last night's Madonna appearance on the usually quite-good Graham Norton chatshow was it demonstrated how well the regular format works. All the guests, on stage for all the programme, makes something watchable. Madonna, though, didn't have to share. This, in itself, was distracting. Why was Madge given the sofa to herself? Was that an offer from Norton's side? That seems unlikely; stars bigger and better than Madonna have squeezed in alongside others. So was it a demand from Madonna, or her people? Was the cost of getting her on the show [...]

I find it really weird how people involved in music production, and even movie production, will leak their art onto the Internet, and basically, screw themselves. But people do it, and they do it a lot. Someone leaked a shit quality version of Lamb of God's upcoming Resolution. The President of the Livecast, and Lamb of ...