It’s safe to say that we hear at CrunchGear think you should be able to do whatever you want with hardware that you buy. Let’s take console modding. You wanna flash the drive on your 360 for whatever reason? Fine, go ahead. But don’t think that you can log onto Xbox Live with said modded console, and play your misbegotten wares (or is that warez?), on Microsoft’s network. It’s against the TOS, it makes a mockery of the entertainment medium that you purport to support, and, well, is unfair to the other players.

Pretty big news to share with y’all today: The Pirate Bay is no more. Well, “no more” in the sense that the site’s admins have decided to kill the tracker once and for all. The site will continue to serve the BitTorrent community, but will instead rely upon trackerless technology, such as DHT and PEX.

It’s getting harder and harder to be surprised about the MPAA’s silly tactics. So, surprise! The MPAA has successfully shut down an Ohio town’s municipal Wi-Fi network because one person was caught illegally downloading a movie. You know, peers and seeders and all that.

Arr… Vendors in Beijing’s Zhongguancun market are charging customers $7 to install Windows 7 onto any computer. The hilarious part? The copies of Windows are pirated.

Bias much, CBS? The network ran a report on 60 Minutes the other day (which shows how far off our radar the show is, seeing as though we just found out about it) that, according to TechDirt’s fantastic report, is basically a piece of MPAA propaganda. It makes all sorts of ridiculous claims that can easily be disproven by, you know, spending two minutes looking this stuff up.

As I cleverly remarked in the official CrunchGear chat room, that a video game leaks a few days before its release is par for the course. When the biggest video game of the year leaks a full week before its release date, it’s worth noting. So that’s what I’m doing right now: Activision’s Modern Warfare 2 has leaked. It’s available where you usually find such things.

Well, well, well, look what we have here. A new study shows that people who download music illegally are more likely to buy music than their non-pirating counterparts. Why’s that? It turns out that people who are into downloading music are actually into music, whereas people who don’t download music aren’t necessarily fans of music in general.

The ban hammer is about to smash UK file-sharers. Legislation there is set to take effect in April that would, as a last resort, kick illegal file-sharers off the Internet. Very exciting~!

Hey, remember Hulu.com? It was a Web site that sort of came out of nowhere, and offered streaming TV shows from NBC and other networks. It was ad-supported, and free. People liked it. And then, one day, in October, 2009, a completely bonkers TV executive all but killed it with one sentence: “It’s time to start getting paid for broadcast content online.”

More news about The Pirate Bay to bore you all! (Seriously, it’s not like people are still talking about the old Suprnova or Torrentspy anymore, yet the TPB has stuck around.) Some time ago, a Dutch court ordered TPB to delete a number of torrents and block Dutch IP addresses from being able to visit the site. Using a sledgehammer on a thumbtack, yes. Then TPB protested, as it does all the time, saying that it had no idea about the court case to begin with, so it couldn’t make a proper defense, etc. The Dutch court agreed to give TPB a a little bit of time to work out its issues, and has now reached another, similar verdict: remove the torrents, and block Dutch IP addresses. Fun all around, really.

I think we’ve all had our fill of The Pirate Bay stories, but here’s one more in the interest of killing five minutes. The site moved its servers from Sweden to Ukraine last week, and rather than have its servers being stored in some random server farm, they’re being stored in a former NATO nuclear bunker. So we think, at least.

What’s wrong with sites like Hulu? Well nothing, per se, except for the fact that they can’t be used anywhere outside of the Unites States. As if other countries don’t want to watch… um, really great shows like “Extreme Makeover” and “The [American] Office”! Perhaps that’s why, then, BitTorrent site EZTV has seen traffic double, mainly from non-American IPs, in the past year? For whatever reason, people want to watch these shows, but since there’s no legal outlet to do so, well, it’s not exactly hard to configure uTorrent or Transmission, now is it?

At ease, soldiers. The Pirate Bay is back in the Google search index. I understand this was eating at your very soul for some time now.

The Pirate Bay just can’t catch a break these days. I won’t bore you with the past, but today’s juicy gossip is: Google has removed The Pirate Bay from its search index because of a DMCA complaint!

Do you know who Lily Allen is? I sure as hell don’t, nor do I care to know who she is. I mean, I know who she is now: she’s some musician who is against piracy. Good for her, great. Years from now, Future People will erect a statue of her and put it in the middle of New York harbor in order to honor her bravery. It’s the least we can do, right? Yeah, well, it seems Lily Alen isn’t just brave, but she’s also monumentally hypocritical. Again, good for her, I don’t care.

There’s an old Seinfeld episode where Jerry agrees to become a bootlegger. His skills at recording the screen with a tiny, hand-held camera are top-notch, so he’s roped into helping out the little kid on the street who can’t get into R rated movies. You know the episode I’m talking about, the one where Elaine dances all weird. (Here comes the horrible segue-way!) If this new technology is widely adopted, episodes like that won’t ever happen again.

It’s time for story Eight Million and Six-teen about how the record labels and the musicians they ostensibly represent no longer get on with each other. This time, we have a bit of a row developing over in the UK, where that proposed knock-people-off-the-Internet-for-file-sharing law is currently stirring division amongst the ranks. One on side, of course, you have the record labels who, in the year 2009, are still afraid of piracy destroying the music business (please note: that’s destroying the music business that made record label execs fat and happy; music hasn’t gone away, it’s merely changed, and change is death to the record label middle men), and on the other, the musicians who recognize that, you know, maybe suing the pants off your customers isn’t the best thing to do.

Let’s make one thing absolutely clear about the Pirate Party of the United States (PPUS): it has no interest in defending your ability to illegally download The Blueprint 3 from Waffles.fm. It just doesn’t. If you had the idea in your head that the PPUS would somehow work to legalize your bad habits, well, tough break, kid: it’s a legitimate political party whose goal is not to make it so that you can download the latest Lady Gaga release with impunity, but rather to effect change in the more general realm of copyright and governmental transparency. In other words, you may want to lower that skull and crossbones flag you’ve been flying.

Lost in all the Apple hoopla yesterday: the company that wanted to buy The Pirate Bay was just thrown off the Swedish stock exchange. Still think the deal is going down?

Knowing you guys, you not only knew Jay-Z’s The Blueprint 3 leaked several days ago, but you grabbed it instantly, and gained some nice ratio buffer in the process. Oh, and you listened to it many times over (as have I). Good, great.