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.

That said, I can almost understand where this law firm is coming from. AbingtonIP (which seems to specialize in class action lawsuits), a law firm with offices all over the mid-west, has a form on its Web site asking if you were affected by the recent Microsoft ban hammer. The law firm is specifically looking for people who haven’t had their Xbox Live service prorated. That is, say you were six months into your Xbox Live subscription when Microsoft booted you off—are you entitled to roughly $25 in recompense? (An Xbox Live Gold subscription is $50 per year, so if you only received half a year in service, then you can argue you are due $25 for services not rendered.)

Then again, maybe somewhere in the fine print it says that if Microsoft catches you using a modded console on Xbox Live it reserves the right to ban you without having to pay back a single penny for any time you had left on the agreement.

Or you can be a cynic and just assume these lawyers are out for a quick buck. Whatever works for ya.

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.

You’ll notice that, for today at least, the site’s well-known pirate ship logo has been replaced by a giant magnet. (No, Panic Software didn’t buy ad space on the front page!) That’s a clever reference to the new type of non-tracker links you’ll be clicking should you continue to use TPB. Called magnet links, these links don’t contain .torrent files, but rather the data needed for your client (Vuze, uTorrent, etc.) to connect to other peers to download the data.

It may take a little while to get used to non-torrents, yes.

Perhaps even more interesting, it seems like TPB’s higher-ups are trying to convince other BitTorrent sites to eliminate trackers, too. So says TorrentFreak, who’s usually right on the money when it comes to TPB news.

The idea is that the Internet’s big BitTorrent sites will do away with torrents so as to better evolve with the BitTorrent protocol. Presumably there are legal reasons for this, too.

How you can convince the world’s big “private” BitTorrent sites to hop aboard the DHT bandwagon, I don’t know. All the private sites I’ve been a party to have discouraged the use of DHT for the longest time.

All that said, you may want to star November 17, 2009 on your calendar, for that’s the day the tracker died. (How’s that for melodrama?)

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.

The Wi-Fi network was set up around the Coshocton County Courthouse located in central-ish Ohio. The network has been up and running for about five yeas now, and serves up to 100 people on a busy day. (Not that I have any idea of what would cause such a commotion in the town!)

The town’s commissioner said: “It’s unfortunate that one person ruins it for those who use the service legitimately.” Yes, and when some maniac stabs another person we confiscate everyone’s kitchen knives. Or when a drunk driver kills an innocent motorist the government comes around and takes away everyone’s car.

Collective punishment, anyone?

The MPAA’s nonsense really isn’t going to be challenged until our elected officials have an understanding of basic technology, which I don’t think will happen any time soon.

The service takes about 40 minutes and includes a full install as well as a quick crack. Win7 Family Edition costs $11.

I haven’t actually seen any Win7 cracks – it just never came up in my searches – but this points to the possibility that either Win7 is hard to install (which I don’t believe is the case) or that the cracks are quite complex right now, similar to the old tricks you had to play with XP.

via Shanzai

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.

The premise was this: Internet piracy is ruining the movie business. No dissenting opinions were presented to dispute that idea, so right away the report was a little fishy.

The report said that because so much money is being lost to piracy, less fewer movies are being made, and Hollywood is doomed as a result. Of course that’s a lie, since TechDirt dug up the statistics that show that nearly twice as many movies were made in 2008 as there were in 2004. And yes, more money was made.

I’ve embedded a clip (I don’t know if it’s visible outside the U.S., sorry about that) to illustrate what a piece of garbage the report was.

The beauty is that the report was presented as Lesley Stahl Reports, some really official thing, when I can guarantee the woman has no idea what she’s talking about. The look on her face when the guy explains peers and seeders and whatnot to her is priceless. That’s a good way to get an accurate report: have someone who is so clearly out of their element present the information.

And to address a TechDirt comment, as to who watches CBS anymore. That’s the thing: the people who use these technologies, who actually know what’s going on, aren’t watching, but the people who have the power to impact said technologies do. The show 60 Minutes may not mean a damn thing to anyone under the age of 60, but how many people running uTorrent all day long know how to hire a lobbyist who can call a congressman to put the wheels in motion for a DMCA-type law? What do you think your senator is more familiar with, 60 Minutes or Slashdot?

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.

Yes, the the Xbox 360 version of the game has leaked, and the ISO weighs in at 6.69GB. It’s the American version, but it’s region-free.

I’d love to know where this came from. I mean, it’s probably just that someone swiped a copy that was sitting in a warehouse somewhere, but you’d figure that all the games would be under lock and key.

So yeah, just sayin’. I don’t even know how to mod my Xbox 360 (Xbox1 was a different story!) so I could give a toss.

And yes, I’m a day late to this news. I need to get back into the habit of checking the release sites every two minutes.

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.

In hard numbers, people who download music spend an average of £77 (around $126) per year on music, versus the non-downloaders coming in an £44 ($72).

So yes, people who illegally download music are the music industry’s biggest consumer. Imagine that.

The survey, which took place in the UK (obviously) and was commissioned by think-tank Demos and carried out by Ipsos Mori, looked at 1,000 16-to-50-year olds.

Ten percent of respondents admitted to illegally downloading music.

All of this brings into question the UK Government’s plan to knock illegally downloaders off the Internet, done, of course, in order to protect the rights of musicians and, more cynically, prop up the ailing music business.

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~!

The deal is that the Government, ISPs, and intellectual property owners will work together to kindly remind you that not all forms of file-sharing are on the up and up. If they find you sharing something that you shouldn’t be, you’ll be sent a letter saying, essentially, “please stop.”

You’ll recall this was a hot-button issue during that Digital Britain debate.

That’s phase one. Authorities will check back one year later to see if the letters were effective in stopping illegal file-sharing. If it’s determined that the letters haven’t cut the piracy rate by 70 percent (man, set a high bar much?) then out comes the ban hammer.

You’ll then receive up to two “please stop” letters before you’re disconnected from your ISP.

All well and good, but wait till Brussels hears about this. Appeal, appeal, delay, appeal.

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.”

Those are the words of News Corp. Deputy Chairman Chase Carey, uttered at some sort of broadcasters pow wow.

The idea that News Corp. (and the other broadcast execs) expects to be paid for something that travels through the air 100 percent freely, and has for decades is, that’s right, ludicrous. And I’m referring only to broadcast content here. Shows like The Office and The Simpsons, and not Curb Your Enthusiasm or Weeds. Ads pay for the broadcast shows, and that anyone expects us to pay for those shows again! Ha!

It’s like this: Hulu already runs ads. I’m not gonna pay for access to the site when there’s already ads on there.

Never mind the fact that people only put up with the ads because the site is a convenience. “Sure, I’ll put up with a few ads so long as I can watch 30 Rock in between CrunchGear posts.” Otherwise, yeah, I’ll head right back to alt.binaries.multimedia and start downloading away. No ads there, and in 720p!

I mean, was I stealing all those Seinfeld reruns or 24 (aka the Jack Bauer Power Hour) when I had an HDTV antenna hooked up to my TV? I don’t recall paying to watch those shows; that’s what the ads were for!

In essence, charging for Hulu is a one-way to Irrelevant Town. I don’t care either way, seeing as thought I really haven’t watched TV for several years now (outside of live sports).

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.

Of course, BREIN is behind all of this. (BREIN is sorta Holland’s equivalent of the RIAA, and has been after TPB for as long as I can remember.) In a perfect, BREIN-approved world, TPB would just go away and never return. That doesn’t look like that’s going to happen any time soon, no here we are.

The Dutch court gave TPB’s owners, whoever they are at this point, three months to comply with the ruling, lest they face a €5,000 (~$7,500) per day fine.

TPB is currently studying the ruling, which they may well appeal. I look forward to more courtroom shenanigans. Then again, I also look forward to the day when Hollywood, and its international equivalents, figure out a business model that clicks with the world in 2009, one that doesn’t involve trying to sue dumb Web sites into the ground. One day!

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.

Yup, so TPB’s new ISP, CyberBunker, has provided the site with access to a former NATO bunker that can withstand a nuclear attack, as well as Electromagnetic Pulses. That way The Man can’t interfere with your ability to grab that latest DVD rip you have your heart set on.

What’s not known, however, is whether or not the actual servers are inside said bunker. Or maybe they’re in a different bunker, or maybe they’re just somewhere else where nobody can find them.

And interestingly enough, the crazy Dutch anti-piracy organization, BREIN, did attempt to stop the move to Ukraine, but CyberBunker, after a bit of hemming and hawing, refused to bow to the pressure.

All is right in the world.

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?

The problem goes back to a time before the Internet ruined Hollywood’s business model. Back in the day (and still today, actually) people in other countries had to wait months, if not years, for “American TV Show” to show up on their local TV networks. That wasn’t much of a problem before the Internet, because how could you get jealous in London that a new season of The Simpsons started when all you had access to was whatever the hell Sky put on the air? You can’t want to see something if you don’t know it exists.

With apologies to alt.tv.simpsons, where I used to hang out for a minute.

But now you can’t visit Digg or Facebook without seeing your online, American buddies chatting about “30 Rock” or “Curb Your Enthusiasm. These shows won’t show up on your local TV stations for months, but that’s why there’s BitTorrent!

It’s like this: would you rather wait months and months to see “Whatever” when you can download it in seconds from EZTV? That’s what I did when I was in Barcelona and wanted to see “Generation Kill.” I downloaded the episodes a few minutes after they made their way to whatever site I was using at the time.

Is that piracy though? I mean, I guess it is, but what are you gonna do? Wait around like a jerk for Local TV Station to pick up the shows?

What the studios should do, but probably never will, is either A) eliminate staggered release schedules or B) set up international versions of sites like Hulu. I mean, why do they do that staggered release nonsense anyway? To protect the local market from imports or some nonsense? One World, baby, so treat it as such.

And why can’t a Web site be set up where my BROTHERS FROM ANOTHER MOTHER~! can stream “Family Guy” from the comfort of their home in Vienna, Melbourne, or Rio? It’s a stupid, Old World restriction that no longer make sense in this environment.

And yes, I know you can merely use a U.S. proxy, but that’s not the point, 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.

We know now who made the original DMCA complaint against Google: Evasive Angels, known for such works of art as “Big Butt All Stars” and “Horny Black Mothers.” That’s right, a porn producer was responsible for The Pirate Bay being thrown off Google last week.

In any event, The Pirate Bay is back in the Google index. As if any of you need to search for TPB to find it!

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!

A search for “the pirate bay” now brings up, in the first two results, the site’s Wikipedia entry, and a link to piratebay.com, a weaselly little site that promises “unlimited downloads” for “no extra fee.” Stay far away from that, friends.

Oh, also, the DMCA complaint isn’t online yet (as of 1:30pm ET), so we have no idea who made it.

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.

It seems Miss Allen has quit the music industry after it was revealed that she had created and shared a bunch of ILLEGAL MIXTAPES. This, coming from the person who’s so against music sharing, or whatever you want to call it.

So, after being exposed as a total fool, Miss Allen has decided to quit the music business. This news must devastate, um, someone.

Again: just ban the whole stupid industry. It will not be missed.

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.

The National Institute of Informatics in Japan, along with Sharp, has developed some sort of IR-based anti-piracy measure that makes it impossible to record a movie theater screen. Quick pulses of light are blasted onto the screen from behind that, while not noticeable to the human eye, render a video camera’s recording unwatchable. Filters on the camera could try to filter out the light, but the picture would be quite blurry.

No, I have no idea what the included pic is supposed to represent.

“First you cry, then you cry 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.

The labels insist that it’s easy for popular bands such as Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails to experiment with different distribution models, but you can’t turn around and promote Unknown Band the same way. That’s why the record labels are still Very Important. I mean, what kind of 18-year-old in a new rock band knows how to record music, and throw it up on a Web site? That requires teams of highly skilled, highly compensated professionals to figure out.

I don’t know, maybe one of our English readers can offer some sort of perspective here. How is the discussion playing out, if at all? Is there TV coverage, or magazine articles being written? Does anyone give a damn at all?

I have a solution to all this music piracy business, by the way: just ban music outright. No creating it, no listening to it, just gone forever. Now everyone’s miserable, but the problem is solved.

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.

This past week I spoke to not one, but two officers of the PPUS. Ryan Martin, the party’s Administrator, and Glenn Kerbein, the party’s Operations Officer. The conversations were illuminating. Like many of you, I was only vaguely familiar with the idea of a “pirate party” as a result of the antics of The Pirate Bay. (I’ve written, at wholly unnecessary length, about TPB in the past, and my opinion on it can be summed up like this: it’s time for it to go away.) The link between the PPUS and its international counterparts isn’t as close as you might assume. As Ryan explained to me, the parties are really only linked together as a “loose confederation” that’s known informally as the International Pirate Party Movement. It’s a bit like the International Green Movement insofar as there’s no central authority telling who to do what.

But while the Greens regularly send MPs to parliaments all over the world, the American political system, wacky thing that it is, isn’t exactly keen on third parties. These days, it doesn’t seem too keen on doing anything, either, but that’s a discussion for another day (if not another blog). And it goes beyond the notion that Americans are just not “used to” the idea of a politician without a (D) or (R) next to his or her name, but the way in which the system works. You see, unlike in unitary polities, here in the good ol’ US of A you don’t really need one, national political party to be an effective national voice, but rather 50 state-level parties. So imagine how difficult it is to get some sort of organization up and running—think of the paperwork!—and multiply that by 50. This, of course, assumes that states will grant you ballot access in the first place, which, as Ryan told me, isn’t always a guarantee. Long delays in processing paperwork, “missing” paperwork, esoteric rules that not even Harvey Birdman could figure out, you name it. No, The Man isn’t working against the PPUS, it’s just that the political system in this country is so convoluted that it’s damn near impossible for someone to run an effective campaign unless they’re backed by one of the two big parties. (Read: you need money, and lots of it, to stand a chance. Just look at how Michael Bloomberg became mayor of New York City.) It’s almost as if all political thought can be broken down into two, and only two, ways of thinking.

To the point, then: what does the PPUS want, and how does it plan to go about doing that? (You should have heard the passion in Glenn’s voice when he began to speak about this stuff!) It comes down to this: the PPUS is looking to reform the way we think about copyright and trademark in this country, while simultaneously bringing some transparency back the government. That’s it. To that end, it wants to elect as many local, state, and national politicians as it can. Who knows, in 10 years maybe you—yes, you!—can run for Congress in your local district, and try to modernize the ancient ways in which we imagine ownership.

The PPUS is a 100 percent legal, federally recognized political organization, one that’s funded entirely by “micro-donations,” as Ryan put it. There is no shadowy sugar daddy behind the curtain funding these guys. And money isn’t even the issue at this point. It’s early enough in the game that your time is just as valuable, if not more so, than your dollars. Do you have a legal background? Perhaps you’d like to donate your expertise to the party? Or maybe you have extensive experience in third-party politics, and know just what it takes to get on the ballot in New York or Florida or Indiana? By all means, send the party the party en e-mail and let them know what you know.

And if you’re wondering, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have contacted the PPUS. Not to take a peek at their platform and perhaps integrate a point or two, or to see how they can better articulate their positions (if they even have them!) vis-à-vis copyright in the year 2009. That’s to be expected, I guess, when you consider how much money certain entrenched interests give to the Democrats’ and Republicans’ campaigns. Is it “free speech” to donate money to a political candidate of your choosing? Absolutely, but I somehow doubt that when the framers were drafting the Constitution they thought there would ever be so much money being thrown around, pushing this interest over that one, smearing that idea over this idea.

And while we’re on the subject of who contacting whom: neither the RIAA nor the MPAA ever sent so much as a Christmas Card to the PPUS. Here I am, thinking that maybe someone at the RIAA would have the idea to contact the PPUS and say something like, “We look forward to a healthy and rigorous debate on the issues with you guys.” Not that the RIAA or MPAA are political parties (though they both seem to have an awful lot of influence over the two big parties), or course, but that maybe they’d have a working lunch one day and, in essence, shoot the shit. A sort of, “What do you think we’re doing wrong here, suing everyone under the sun for unlawfully humming Happy Birthday while on line at the Post Office?” Nope, as far as the RIAA and MPAA are concerned, the PPUS doesn’t exist. And if you don’t exist, you can’t possibly make any sort of impact on the national debate, which is music to the RIAA/MPAA’s ears. Fully licensed music, of course, with royalties that go not to the artist, but to the record label. America!

Getting into the specifics, just how could the PPUS change copyright in this country? First, we have to understand what copyright is before we can change it. In its most simplified form: when you create a work, you and your estate—right now, my estate consists of a 2006 era iMac and an Xbox 360—are fully entitled to all related monies for up to 50 years after your death. (It begins to complicate once you start involving other people, and copyright currently can be extended to as much as 120 years after the original creation.) Write a song today or play today, and you’re entitled to make money off it till 50 years after the day you die. To me that makes zero sense: why would I need to keep making money after I’m dead, to support my didn’t-even-earn-it progeny? (I have a weird relationship with money, I readily admit.) That time limit is pretty arbitrary, Glenn says, and should be lowered to something a little more reasonable. By all means, let the artist make his or her money, but after they’re gone we don’t need to keep paying his or her estate for dozens of years, and then see that time limit extended because some sympathetic congressman snuck a provision in an omnibus bill. Something that was initially designed to help out starving artists and promote good ol’ creativity has been bent and warped beyond all recognition. The system is broken, so let’s fix it.

I did ask Glenn where all of this is going. It’s one thing to call for change, and it’s another thing to actually bring it about. (See: this past presidential election.) And the PPUS is moving in the right direction: it’s about as organized as you can expect such a lightly funded, grassroots organization to be at this stage in the game. The long-term goal, obviously, is to elect PPUS members to national office, which is to say Congress. Considering how much it costs to run an election campaign, even at the congressional level, and considering how carefully etched out election districts are, and considering all the inherent advantages that incumbents have over challengers (and challengers from a “pirate party,” no less), and you understand why that’s not really a plausible scenario in the short term. What is entirely plausible, however: running for local school board.

Both Ryan and Glenn used the word “loophole” to describe the election of local school board members. That is, you don’t have to be a member of any party to run. In fact, party ID is totally irrelevant when it comes to school board elections. And you may be thinking to yourself, “What does a local school board have to do with copyright reform?” Anecdotally, I can say that it was brought to my attention that last year that my younger brother (age 12 at the time) had come home with an assignment from his computer class that ostensibly taught the Dos and Don’ts of using a computer. What was one of the most emphasized “Don’t”? That’s right, download music! No distinction was made between legal and illegal downloads, no effort was taken to actually teach anything even remotely related to copyright. Just the blanket statement: downloading music is bad, so don’t do it. Now, of course I don’t expect a teacher to get into issues of copyright, fair use, and whatnot in a class of 12-year-olds, but why not broach the subject in high school? I graduated high school in 2004, and the subject was never brought up. Why no take one or two days out of an economics class—really, what are you learning in high school economics beyond the demand curve and that communism means everybody is equal (which, I guess, is pure evil)?—and teach the kids about copyright law? If you’re a member of a school board, you very much have the opportunity to influence that kind of decision.

I guess I can end this long-winded nonsense with this: while the PPUS certainly stands for all the right things, it more than has its work cut out for it to “make it” in this political system. For better or worse, third-parties are just portrayed as being “odd” or, the phrase of the moment, “out of the mainstream.” As if your rights as a consumer are “out of the mainstream”! In a best case scenario, I see the PPUS playing the Ralph Nader (of the 1970s) role of forcing the candidates of the two major parties to at least broach the issues it believes in.

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?

So why was Global Gaming Factory X given the boot? Oh, you know, just a minor case of fraud here and there. Charges include: providing “false information” (regarding the acquisition of TPB), showing a “lack of accountability,” and “seriously violating” transparency rules.

Just another day in the park for TPB-GGCF!

It’s basically down to this: GGCF doesn’t have the money to buy TPB, despite the fact that it said it would (1) find the proper financing (because banks are just throwing money at companies these days /me eye roll) and (2) then said it would finance the deal itself. Lies, lies and slander!

In other words, this whole thing has been a charade, which is what many of us here at CG expected from Day One.

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.

Well, not everyone can flout the law so readily, so Rhapsody, which I’ve written about a couple times, has decided to bump up the release date of the album to today, 3PM EDT. (The album was originally supposed to come out on next Friday.) Now, the official reason for the bump up is because of “popular demand and recent buzz,” but we all the real reason: to lessen the blow of piracy. It’s not like this is the first time this has happened to a highly anticipated album.

So, again, once 3PM hits today, you, too, can enjoy The Blueprint 3.

Rhapsody also has a contest that runs through Friday, where, among other prizes, lives a Vizio HDTV. You basically have to listen to the album while on Rhapsody.com, then click the little “tweet” button, and that’s it. You can read the full deets here.

And if Jay-Z sells less than 800 million copies of the album I’ll be surprised. The guy is as over as Ric Flair.