Tag Archives: pirates

The Australian Productivity Commission has completed a new study of piracy and the reasons people have for taking part in it, and found that “sheer frustration from poor access,” was the most common. It then took the unprecedented step to call on all authorities to end geoblocking, claiming that it …

Being a pirate in the modern world is much less fun than Johnny Depp ever made it look. There's a lot less rum for one, but it's also much harder to get away with stealing an entire ship – you can't just sail off into the sunset any more. So targeting …

Although its much less of a common tactic today than it once was, some movie distributors still like to target individual downloaders and attempt to have them pay through the nose for pirating a single movie. Considering defending yourself can be an expensive practice, one judge in the U.S. has …

The British public has almost unanimously rejected a call from the government to extend the maximum prison sentence for media pirates from two years to ten, following a consultation on the matter. The results suggest that the public just doesn't see piracy in the same way the government does. To …

Although the music and movie industry have largely stopped going after individual pirates with lawsuits – unless you're the makers of Dallas Buyers Club – it hasn't stopped trying to take down those responsible for uploading content. In the finale of arrests made in early 2013, four men from the UK …

A Czech man found guilty of pirating various pieces of software faced upwards of half a million dollars in fines from the court, after Microsoft, 20th Century Fox and Sony Music demanded compensation for his sharing. However since he couldn't pay it, the courts came up with a novel solution: …

Torrent uploaders – and to a lesser extent downloaders – face the ever present threat of being discovered. If they're prolific, the knock at the door may come from a SWAT battering ram, but casual seeders may just receive a letter or email from a music lobby group or copyright …

BitTorrent Inc. the parent company behind the Utorrent peer to peer sharing software and more media focused ventures like the BitTorrent bundle, has always maintained that it does not endorse piracy or the use of its programs for such sharing. The RIAA is now calling on it to make good …

A British man from Leicestershire has been arrested on suspicion of being one of the most proflific pirates of WWE wrestling and UFC MMA events. Reportedly his uploads have been downloaded several million times and he alone has uploaded more than three terabytes of data. This means, according to PIPCU, …

Microsoft is making a big push with Windows 10 to re-ingratiate itself with its customer base. It made a big splash earlier this year when it announced that it would be giving everyone with legitimate copies of Windows 7 and 8 free upgrades, but it's now looking like it might extend that offer …

In some strange amalgamation of biting off its ball to take it home and spite its face, an Indian government body called the Tamil Film Producer's Council, has announced that it plans to halt the release of all movies in the region for three months in an attempt to send pirates out of …

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 …

Last week one of the world's most iconic torrent search sites, The Pirate Bay, was downed by Swedish authorities in a raid on a server farm located in the side of a mountain, along with several other prominent sites. Since then its future has been uncertain, with the admins speculating about …

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 …

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 …

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, …

Clearly suing downloaders and pirates doesn't work. That's obvious at this point, so some creative types have come up with a new idea: educate children about copyright while still in school. According to a bunch of authors that took to parliament yesterday to put forward some new ideas on combating …

I'm not breaking any ground when I saw that a lot of people download media illegally. You've told us for one, but it's a widespread thing that continually shows up in the headlines when a new movie is released as the producers complain, or when Game of Thrones is on …

The debate over how much damage piracy has done to differing media industries has been raging since the original creation of digital products, be they music, movies, games or software. That debate has only intensified in the last decade with the growth of P2P sharing and the answer from lobby …

The MPAA and other media lobby groups have seemingly tried everything when it comes to getting file sharing sites shut down. They've tried shutting down the servers, they've tried blocking the domains and they've tried bringing legal action against the owners and the users, but now they're taking a new …

As is often the case in this world – especially when it comes to piracy – rule makers and enforcers like to employ a “do as I say, not as I do,” kind of attitude. That's no less obvious in the case of Richard Humphrey, who was sentenced to two …

Last year the British government created a new organisation designed with tackling online piracy, called the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) and since then it's gone after file lockers and torrent sites, in an attempt to make it much harder to view copyright protected content without permission. While initially …

British authorities are hoping to go after pirate websites' sources of revenue, in a continued bid to make them less profitable and less popular. The initiative will see the creation of a list of classified “illegal” websites, known as the Infringing Website List, which will then be distributed to companies …

If you're a media lobby group like the BPI, MPAA, RIAA, FACT or any of the numerous others dotted about the globe, then you get the majority of your funding from studios paying you to be their digital piracy watchdogs. However, there's another method of drumming up the Christmas bonuses …

Anti-piracy adverts have always been a bit of a laughing stock, whether it was that giant, sweating blacksmith or the comically awful links in “you wouldn't steal a car,” but sometimes they're bad for other reasons, like being totally hypocritical. That's the situation the Business Software Alliance finds itself in today, as its …

Google has been pretty active in combating piracy on Youtube for some time now and even threw a massive finger to a lot of its hardest working contributors when it introduced the completely uncaring Content ID system which allowed trolls to strip ownership and revenue from videos with a single …

Australia regularly gets the short end of the stick stuffed where it doesn't want it, when it comes to media content access. Thanks to its often hyper-inflated per-unit cost for movies, games and TV shows, many people choose to pirate content, making it the copyright infringement capital of the world, …

While the landscape for media pirates is a lot better today than it was a few years ago, there's still a lot of copyright lobby groups and firms that are happy to bring legal action against ISPs, individuals and site owners alike. One of those companies is Zuffa, the owner …

Ubisoft has announced that Assassin's Creed IV will receive its first bit of story expanding DLC  next week . It's called Freedom Cry and it's set to come out on the 17th of December and will launch on all platforms at the same time in the US. However, in Europe it …

The US government is set to wipe a big heaping portion of egg off of its face today, after it was discovered that for several years, the military has been using pirated software, skipping out on over a quarter billion dollars worth of licensing fees. To make the problem go …