There’s a fight going on online, and it’s turning nasty. Following on from Virgin Media’s blocking of the Pirate Bay, Anonymous has ripped into the ISP’s website and turned the lights off. Thing is, the Pirate Bay wants to fight its own battles, and now everyone’s angry. What’s going on? Read on for the full details, before someone switches the web off for good. Read more
Online piracy is a sticky situation that’s not going to go away any time soon. On one side you’ve got the pirates doing anything they can to not get caught. On the other, the IP industries desperately trying to protect profits. There’s no easy answer, but then maybe there isn’t one. Vint Cerf, one of the so-called ‘fathers of the internet’ doesn’t have a solution, but he’s at least got a couple of bright ideas, as we discovered during a talk yesterday… Read more
Imagine you run the Pirate Bay. You’ve got to be watching your back at all times, forever nervous that someone’s going to bring the walls down around you. The solution? Takes to the skies, of course. News from the Swedish file directory’s official blog is that it’s building “something extraordinary” to help it do exactly that. Read more
Changes to copyright law will make it a lot easier for cloud music services including Google Music, Amazon Cloud Player and the iTunes in the cloud feature of Apple’s iCloud to launch in the UK. Business Secretary, Vince Cable, will announce the proposals in a speech at the British Library today.
The changes also aim to finally make it legal to copy music and DVDs to your computer or MP3 player. Laughably, it’s still technically illegal to transfer content from its original format to another for personal use, which means anyone who owns an iPod has been a lawbreaker for years. Read on for full details on what the changes will mean to you…
Michael Fricklas, general counsel at entertainment mega-corp Viacom, has admitted that suing end users for online copyright infringement is “expensive, painful and feels like bullying.”
The Pirate Bay is on the way to going legit (so it claims) but it’s still had its problems recently – knocked offline by a copyright claim and ripped from Google results in one week. But it’s now back online, back in Google and back in business.
Before The Sims 3 even launched, it suffered from a staggering scale of piracy at the hands of Bit Torrent users. So how is EA’s CEO John Riccitiello taking it? Surprisingly well, actually; in fact he even went so far as to jokingly refer to it as “our secret marketing campaign.”
UPDATE: The rumours were right. YouTube is now streaming full length films from Sony Pictures!
