You will never kill piracy and piracy will never kill you.
posted by Sebmojo on Feb 4, 2012 - 216 comments

MegaUpload is currently being portrayed by the MPAA and RIAA as one of the world’s leading rogue sites. But top music stars including P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg and Kanye West disagree and are giving the site their full support in a brand new song. TorrentFreak caught up with the elusive founder of MegaUpload, Kim Dotcom, who shrugged off “this rogue nonsense” and told us he wants content owners to get paid. “It works like an ad blocker but instead of blocking ads we show ads coming from Megaclick, our ad network,” says Kim. “This way we will generate enough ad revenue to provide free premium services and licensed content so that our users can have it for free.”
posted by finite on Dec 9, 2011 - 73 comments

Amelia Andersdotter of Sweden's Pirate Party (Piratpariet) will finally become the youngest ever member of the European Parliament this December. [more inside]
posted by jeffburdges on Nov 25, 2011 - 19 comments

The U.S. House of Representatives has drafted their version of Senator Leahy's Protect IP Act, renaming the bill the E-Parasites Act. Among other changes discussed previously, the bill now makes internet service providers and websites liable for activities of their users that infringe upon copyrights, effectively overturning parts of the 13-year-old Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
posted by jeffburdges on Oct 27, 2011 - 120 comments

A FOIA request by Christopher Soghoian revealed that Obama administration officials, including Copyright Czar Victoria Espinel, Biden’s deputy chief of staff Alan Hoffman, and criminal prosecutor Lanny Breuer, negotiated the deal between ISPs and copyright holders to punish subscribers whose IP addresses participated in copyright infringement. [more inside]
posted by jeffburdges on Oct 21, 2011 - 52 comments

Senator Leahy's Protect IP Act would require that U.S. ISPs impose an 'internet death penalty' upon domain after merely a preliminary injunction from a U.S. court that suspects the site of being 'dedicated to infringing activities', even if the domain's owner had never been notified and was not subject to U.S. jurisdiction. There is concern that the legislation would fragment the DNS system and facilitate DNS spoofing by obstructing DNSSEC (pdf). There is also an open letter opposing the bill signed by 108 Law Professors who study intellectual property law. [more inside]
posted by jeffburdges on Jul 24, 2011 - 29 comments

Major US Internet providers—including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision, and Time Warner Cable—have just signed on to a voluntary agreement with the movie and music businesses to crack down on online copyright infringers. The policy features a graduated series of responses to infringing activity, ranging from "educational" warnings to throttling of connection speeds.
posted by Horace Rumpole on Jul 7, 2011 - 96 comments

Swedish "Pirate" MEP Christian Engström has announced that today or tomorrow Europe will be voting on extending copyrights for recorded music from 50 years to 95 years.

Recently, Engström and Dutch liberal party D66 MEP Marietje Schaake have submitted a formal question to the European Commission on the conflict of interest arising from their appointment of Maria Martin-Prat. Martin-Prat has spent years directing 'global legal policy' for IFPI, the global recording industry's London-based trade group, but will now be overseeing IPRED and the ongoing ACTA proposals (previously).

On the other side of the pond, Judge Beryl Howell has overturned restrictions established by lower courts on the issuing mass subpoenas to ISPs during her first week on the U.S. D.C. District Court (previously, known results). Beryl Howell was recently employed as an RIAA lobbyist and Executive Managing Director and General Counsel at the pirate chasing company Stroz Friedberg.
posted by jeffburdges on Apr 11, 2011 - 211 comments

The International Intellectual Property Alliance, an umbrella group for organisations including the MPAA and RIAA, has requested with the US Trade Representative to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its “Special 301 watchlist” because they use open source software. (also here) [more inside]
posted by knz on Feb 25, 2010 - 61 comments

A new trojan is on the loose. It doesn't install any harmful adware/spyware, but does block both mininova and the Pirate Bay.
posted by azarbayejani on Jan 6, 2009 - 26 comments

Internet television host Revision3 was the victim of a denial of service attack this weekend. The source of the attack? None other than RIAA and MPAA-funded MediaDefender.
posted by mullingitover on May 29, 2008 - 27 comments

Anti-Piracy agents MediaDefender have 700MiB of juicy internal emails leaked on BitTorrent; are in trouble.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 on Sep 16, 2007 - 83 comments

Permission to Innovate? How the Record Industry Is Like 17th-Century French Buttonmakers A corporate consultant blog makes a weird but compelling argument that the RIAA and MPAA are forcibly imposing a draconian 17th-century business model on the 21st century.
posted by jonp72 on Jan 13, 2007 - 45 comments

"Don't Download This Song." A free, and rather hilarious, download from "Weird Al" Yankovic done in the 'charity gospel' "We are the World" style, including a few gems in the lyrics like "even Lars Ulrich knows it's wrong." Direct MP3 link. Music video evidently coming shortly.
posted by WCityMike on Aug 22, 2006 - 35 comments

Cory Doctorow visits a Radio Shack. via keswick and MeCha
posted by loquacious on Jun 5, 2006 - 148 comments

Suprnova.org is back... with a vengeance?! It was just last week when suprnova.org, the most popular site online for finding BitTorrent downloads, shut down their site. The MPAA and RIAA crowed, but it appears the celebration was a tad premature. Suprnova's new site mentions a special announcement tomorrow at 9 PM GMT on NovaStream.org radio. Rumors suggest that it will introduce Exeem, a decentralized, BitTorrent-driven software client that turns every user into a tracker, removing the requirement for a centralized site such as suprnova, while providing users with easy searchability, the swarming powers of BitTorrent, and a network that is far harder to shut down.
posted by insomnia_lj on Dec 29, 2004 - 73 comments

MPAA Blocked From Techfocus
:Effective immediately, the RIAA and MPAA will need to find another way to get to Techfocus. In response to their legal targeting of individual file-swappers, access from their known networks to this site has now been blocked. While it may still be possible for them to access Techfocus via address ranges which we're not aware of, they'll otherwise have to use non-RIAA and non-MPAA networks to view the site."
posted by metameme on Jul 20, 2003 - 34 comments

Verizon Must Reveal Internet Song Swapper In a recent discussion of the Supreme Court's decision to protect the rights of the individual from the greed and sloth of the many I warned that the RIAA and MPAA, comically inept though the media paints them, would soon have things their way. This link is to a news report about an important step in their fight for individual rights.
posted by BGM on Jan 21, 2003 - 23 comments

Now I Get It
Ugh. Disney made the cartoon equivalent of Hillary Rosen reading your kids a bedtime story. Perhaps succeeding episodes can explain why we should all buy DVD reissues of Disney films. Or extol the virtues of Song of the South. (from Plastic)
posted by yerfatma on Oct 24, 2001 - 12 comments

DivX + filenavigator = headaches for MPAA. Of course the SPA and RIAA can't be too pleased about filenavigator either. I've checked and the DivX of Castaway is on the net already.
posted by john on Jan 17, 2001 - 3 comments