The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) wants $15.4 million from The Pirate Bay for copyright infringement. It cited that “The Pink Panther” torrent file has been downloaded from The Pirate Bay almost 50,000 times. The Pink Panther — starring Steve Martin? I think 50,000 downloads would eclipse the number of people who saw it in the theater. Plus, it’s just the torrent file. There’s no telling how many people actually got the movie fully downloaded. That’s not likely to stop the MPAA, though.
The MPAA is asking for between $37 and $44 per download, per film and almost $70 per downloaded episode of the TV show Prison Break. The law firm representing the MPAA says that these sums are fair “because the distributed files didn’t include copy protection, and were made available before the release of a DVD or a legal download,” according to IDG News Service.
That seems a bit steep to me. The lawsuit also calls for interest to accrue over time, which pretty much means that the MPAA doesn’t expect The Pirate Bay to be too willing to pay up anytime soon.
In what can only be termed a crushing defeat, leading torrent site TorrentSpy has been ordered to pay more than $110 million to the MPAA by a US District judge. It’s been a losing battle following TorrentSpy’s decision in March to make a stand by erasing a huge amount of MPAA-requested data they considered private.
This isn’t the time for sites like TorrentSpy to win cases like this — that’s still a ways off. In the meantime, though, their best course of action is to do what TorrentSpy and the Pirate Bay have been doing, even if that means you get hammered with an unfathomably huge fee. For those about to pay, we salute you.
In 2005, the Motion Picture Association of America did a study where it claimed to find that college students account for 44% of the losses that the movie industry incurs, thanks to the illegal downloading of pirated films over high-speed campus networks. That figure is more like 15% due to a “human error,” according to the MPAA. That’s a pretty big difference. What’s more, that figure may actually be closer to 3%.
Use BitTorrent to, cough, illegally download music, movies, games and whatnot? If you do, you might want to watch this video, which explains how tracking agencies (the companies the **AA hire to track your downloads, often leading to a letter from your ISP saying you’ve been caught) do what they do. It’s fairly informative and will tide you over until the MacWorld three ring circus begins in a couple of hours.
I do use PeerGuardian (well, SafePeer, to be exact) when I use Azureus, mainly for the illusion that I’m being protected. Who knows if it actually does anything.
Say hello to the source of the MPAA’s next ulcer. It’s ZML.com, a site with similar ultra-simplicity and low, low pricing to former heavyweight music champ Allofmp3.com.
The site offers movies in varying levels of quality, with the lower resolution movies starting at $1.99 and the highest resolution movies (DVD-quality) topping out at $4.99. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Use at your own risk because the legality of this service is similar to Allofmp3, which got shut down.
Movies are preformatted for your iPod, PDA, and/or big screen but it’s a crap shoot as to whether or not the movie you want is available in a particular format. It’s not quite as evolved as Allofmp3.com’s on-the-fly file encoding…yet. We’ll be watching this one like a hawk. I can almost hear the faint shuffle of the assembling army of lawyers.
Are you an out-of-work hacker angry at the world/some guy from TorrentSpy who wouldn’t let you do some ridiculous ad thing? Want to make over $4,999? Then send the MPAA an email. They’ll pay you $5,000 for secret information about TorrentSpy (Hacker: “They use PHP and Apache.” Hollywood: “Is that special code for stealing movies?” Hacker: “Yes.”). You’ll become hated by everyone in the world ! Best of all, you’ll learn a valuable lesson: don’t trust the man. Read More
Don’t ask, don’t tell. Oh, but if the RIAA catches you, your ass is grass. That’s essentially how New York University, known as NYU to the Haley Joel Osments and Spike Lees and John Biggses of the world, treats piracy on campus. (I’ll be a senior there this fall.) I logged into the school’s main portal today to determine whether or not my $73 zillion in loans had cleared—they have! Debt rules!—and found an interesting little note from one of the higher-ups here. “A Note On Illegal Downloading,” a title that just screams faux academics, basically tells new and returning students this: look, we know you download music and movies, just don’t get caught. Because, hey, if you do, you’re on your own.
I know this spread like wildfire last night, but it’s pretty funny. The MPAA hired a company, MediaDefender, to stop piracy. How did they do it? Through a fake video download site called MiiVi, a red hot download site full of red hot videos. The catch? It makes you download spyware that reports back on stolen video found on your computer. What a treat!
How did the world find out about the ruse? The morons used their own name and address to register the domain.
I’ve said it once and I’ve said it again — these ham-handed efforts are so disgustingly transparent and foolish that it reflects poorly on an industry that has, thus far, acted like a bucket of morons. I love me some movies and I buy me some movies on iTunes, but this is like watching Gargamel trying to squash the Smurfs and it just makes me want to download some red hot movies.
Up until about a month ago, if you got caught pirating some software, music, or video, you could just claim that your router was left unsecured and that anyone could have accessed it. This claim would cause the party trying to sue you to drop their case against you and you’d walk off a free man or woman. But now times have changed and these big-shot lawyers accusing you of piracy now know that your router isn’t an acceptable cause for pirating. Read More
The nerds cried foul and Digg acquiesced. Digg’s founder—and deity to many—Kevin Rose just posted an explanation for all the shenanigans that happened yesterday regarding HD DVD encryption key stories being pulled. The short of it, Digg has a policy of removing stories from the front page that it deems could get it into legal trouble—porno, piracy, and here, encryption keys. But since so many users were virtual rioting, Rose caved in.
You would think that with the MPAA suing people left and right for copyright infringement and with movies like Ghost Rider climbing to the Number 1 spot you’d think it’d have $50 to throw a blogger for his software.
“Think again!” cries Patrick Robin, designer of the Forest Blog publishing platform. Robin recently discovered that the MPAA’s blog (currently down) is using his software without having paid the proper licensing fees – 10 British Pounds for a personal license, 25 Pounds for a commercial license.
So has Robin gotten his money yet? Nope. The MPAA has yet to reply to a letter he wrote regarding the theft of his code.
A charming little video by the Futuristic Sex Robotz who seem to be upset by some sort of “copy protection” on music. I suspect they’re just angry because they don’t have big record deals like Nelly Furtado and don’t get to be taken both from behind and the front by rapacious contacts. Next year, boys!
