Tag Archives: MPAA

The Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), a British run organisation that lobbies and sues to combat piracy, has been dealt a major blow by its biggest contributor. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has cut its funding to the group, reducing its financial support by as much as 50 …

It seems that Hollywood has completely missed the point once again. MPAA backed anti-piracy initiative, WheretoWatch.com is a tool designed to point consumers towards legal alternatives to piracy but there is a catch, it is only accessible to those in the US, meaning a VPN is required if people elsewhere …

Google has been both a friend and a foe for organisations like the MPAA over the years. While it has acquiesced to DMCA takedown requests and helped block certain websites from being accessible through its search results, it's also been more reactive than proactive in doing so and therefore is …

The Motion Picture Association of America recently released a statement claiming that complaining about availability with movies was ridiculous, as clearly there are many legal avenues to go down when it comes to buying and renting movies in your own home. However research suggests that most of the top-torrented films …

Mississippi Attorney General, Jim Hood, has apparently been giving Google a hard time for the past year and a half, with repeated urges to try and have it block content online. Now though Google is turning the tables on him and suing him for having close ties with the MPAA, …

While Sony might not want anyone talking about the leaks, I don't know if many people will complain about everyone knowing what the MPAA has planned over the next few years. It's future anti-piracy strategy has been revealed as part of the hack and it shows that it plans to …

BT, like all the other big ISPs in the UK has repeatedly been forced by lobby groups, through the court system, to block many websites linked with piracy, despite the fact that circumventing the block orders has become incredibly easy. After the latest round of blocks however, BT has begun …

Google has turned down the request from the MPAA to blacklist the homepage of a number of sites in its search results. While it has yet to publish a response as to why it turned down this particular request, it's been speculated that it could be because any pirated content …

You know what the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and its contemporaries like the MPAA are fed up with? Their human rights being infringed upon. No, not because organisations like theirs are clamping down on freedom of expression by restricting access to information, but because those dastardly pirate sites are …

Expendables 3's fallout could go down as one of the biggest piracy related stories of the year. Not only was it leaked pre-release, but it was leaked at a decent quality too. This sent Lionsgate into a meltdown, with lawsuits, site take downs and presumably a lot of finger pointing …

When it looked like MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom's legal team might actually win his extradition trial, the MPAA and RIAA announced new law suits to try and cripple his funding. Those suits are still ongoing today, but now Dotcom's representatives want them delayed, since once again, the extradition trial has …

The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), set up late last year to help the authorities in the UK tackle online piracy and file sharing, has hailed its efforts over the past nine months as impactful, stating that with the help of media lobby group FACT (the British arm of …

It was announced last month that Kim Dotcom would be likely to regain all of his frozen assets, after New Zealand's high court ruled that it would not extend the foreign restraining order against them, thereby giving a real timeframe that would see Dotcom's cars, personal property like laptops and …

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 …

One of the cornerstones of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) case against file locker site MegaUpload and its founder, Kim Dotcom, is that the site was nothing to do with online backup of personal files, but was only a source of …

Kim Dotcom and the MPAA are two legally represented entities that have been circling each other, locking horns and disengaging for years now, taking swings in the court and the papers but in all but a few cases, they've had lawyers buffering their commentary. However following on from the lobby …

Movie studios and lobby groups have been gunning for Kim Dotcom for some time. In conjunction with the New Zealand authorities and FBI, they spied on him before and after his arrest in January 2012 and since have been pushing to have the man extradited to the US. However with …

Kim Dotcom made headlines again last week with the news that Popcorn Time, the real end game for online movie piracy, was taken down from his Mega file locker service. According to his own statements, he had no idea about it until after the fact and we still don't know …

When your job is to fix something, you often have the dichotomy of ideals in your head. You want to fix the problems that occur, but if you do such a good job that it will make your job useless, then why would you continue to be paid to do …

Isohunt's decade and-a-bit long career as one of the world's paramount torrent search sites has come to an end and the site's owner and founder, Gary Fung, has initiated the self-destruct sequence, shutting the site down a couple of days before his original court settlement decreed. It was just last …

Pirates around the world, remove your stove hats for a minute of silence please. Isohunt, one of the world's longest running and most popular torrent search sites has finally succumbed to legal pressure from the media lobby and US government and has been forced to settle on a cease and …

Shock and horror, it turns out that the most pirated movies might be suffering from problems with availability, making the illegally downloaded version not only cheaper, but quicker, easier to access and simpler to find, according to data from a newly launched website: PiracyData.org. The site takes the list of …

The MPAA has released what it describes as a ‘debunking' of the recent London School of Economics study that suggested piracy wasn't having anywhere near the negative impact that media lobbyists have been saying for years. The LSE's response? This is all par for the course. The study was “debunked” …

Media lobby groups like the MPAA and RIAA in America and the BPI over here in the UK, have been using all sorts of nefarious tactics over the past few years, to try and block sites related to piracy. They've used DMCA takedown requests – that have even targeted their …

The Motion Picture Association of America has claimed victory in a summary judgement against file locker website HotFile, which it maintains has built its entire business on the trafficking of illegally pirated movies, music and software – despite the fact that the most popular shared files on the site are …

Today torrent search site Isohunt lost an appeal against the MPAA which would have seen it able to halt the filtering of its search results. However, backing up the initial 2006 ruling that forced the filtering into place, the court did not rule in the site's favour. Isohunt has been …

Despite the fact that his legal team has been denied access to the majority of evidence against him and therefore much of the supposed illegal surveillance that the New Zealand intelligence agency, GSCB gathered, Kim Dotcom has promised that there will be “interesting facts” about both NZ authorities and US …

Throughout 2012 we had a lot of attacks on piracy. There was the blocking of sites like The Pirate Bay, the confiscation of a nine year old girl's laptop, porn stars going after torrent users and loads more. However despite the number of anti-piracy stories, we've also had BitTorrent Inc. …

The head of Kim Dotcom's US legal defence team, Ira Rothken, has been speaking with Radio New Zealand about the Megaupload trial stating that he believes it has grown beyond its original meaning into something that's important for all New Zealanders, because it shows how well protected they are from …

One of the world's most strictly regulated and ethically proud torrent websites, UKNova,  has been forced to announce its imminent closure, after FACT – the UK arm of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) – serviced it with a cease and desist order. Despite full compliance from UKNova regarding …