Archive for the ‘Piracy’ Category

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Activision taking RIAA-style Approach to Piracy

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

Kids – Watch out. If you think you are just downloading “to try it out before you buy it,” think again. Activision has been suing pirates of its most popular games. Kotaku has a nice, profane version of the story, and Edge Online has some deets too.

These folks a just the latest to find themselves in some hot water. When are people going to smarten up?

# awn Guse of Federal Way, Washington. Guse, unrepresented by counsel, agreed to pay Activision $100,000 (CoD 3 Wii, CoD 3 Xbox 360) to settle the case.
# Chris Hyman of Abbeville, South Carolina. Hyman, also unrepresented, agreed to pay Activision $25,000 to settle the case. (CoD3 Wii, Tony Hawk’s Project 8, Xbox 360).
# George Laflin of New Jersey. Laflin, apparently the only defendant who had an attorney, agreed to pay Activision $100,000 (CoD 3 Xbox 360).
# Maryanne Leach of Northome, Minnesota. Leach, with no attorney, agreed to pay Activision $1,000.
# Kenneth Madden of York, South Carolina agreed to pay Activision $100,000 (CoD 3 Wii, Cod 2 The Big Red One PS2, Tony Hawk’s Project 8, Xbox 360). He too was unrepresented.
# James R. Strickland, aka Ryan Strickland of New York State; case is still active (CoD3 Xbox 360).

Activision taking RIAA-style Approach to Piracy

Posted in Copyright, DRM, Legal, Piracy, Software | No Comments »

MediaPost Paying Attention

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Nice to see some traditional, mainstream media outlets covering the file sharing and bittorrent communities.

In the past week, Mediapost’s Wendy Davis has written about Pirate Bay’s new blogging platform as well as ISPs and their efforts to throttle bandwidth.

Thanks for putting some of these issues in front of a new audience. Too often, the coverage we see is biased and prejudiced against anyone who uses a lot of bandwidth – even for legal P2P applications, like Joost or Vuze.

MediaPost Paying Attention

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Posted in News, P2P, Piracy | 1 Comment »

DVD Jon Liberates Tunes from iTunes

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

More details to emerge, I’m sure, but this time DVD Jon, known for cracking the DVD copyright encryption, has cracked Apple’s DRM, enabling people to play their iTunes purchased music on non-Apple devices. San Francisco-based doubleTwist, co-founded by DVD Jon, is releasing the software.

Beyond computer-to-computer media-sharing, doubleTwist lets users synchronize media sitting on their computers to mobile devices they or their friends own, simply by “dragging and dropping” media files into a desktop folder that then drops copies of the media files onto the mobile devices over the Web.

This is similar functionality provided by Red Chair Software’s Anapod, which the Hobo’s Mom uses for dragging and dropping to her iPod. It also seems to mimic the functionality of Tunebite, which plays back songs in fast forward and re-records them as unprotected files.

While there appears to be little hope for DRM when users are determined to get around it, I still maintain that there is very little that people can’t do under “Fair Use” with DRM protected files.

DVD Jon Liberates Tunes from iTunes

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Posted in Copyright, DRM, Music, News, Piracy, Software | No Comments »

MPAA Admits “human error”

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

Ah, good stuff. Never hurts to trump up some numbers when trying to emphasize the size and scope of a problem.

In 2005, the MPAA said 44% of piracy came from college students. Now, three years later – oops! – we were wrong. It was only 15%. The blame? “Human Error.”

It took three years for the MPAA to find a math mistake that was 200% higher than the actual number? Solid.

MPAA Admits “human error”

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TorrentSpy.com Loses MPAA Battle

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

DigitalMediaWire reports that a federal judge in Los Angeles has ruled in favor of Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) member studios in their copyright infringement suits against TorrentSpy.com.

The judge also determined that TorrentSpy had destroyed evidence in the case and moved directly to the damages phase.

TorrentSpy.com Loses MPAA Battle

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Biz Wins Over Minn. Woman

Friday, October 5th, 2007

In the first illegal downloading case to make it to court, the Biz won.

A jury found that Jammie Thomas infringed upon copyrights and awarded damages of $9,250 for each of the 24 recordings cited, for a total of $220,000.

Biz Wins Over Minn. Woman

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Record Industry Takes Its Case to Court Tomorrow

Monday, October 1st, 2007

The music industry is taking its case to court for the first time tomorrow.

A group of record labels is suing Jammie Thomas for sharing music across the Kazaa P2P network. While most people threatened with legal action from the industry have opted to settle, Jammie Thomas decided to take it all the way.

At risk is more than $1.2 million. The recording association is seeking damages set under federal law, of $750 to $30,000 for each copyright violation, and accusing Ms. Thomas of sharing more than 1,700 songs.

Record Industry Takes Its Case to Court Tomorrow

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