MetaFilter posts tagged with Piracy

Pirates Paying for Downloadable Content: a Viable Niche Market

filthy light thief — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 12:51:49 -0800

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."

Flight 93: "A Lot of Fun!" --Richard Roeper

not_on_display — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:55:43 -0800

[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!

What if copyright law is more complicated then a damn flower?

Askiba — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:00:31 -0800

Take my movie—please. Nasty Old People is a Swedish movie about just that. However, it's been released freely on the web by its creator, Hanna Sköld, under a Creative Commons License, being the first Swedish film to do so. The CC License it is under allows the movie to be redistributed, screened, remixed- anything you want, as long as Hanna and the rest of the team behind the movie is credited. Going on a "pay as much as you feel like model", the creator has so far gotten back about 2,000 euros from the internet community- a little more then 20% of the bank loan the creator took out to make the film. Not to mention popularity: the film has been downloaded 30,000 times in over 100 countries. It's a kick in the face to the MPAA, whose cries that sites like The Pirate Bay are "killing entertainment" have been largely disregarded in the success stories of these indie efforts.

Every party should be a windows 7 party

Artw — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:13:01 -0800

Hosting Your Windows 7 Torrenting Party (Previously)

Step 1. Make an utterly fantastic game. Step 3. Profit!

straight — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:24:08 -0800

2D BOY made around $100,000 in a week. That’s $50,000 each for writing a blog post about a game they finished a year ago. By letting people pay whatever they wanted. 2D Boy stirred up a lot of discussion (previously) about game piracy when they used online scoreboard data to estimate an 82% piracy rate for their fantastic indie game World of Goo (previously). For World of Goo's first birthday, they decided to try the Radiohead model and let people buy the game for any price they choose. Now they've released extensive data about the results. Short version? "A huge success," even though the most commonly chosen price was only a penny. Don't miss the excellent analysis in the Rock Paper Shotgun article (that first link), including the comments where one reader has created a chart showing that the bottom 40% of the downloads account for 1.5% of the profit and the top 30% of the downloads account for 83% of the profit.

Batman dies in cloud of poison gas – unless you actually buy the game

joeclark — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 09:24:41 -0800

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.”)

RIAA vs. Jammie Thomas

6550 — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:42:34 -0800

Jammie Thomas to pay RIAA $1.92 million. Found guilty of willful copyright infringement, the jury awarded the RIAA $80,000 each for 24 songs. This is up from $220,000 in the first trial (previously). Ars Technica has a good review of the case. Kiwi Camara, her most recent lawyer, intends to press on with his class action suit against the RIAA, along with his old Harvard prof Charles Nesson, also involved in the Joel Tenenbaum piracy case.

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum

Artw — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:13:08 -0800

Home taping didn’t kill music, says Ben Goldacre - but where did all the money go?

I will make you fishers of men

benzenedream — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 02:56:32 -0800

"What began as a defensive movement by local fishermen has evolved into a complex amalgamation of banditry, organized crime, freebooting, and insurgency targeting all types of vessels from fishing trawlers to oil tankers." Somali pirates holding an American captain hostage were killed during a rescue yesterday. The lack of effective governance in Somalia allows massive vessels from Europe and Asia to decimate the local fish population, which may have forced Somali fisherman into piracy. Other ships use the Somali coast as a toxic waste dump. [previously]

"It's rare to come to face-to-face with the people behind the software, music, and media we pirate on regular basis; I guess that's part of the problem."

ND¢ — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 14:42:11 -0800

So there is this guy named Jona Bechtolt and he is an electronic musician and multimedia artist who performs as YACHT. He recently described in an interview some audio software that he had illegally downloaded, adding "Does all this piracy make me a bad person?". The company that makes the software that he illegally downloaded apparently saw his comment and wrote a blog post where they linked to his interview and stated "We've put up with rampant idiocy from people that style themselves members of the creative community but are actually members of some kind of bullshit that doesn't have a name." Then Mr. Bechtolt commented on that blog post kind of apologizing, but also saying "I'm a musician and I haven't bought music in years, nor have almost all of my musician friends." Then the company wrote him an open letter explaining why they did not accept his apology. [via Pitchfork]

Pirating the 2009 Oscars.

the dief — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:42:55 -0800

Pirating the 2009 Oscars Metafilter's own waxpancake gives us an exhaustive analysis of the current crop of Oscar nominees, and how many of their releases are available via Bittorrent. With spreadsheets!

DOWNLOADING IS WRONG

azarbayejani — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 06:06:43 -0800

A new trojan is on the loose. It doesn't install any harmful adware/spyware, but does block both mininova and the Pirate Bay.

The aXXo files

fearfulsymmetry — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 03:16:27 -0800

"If you already know his name, chances are you've been doing something illegal." The Independent on aXXo, the movie pirate king.

Almost like an anti-Doctorow

camcgee — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 09:33:47 -0800

TweakGuides presents a very long examination of software piracy as it relates to PC gaming: "PC piracy and related topics such as DRM seem to have become so shrouded in illogical excuses, hysteria, scaremongering and uninformed opinions that having a sensible discussion on the topic is virtually impossible." The first couple of pages are fairly broad introductions to basic legal and technical issues that can probably be skipped without losing much but he eventually gets into evaluating such claims as "DRM causes piracy" and "DRM never works," and offers apologies even for the reviled Starforce and SecuROM. Link via RPS.

The current state of DRM and piracy in casual gaming

tybeet — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 06:50:24 -0800

You may have heard by now about World of Goo, an independent game which can best be described as a "physics/construction puzzle game" that touches on everything from beauty to consumerism to internet privacy. The developer, 2DBoy who had originally released the game under a "no-DRM, don't screw us" policy now estimates a piracy rate of 82%. The authors cite a related figure of 92% found for a game called Ricochet Infinity, which was, in contrast, released with DRM, and whose developer studied the effects of their continued efforts to patch up the keygens and exploits in its DRM along the way. From this article: "As we believe that we are decreasing the number of pirates downloading the game with our DRM fixes, combining the increased sales number together with the decreased downloads, we find 1 additional sale for every 1,000 less pirated downloads. Put another way, for every 1,000 pirated copies we eliminated, we created 1 additional sale."

Yo-ho-ho

gman — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:02:25 -0800

Piracy may be on the rise, but it's never really gone away. Each pin in the first link contains an incident report.

The biggest hacker in China

strangeguitars — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 08:41:02 -0800

Microsoft is taking unprecedented measures to combat China's piracy. The people aren't happy. Is the company shooting itself in the foot?

Lo-Fi Video Game Anti-Piracy

Damn That Television — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 12:27:54 -0800

Long before user authentication and online validation became a thorn in the side of software pirates, copy protection techniques were a little more friendly and a little more lo-fi: packaged with Infocom's interactive fiction games, "Feelies" (primary link, click on the boxes)were assorted physical items that acted as accompanying illustrations (fake magazine covers, in-game currency, decoder slides, and even scratch-n-sniff cards for specific points during game play) to worlds made entirely from text. The thinking was that the feelies would add so much value and atmosphere that they'd encourage people to buy the games, rather than copy them. Oh, and it didn't hurt that they also frequently contained information required to complete the accompanying game. Of course, there have been other methods, ranging from the surprising, to the frustrating, to the downright cruel.

Suspension de l’abonnement internet

three blind mice — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:55:21 -0800

"There is no reason that the Internet should be lawless," President Nicolas Sarkozy told his cabinet, as Culture Minister Christine Albanel presented a new bill designed to encourage responsible use of the Internet. The legislation would set up a new administrative body that would receive complaints from the music and film industry and track down offenders through Internet service providers. An e-mail warning would be sent to suspected downloaders followed by a registered letter. After two strikes, offenders would risk losing their Internet subscription for up to a year. "We know that we are not going to eradicate piracy 100 percent, but we think that we can reduce it significantly," Albanel told a news conference. Minister of Culture and Communication, Christine Albanel, has made the French spirit of responsibility a cornerstone of her portfolio. The new bill follows agreements signed on the 23 November 2007 at the Elysée Palace, in the presence of the President of the Republic, by 47 businesses and organisations representing cinema, music and television, and also by all the Internet service providers, who the Minister has compelled to fulfil the agreement. Firstly, the Minister revealed that 74% of French people are in favour of the mechanism of the bill, which would, in the first instance, consist of sending numerous educational advertisement messages to Internet users who use their Internet connection to pirate works. Then, in the case of this behaviour being repeated, the temporary suspension of Internet access. The Minister also revealed that the projected mechanism will be useful from the preventative phase, since 90% of French people would stop downloading after two advertisements. This study also shows the adherence of the majority of French people to the defence of the right of the author, without which ‘creation’ would have its existence threatened, against those who support openly the law of the jungle and permissiveness on the Internet.

TV Pirate Tells All

whir — Sat, 31 May 2008 18:33:38 -0800

Christopher Tarnovsky, smartcard programmer, gives a fascinating insider account of his years in the cloak-and-dagger world of satellite TV piracy. Tarnovsky began as a satellite pirate himself before being hired by a DirecTV contractor to develop anti-piracy electronic countermeasures; he was allegedly responsible for the "Black Sunday" attack on DirecTV pirates. The included video, though not directly relevant to his story, features an impressive display of hardware-hacking skills and is well worth watching. Previously: the end of DirecTV piracy, Black Sunday attack.

Republican 1337

Artw — Tue, 06 May 2008 13:53:05 -0800

I was a Teenage Wares Freak? San Diego Republican Party chairman Tony Krvaric may have been Strider, co-founder of Fairlight. via Slashdot

Why doesn’t the IFPI dare to stand up for its own history?

mr.marx — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:47:04 -0800

What the IFPI tries to conceal about its origins in fascist Italy IFPI is the global version of the RIAA

No more posts until Matt starts paying up

Horace Rumpole — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:47:10 -0800

Home ~~taping~~ downloading is killing ~~music~~ authorship. The Society of Authors warns that authors will simply stop writing if they aren't compensated for piracy of their work (as unlikely as that seems). Perhaps they should follow the example of Jim Griffin, newly hired at Warner Music to persuade broadband providers to attach a $5 per month surcharge for the benefit of the major labels, in exchange for halting the lawsuits that have thus far been their mainstay weapon against piracy.

Stage 6 to Shut Down Today

Avenger50 — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 01:44:28 -0800

Stage 6, recently linked in a popular FPP, has announced it will shut down today. Rumors about why include their battle against UMG to a "ridiculous battle of egos."

Illegal downloaders 'face UK ban'

electricinca — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 11:03:58 -0800

British internet users face ban for illegal downloads. A draft copy of a Green Paper produced by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport was leaked to The Times newspaper which detailed how the government was considering introducing legislation that would require ISPs to take action against users who access pirated material. The Government's resolve on the issue has apparently been stiffened following similar proposals made by the governments of the US and France. The proposal is designed to bolster the UK's creative industries but it is questionable how much impact it will have on piracy and how willing Internet Service Providers will be to cut off their revenue by banning their own customers.