In 2000, the anime industry was
on the brink of what looked like a global takeover, and was pushing live action movies to the side. However, trouble began to take hold just a few years later, when
labour issues involving long hours and low pay, along with a
sharp drop in anime DVD sales, began to cause serious trouble for the industry. Although some government officials
pinned their hopes in beefing up exports in order to breathe life into the economy, to industry insiders the situation looked
bleak and
possibly unresolvable using traditional models. However, other avenues - such as the internet, and even internet piracy - were studied for their economic effects. The results?
[more inside]
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing
on Feb 2, 2012 -
32 comments
Four days after the shutdown of popular "cyber-locker" Megaupload, rival companies
Filesonic and
Fileserve have also disabled file sharing. The two companies also owned wupload, upload.to, and a number of other cyber-locker sites. Is this the end of direct download filesharing?
posted by reformedjerk
on Jan 23, 2012 -
108 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
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
previ
ously, 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
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
Chasing Pirates: Inside Microsoft’s War Room - From the special thread that Chinese factories counterfeit in mile-long spools that adorns software authenticity stickers, to near-perfect bootleg discs leaving microscopic evidence of their factory origins, to Mexican and Russian gangsters who are dealt with very carefully, the NYT covers Microsoft's multi-pronged, international war on piracy.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Nov 7, 2010 -
30 comments
Russia Uses Microsoft to Suppress Dissent - Adding to its
long-running series on corruption and abuse in post-Communist Russia, the New York Times has reported on Russian authorities using the pretext of software piracy to seize computers from journalists and political dissidents critical of current policies. In a surprising twist, lawyers representing Microsoft have been found working with Russian police, despite reporters and NGOs providing evidence of legitimate software purchases. An
official response to the NYT piece suggests impostors claim to represent Microsoft in Russia, and notes the company's offer of free software licenses to these and similar groups.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Sep 12, 2010 -
25 comments
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has shut down nine websites in connection with an ongoing crackdown on internet film and TV piracy. The sites seized are Movieslinks.tv, Planetmoviez.com, ZML.com, Thepiratecity.org, Filespump.com, TVShack.net, Now-Movies.com, NinjaThis.net, and NinjaVideo.net. The feds also seized related Paypal accounts and bank accounts as part of the operation. Ninjavideo was the most notorious of the group, and its admin, Phara,
went so far as to record a manifesto in praise of internet piracy.
posted by Pastabagel
on Jul 1, 2010 -
197 comments
Ars Technica reports on the US Copyright Group (website:
SAVECINEMA.ORG), an entity that
has sent out over 14,000 subpoenas in the past 5 months to P2P users who have downloaded smaller independent movies such as
Uwe Boll's Far Cry and
best picture Oscar winner The Hurt Locker. To put that in perspective,
the RIAA sued 18,000 P2P users during their multi-year anti-file sharing campaign. The law firm takes the moviemakers cases on for free, splitting with them the money the defendants pay to settle the case ($1,500 to $2,500 per subpoena) on a site that will conveniently take your credit card. The law firm and the filmmakers could end up splitting $19.7 million, and it's likely that this kind of approach will be tried with more movies. As you might expect,
some targeted individuals have been wrongly accused.
posted by The Devil Tesla
on Jun 3, 2010 -
166 comments
The Book Pirates of Peru. A slideshow in which Peruvian author Daniel Alarcón describes the vibrant literary scene in his home country, where the informal publishing industry is the same size as its legitimate counterpart. There's no library system to speak of, the National Library's acquisitions budget is nil, but a culture of reading and writing is booming, with book sales and attendance at literary festivals up, up, up.
posted by WPW
on Jan 18, 2010 -
16 comments
Piracy of PC games is nothing new, and has been
discussed previously. Due to the high levels of PC game piracy, some development companies have
decreased (or eliminated) PC game development, shifting support to console development. But piracy isn't limited to PCs, as
modchips and other hacks have allowed users to play pirated and
homebrewed games. In the continuing struggle for control,
Microsoft banned as many as 1 million modded systems from Xbox Live, resulting in a surge of
people reselling Xbox 360s that have been banned from online play (and
modders finding a fix for the ban). Some developers have adopted another tactic - increased development of
downloadable content (DLC), which has been seen as
both good and bad by gamers. John Riccitiello, the head of Electronic Arts, seems to have embraced DLC as a marketing option, in noting that "
[people] can steal the disc, but they can't steal the DLC."
posted by filthy light thief
on Dec 9, 2009 -
77 comments
[FlickrPoolFilter] Crappy Bootleg DVD Covers: Here, you will find Tom Cruise's hit movie,
Pepe Likes Tacos. In this universe,
Star Wars features Arnold Schwarzenegger,
Dustin Hoffman stars in Lost in Translation;
witches, pirates, and hobbits inhabit the same world. Titles are improved upon.
Reviews are refreshingly frank (if they make any sense at all). Your DVD may also contain subtitles in French, Chinese,
Spamsoc, or
Martian.
(Don't say there was no warning.) Remember, kids:
Piracy Creates Jobs!
posted by not_on_display
on Nov 5, 2009 -
58 comments
DRM as a cloud of poison gas. Run an illegally-downloaded prerelease version of the video game Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman always dies in a vat of poison gas. Run the legit version once it gets released and (apparently) there won’t even
be any poison gas. (
Game developers: “[Y]ou have encountered... a hook in the copy protection, to catch out people who try and download cracked versions of the game for free. It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code.”)
posted by joeclark
on Sep 13, 2009 -
326 comments
