Tag: Piracy
Atari abandons filesharing lawsuits
Following the news the other week that some pensioners had been accused of downloading pirated games, Atari has abandoned its ‘sue-your-own-customers’ strategy, developed in conjunction with trigger-happy lawyers Davenport-Lyons.
Although the company maintains that it will “always retain and reserve the right to protect our intellectual property from illegal copying and piracy”, this is a positive step from a company realising that the only thing it’s actually getting out of the campaign of intimidation is bad press.
Will other companies follow? Codemasters is the biggest games publisher still associated with the troubled law firm. With any luck, it will wake up too, and realise that bringing legal action against its customers is far more trouble that it’s worth. There are many other options for making money with games.
I’m off to go buy some Atari games.
Atari (via TorrentFreak)
Related posts: Pensioners ‘caught’ pirating games | Atari and Codemasters join video game piracy legal fight – £300 fines on the way to 25,000 game-sharers
On Orange? Blocked from the Pirate Bay? Here's a solution.
There’s no official confirmation yet, but it appears that Orange has blocked its customers from accessing the world’s biggest Bittorrent tracker – the Pirate Bay. Orange subscribers first starting reporting problems accessing the site last Friday, and since then Orange has been very vague – not providing any solutions to customers, and not confirming or denying the block.
Orange’s PR company state:
“Our understanding is that Orange doesn’t block access to any sites other than those identified by the Internet Watch Foundation, that relate to illegal child abuse imagery. However, we’re looking into this and will update you again as soon as we can.”
However, French customers are also reporting the same block, so it seems unlikely that this is a technical problem, especially as people can access the site fine when viewed with a proxy. If you’re an Orange customer, click over the jump to find out how to get onto the site in this way.
Legal vs Illegal music downloads now 51% to 49%. Hopefully stats for "not murder vs murder" not quite so close.
It has only taken ten years, but legal music downloads have finally overtaken illegal downloads – according to one survey, at least.
A survey by Entertainment Media Research suggests that 51% of web users now download music legally, through services such as iTunes rather than the virtual equivalent of the dodgy man in the pub with a long coat who has a long coat full of mobile phones.
Arr, it be talk like a pirate day!
Aye, today, September the 19th, is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. “What?” I hear you cry… Shi’er me timbers, you deserve t’ walk the plank if you’ve had your head buried in the sand, like Da’y Jones’ treasure, o’er the last couple o’ years. Arrr, tis’ had massive media coverage…
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…
Atari and Codemasters join video game piracy legal fight – £300 fines on the way to 25,000 game-sharers
It would appear that yesterday’s shaming of poor Isabella Barwinska was no one-off – some of the largest players in gaming are joining up to (try to) eliminate online piracy.
Atari and Codemasters, who make half the stuff you’ve played during your lifetime, have joined Topware and another couple of companies in targeting P2P-using game pirates, and will, according to The Times, start sending out automatic £300 fines…
Woman made example of – fined £16,000 for illegally downloading a game
Poor old Isabella Barwinska just wanted to have a bit of fun playing pinball on her PC with her friends, but she’s ended up with a £16k fine after being tracked down via the P2P network she used.
Isabella unwisely chose to nick a copy of Pinball Dreams 3D off the internet, no doubt attracted by its wide variety of tables and realistic arcade gameplay! But she was rumbled, and recently ordered to pay damages of £6,086.56 and costs…
Italian Pirate Bay traffic goes up, staff drink bottle of rum to celebrate
All publicity is good publicity, or so the saying goes – and it might just be right. Apparently since the Italian government banned BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay the other day, the site has seen a 5% increase in hits coming from Italy…
Google launches ad-funded music search service in China, to battle local piracy
Google is trying to succeed where all have failed, by stemming the impact of piracy in China.
Its latest venture, an ad-funded music search service, hopes to go some way toward making a bit of money out of flogging music in China, a country where it’s believed 99% of all music distributed has been obtained illegally somewhere along the line.
Google’s music search service will lets users browse “tens of thousands” of songs…
Airports given the power to scan your media player for copyrighted material?
Good lord, imagine the queues this would cause.
Global world-controlling power-consortium G8 is, apparently, looking at plans to give airports the power to scan portable media players for copyrighted material when you fly, under its upcoming Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement…
