Tag Archives: piracy

With just 10 days left on its giant countdown timer, the Pirate Bay has made its biggest return to form since it showed up several weeks after being taken down late last year. Along with the waving black flag – which takes up a lot less space than it once …

The effectiveness of warning letters sent to households that are thought to have downloaded media that's copyright protected is pretty much unknown. Some people pay up if money is demanded to make the whole thing go away, some ignore it and others fight it saying that it certainly wasn't them. However …

After a recent law was passed in Canada that forced ISPs to send copyright infringement notices to their customers, copyright lobby groups have been jumping on the bandwagon and also firing off notices of their own. However, some have been using it as an opportunity to try and extort money …

If you're going to call the kettle black, you better make sure that your pot is sparkly clean. Unfortunately for CANIPRE, the Canadian Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement organisation, it turns out that its one has more than its fair share of soot, as the anti-piracy firm has been found plagiarising news …

Game of Thrones has managed to become the most pirated show of 2014, continuing its annual winning streak. This year's season was downloaded more than eight million times via BitTorrent, steaming ahead of the rest of the competition. The Walking Dead came in at a distant second place with just …

We often hear a lot about Australia and its woes with getting legitimate access to movies and TV shows from the US and elsewhere and how that has led to it becoming one of the biggest hotbeds of piracy in the world. In the UK things are a little better, …

Google has gone ahead and started removing popular Pirate Bay applications from the Play Store. An email sent to developers noted that these apps violate intellectual property and Google's content policy. Google has slowly started getting more involved in the fight against piracy due to intense pressure from media outlets. …

UK internet providers have been forced in to blocking another 53 piracy websites, bringing the total number of sites banned by court order to 93. The ruling came down from the high court and is the latest in a series of on-going blocks. The Motion Picture Association is obviously supportive …

UK based ISP, BT, has gone on another torrent site blocking spree this week, shutting down access to sites that use private trackers and require invites from current members to download from, such as IPTorrents and TorrentDay.  This is the first time that a UK ISP has decided to block …

A federal court judge in Washington has gone ahead and rejected a $30,000 damages award against internet subscribers accused of downloading a pirated movie through a torrent client. The judge, Thomas Rice, expressed doubts that the filmmakers were really hurt that much and branded the $30,000 request as “excessive punishment”. …

It's rare to hear an artist say something that's not disparaging when it comes to piracy. Most of them are clearly told by their labels or producers that they lost X number of sales because of the downloaders out there, so you can understand why they're annoyed, or at least …

Last week saw Google instigate a new round of copyright wagon circling by implementing a new downranking system that saw many of the internet's most popular torrent search sites all but removed from the search engine's results pages. While this had a surprisingly hefty impact on those sites' traffic, it's …

Gottfrid Svartholm, the founder of notorious torrent site, The Pirate Bay, has been found guilty of hacking crimes by a Danish Court. Svartholm and an unnamed accomplice were found to have illegally accessed systems operated by IT company, CSC. The TPB founder was originally arrested way back in 2012, so …

The MPAA and National Association of Theater Owners have officially banned Google Glass from US based cinemas due to piracy fears. Those wanting to go to the movies will need to take their smart glasses off as even though the internal space on the device is small, it can still …

The City of London's Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) is a government funded organisation dedicated to clamping down on intellectual property and copyright infringements, most notably online piracy. It's been in operation for a few years now and clearly the government is pleased with its progress, as it's now …

A man and a woman have been arrested today by the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit after they were suspected of earning £350,000 by selling hard drives filled with illegally downloaded music. The couple would sell drives containing around 200,000 songs and music videos, the scheme made them a pretty …

Google has announced that in the near future, its search features are going to cater much more to legitimate sources of media than it does currently, promising that some of the world's most popular and stubborn pirate sites will no longer feature anywhere near as high in the rankings as …

The UK Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit has decided to drop charges made against a man who had his home raided and was subsequently arrested for running an “industrial scale” pirate sports streaming operation. The original arrest was made back in early September, the raid took place in Greater Manchester. …

Last year Italy dropped the ban hammer on a bunch of different sites, claiming they were heavily involved in media piracy. Some of these were file lockers like Mega, while others were webmail clients like Mail.ru. Since then however, the site owners have been appealing the decision and now after nearly a …

US District Judge, Kathleen Williams, has ordered movie giant, Warner Bros, to reveal documentation detailing the company's flawed anti-piracy measures. The records are a part of a now closed case between Hotfile and the MPAA. Three years ago, file locker site, Hotfile, countersued Warner Bros, stating that the studio had …

As if Kim Dotcom's “Moment of Truth,” revelations with Edward Snowden and Julian Assange didn't provide enough hot water for the current prime minister of New Zealand, John Key, now his political party, the National Party, is being sued by rapper Eminem's publisher, over claims a song of his was …

As file sharing has evolved over the past decade, the efforts of lobby groups and studios to stop it have done so too. Back in the day the technique of choice was to sue individual downloaders and uploaders, but that's time consuming and ultimately has little effect on the number …

The BBC has weighed in on recent copyright and piracy talks, suggesting that Internet service providers should monitor network traffic and automatically be suspicious of customers using a VPN while consuming large amounts of bandwidth- assuming that all VPN users are pirates. In a submission to the Australian government, the BBC …

Music Industry group, IFPI, has sent not one, but two take down notices to Mega, asking the site to remove Kim Dotcom's very own album, casting doubt on the accuracy of record label take down notices. Kim Dotcom founded cloud storage service, Mega, in the aftermath of the Mega Upload court …

The UK government has sent out warnings to Microsoft, Google and Yahoo stating that if these companies don't address the issue of online piracy and stop linking to illegal content voluntarily, then legislative action will be taken. Over the last year or so, the UK government has shown its full …

It turns out that Google is currently receiving and processing an all time high of one million piracy link removal requests per day, proving that copyright holders and media lobby groups just don't give up. The media Industry's new tactic is to simply overload Google with DMCA takedown requests, all …

One thing consoles have always been a bit tighter on than PCs, is piracy. That's why I had to get a friend of a friend to modify my PS One back in the 90s so it could play pirated games (only in black and white for some reason), but it …

It's rare to hear much from movie studio heads on the subject of piracy, other than the company line. It's almost always fire and brimstone in one guise or another, aimed at ISPs, site owners or maybe even the downloaders themselves. However there's a chance the tide could be turning, …

It's not often you hear about a government employee that' isn't all fire and brimstone when it comes to copyright law enforcement. Most of the time they're backed up by the MPAA or RIAA waving their pitchforks and blocking sites, suing individuals and site owners, but down under it seems, …

The police are getting involved with the UK's new anti-piracy initiative it turns out. Right now the Police plan to take over banner ads on piracy sites to display warnings advising users to close the page and not proceed to download anything. This is part of a campaign led by …