Tag: copyright
Pirate Bay: "We will not pay any fines!"
Ever defiant, the Pirate Bay has resolutely stated in a blog post on its website that it won’t be paying any fines. The post, titled “TPB FTW”, explains how the administrators of the site will be appealing Friday’s court decision, which will take another two to three years:
“You, our beloved users, know that this little speedbump on the information super highway is nothing more than just, a little bump. Todays verdict has already been appealed by us and will be taken to the next level of court (and that will take another 2 or 3 years!)”
The site also pleads with its users not to send them any donations. They provide a list of things to do if you want to support the site:
* Seed those torrents a little bit more than you usually do!
* Buy a t-shirt and show the world where your sympathy is.
* If you live in Europe, vote in the election for the EU parliament in June.
* Continue to build the internets! Start more bittorrent sites, blog more, start your own lobby group, create, remix, mash up and continue to grow more heads on this amazing hydra that we know as the internets!
* Do not be afraid of using the network. Invite your friends to this and other file sharing systems. Calm people down if they’re upset. We need to stay united.
Meanwhile, protests erupted in several Swedish cities over the court’s decision. 1,000 people turned up in Stockholm insisting that the ruling be overturned. The leader of the protest, Malin Littorin-Ferm, said:
“We young people have a whole platform on the Internet, where we have all our social contacts — it is there that we live. The state is trying to control the Internet and, by extension, our private lives,”
The generation that live ‘on the internet’ are going to become more and more important, because for them, the rules of everything – just starting with attitudes to copyright – are completely different.
(via TheNextWeb)
Pirate Bay trial begins in Sweden
The four operators of the Pirate Bay, the internet’s premier Bittorrent tracker, began their trial today in Sweden, accused of 33 cases of copyright infringement. According to charges filed by the public prosecutor, they’re “promoting other people’s infringements of copyright laws”, a reference to the fact that the site simply links to copyrighted content – it doesn’t actually host anything itself.
Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi and Carl Lundström face a fine of £100,000 and up to two years in prison, but the real effect will be on the future of file-sharing on the internet. A victory for the Pirate Bay would set back the cause of content-owners world wide.
The Pirate Bay is calling the event a “Spectrial” – a cross between a spectacle and trial. They’re trying to make the reporting of the case as open and transparent as possible, with audio and video streams available in multiple languages.
The Pirate Bay has launched a blog – http://trial.thepiratebay.org/ – though it’s currently struggling under heavy traffic, and it’s encouraging people to use the #spectrial hashtag when discussing it on Twitter. Blogs like ZeroPaid and TorrentFreak are also covering the trial in fine detail.
What I find most baffling about the whole affair, though, is that the authorities think that they can make a dent in file-sharing volumes by shutting down the Pirate Bay. If that was to happen, then 99.5% of its users would just move to another site and carry on as if nothing had happened.
Even if Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi and Carl Lundström go to jail for this, it’s highly unlikely that the site will go down for longer than 24 hours or so. I strongly suspect that the operators have backup plans in place just for that very event.
Still, I suppose the Swedish government has to appear as if its doing something to placate the content-owners whose business is crashing all around them. I just hope that they have some sense of reality about the game of whack-a-mole that they’re playing.
Leyio Personal Sharing Device – a pimped out, wireless, flash drive
The Leyio Personal Sharing Device, or PSD as they’re calling it, is an interesting proposition. At its heart, it’s just a 16GB flash drive, but it comes with added security and sharing functionality. It utilizes UWB (Ultra-wideband) radio technology, normally used in tracking and radar, to transfer data between itself and other Leyio PSDs.
UWB operates at low energy levels, so it’s less subject to interference, but it’s short range. It enables fast transfers though – Leyio claim a 3MB photo can be exchanged in 0.3 seconds. My A-level maths suggests that that’s a 10MB/s transfer rate. Not too shabby.
YouTube shoots self in foot – mutes all video with 'unauthorized copyrighted music'
In a strange, sudden and unannounced move, YouTube has suddenly muted a bunch of videos that it claims have ‘unauthorized copyrighted music’. Under the video, it says “This video contains an audio track that has not been authorised by all copyright holders. The audio has been disabled.”
Two things bother me about this. Firstly, the users are going to absolutely detest it. They’ll leave in their droves for YouTube’s competitors. I don’t understand why YouTube would agree to something as ridiculous as this – they’re not stupid, and I’m sure they realize what the effects will be.
Secondly, how does this square with the deals YouTube made two years ago, when labels made their content “available for inclusion in sanctioned consumer uploads”. This move seems to run 180 degrees in the reverse to what those deals aimed to facilitate. I’ll be keeping an eye on this one, and update the post when I hear more and/or YouTube releases some sort of official statement.
(via Media Futurist)
Related posts: Universal Music: We’re getting heaps of cash from YouTube | YouTube goes full HD at last?
PSYSTAR SAGA: Company claims Apple never copyrighted OS X
Quick recap for the slow: Psystar is a company that makes “Hackintoshes”, PCs that can (and do) run OS X. For the entirety of its life, the company has been plagued with legal problems from Apple, and it filed a number of lawsuits in response, including one that alleges antitrust issues and an illegal monopoly on the sales of Mac hardware.
Last month, a judge threw out all these claims, and Psystar was given 20 days to come up with something better. Today, they’ve tried to do just that, filing the rather strange claim that Apple failed to register the copyrights on OS X properly.
UPDATE: Stroppy Apple threatens to close iTunes in MASSIVE SULK over royalty payments
There are two very important financial rulings being voted on today. One is something to do with banks and mortgages and the world not ending, which we couldn’t care less about and certainly don’t intend trying to understand.
The other is to do with Apple and the amount of royalties it pays to record labels in return for selling their music on iTunes. Three Copyright Royalty Board judges are meeting in Washington today, to decide if Apple should be forced to boost its royalty payments from 9 cents a song to 15 cents a song for each track sold via iTunes – a 66% increase.
Apple has, incredibly, threatened to CLOSE iTunes…
The Pirate Bay hits 15 million downloaders and 3 million registered users
How appropriate. Just a few days after Talk Like a Pirate Day 2008, the Pirate Bay – the world’s most notorious bittorrent tracker – has announced that it has hit 15 million peers, and 3 million registered users. For those of you unfamiliar with bittorrent terminology, that means that they’ve got 3 million uploaders, and 15 million downloaders. That’s more than the populations of Norway and Sweden put together…
UPDATED: UPDATE: RIAA talk about Muxtape, 8tracks gain a whole lot of users overnight
Despite the optimistic message on their front page, it turns out that Muxtape have been evading the RIAA for a little while.
A spokesman for the centre of all evil in the Universe trade association for record labels had this to say on the subject…
Muxtape down, RIAA blamed, users weep
Popular digital mixtape-making service Muxtape has been shut down by the RIAA. A pity, because the service was one of the best music resources online, and a big favourite here at Tech Digest…
Survey: DVD piracy on the rise in the UK
A new survey suggests that DVD piracy is on the increase in the UK. Armed with a wheelbarrow of scepticism, we bring you the results from an analysis conducted by Futuresource Consulting: 36% of Brits (who responded to the survey) have copied DVDs within the last six months compared to 25% last year. In that time, an average of 22 movies were copied, including 13 new releases, and a “significant portion” of people were copying from rental and borrowed DVDs.
