Piracy

riaa

RIAA Pulls Case Before It Can Be Dismissed, Then Refiles Days Later To Get Different Judge

If you were still somehow unconvinced that the RIAA's legal strategy is "be sleazy, intimidate, then profit," their latest legal maneuvering might finally convince you. Next week, a judge was to decide whether their case against a New York family should be thrown out—the family's lawyer, RIAA critic Ray Beckerman, argued "that if the RIAA can't prove anybody downloaded the music from an open share folder, then the case would have to be dismissed."

Earlier this month the RIAA voluntarily dismissed the case—then refiled it last week but didn't mention it was the same lawsuit, which means it was assigned to a different judge. Now the RIAA is demanding immediate discovery (which includes depositions and hard drives), which the previous judge had blocked pending a rule on the dismissal motion. We tip our hats to you, RIAA lawyers. You bring every evil-lawyer cliche from TV to life.

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1:00 PM on Sun Jun 15 2008
By Chris Walters
7,898 views, 51 comments

file sharing

Arizona Judge Rejects RIAA's "Shared Directory = Piracy" Argument

Although it won't affect other cases, the RIAA was handed a small smackdown this week when a U.S. district judge rejected their request for a summary judgement, and ruled that putting song files in a shared directory was not enough proof that infringement had occurred. More »

8:14 PM on Wed Apr 30 2008
By Chris Walters
4,019 views, 26 comments

fair use

HBO Using Tivo's Macrovision DRM To Restrict "John Adams" Miniseries?

When Dean recorded HBO's new Tom Hanks-produced miniseries "John Adams"—which is not a pay-per-view or on-demand program—he was surprised to see it was flagged by Tivo's Macrovision software, which controls how many times you may watch a program and how long you can store it before it's automatically deleted. Now the question is, was this a mistake on the part of HBO or Dean's cable provider Comcast? Or—considering HBO's infamous anti-consumer stance on time-shifted programming—is it the beginning of a sneaky "back-door" approach to locking down all their content, something Tivo's own people said would probably not happen when they added Macrovision to their recorders in 2004? More »

10:04 PM on Tue Mar 18 2008
By Chris Walters
6,079 views, 70 comments

Latest by n/a: I'm Stephen Mack, director of operations at TiVo. more »

corporate influence

House Passes Bill That Would Require Colleges To Practice Network Filtering

Last week the House voted 354-58 to approve a college funding bill that requires colleges to "make plans to offer some form of legal alternative to P2P file-swapping" and to implement some form of network filtering. Luckily for sane people everywhere, the White House has already made veto-noises at the bill for other reasons—but still, the MPAA came that much closer to forcing its admittedly false worldview on universities. More »

6:09 PM on Tue Feb 12 2008
By Chris Walters
2,588 views, 26 comments

privacy

Verizon To Hollywood: We're Not The Piracy Police

AT&T and Comcast may be willing to help Hollywood control piracy on their networks, but Verizon wants none of it, says the New York Times. More »

1:41 PM on Wed Feb 6 2008
By Meg Marco
5,632 views, 46 comments

taking it seriously

MPAA Takes Unfairly Blaming College Students For Illegal Downloading Very Seriously

WHO: The MPAA
WHAT: The MPAA commissioned a study that blamed 44% of movie downloading on college students. The real figure is more like 15%.
WHERE:MPAA admits mistake on downloading study [Yahoo!] (Thanks, Robert!)
THE QUOTE: "We take this error very seriously and have taken strong and immediate action to both investigate the root cause of this problem as well as substantiate the accuracy of the latest report," the group said in a statement.
BONUS QUOTE:"Illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing is a society-wide problem. Some of it occurs at college s and universities but it is a small portion of the total," [Terry Hartle ,vice president of the American Council on Education] said, adding colleges will continue to take the problem seriously, but more regulation isn't necessary.

8:46 AM on Wed Jan 23 2008
By Meg Marco
2,077 views, 41 comments

Latest by Mr. Gunn: scoosdad: LOLNO, FAIL for me. I meant to reply to JustAGuy2's post right above yours. more »

fake news

RIAA Sends Out Fake News Clip To TV Stations

The RIAA wants you to know that everyone loses with pirated products, so they've put together a fake news story and sent it out to TV stations around the country—maybe it will show up on your cash-strapped local news over the next few days, if you're lucky. We're torn, though, on posting this because it's being leaked (promoted?) heavily by the video news release (VNR) company that produced it—we want you to scoff at it with us, but keep your bullshit "stealth marketing" sensors up. More »

12:40 PM on Fri Dec 21 2007
By Chris Walters
6,180 views, 54 comments

Latest by n/a: so artists want to stop their music going public? first, that sounds really logical on their part. they wouldn't want people to spread their name, that's not why they're in the business. if artist don't want people to make digital copies more »

copyright

Article Recounts Sony's Rootkit Debacle In Detail

Remember Sony's cringe-inducing copy protection scheme a couple of years ago, where they secretly installed rootkits on millions of customers' PCs and then pretended it was no big deal? ("Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" — Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG's President of Global Digital Business.) There's a new article (PDF) about to be published in the Berkely Technology Law Journal called "The Magnificence of the Disaster: Reconstructiong the Sony BMG Rootkit Incident." It's a very detailed and entertaining read that examines the conditions that led Sony BMG "toward a strategy that in retrospect appears obviously and fundamentally misguided." More »

12:09 PM on Tue Dec 18 2007
By Chris Walters
2,259 views, 27 comments

Latest by n/a: This has recently been a problem with Maxis/EA games with their new sims products as they have Sony's SECUREROM(sp?)as their copyright protection. Fortunately I never installed any of the products with that program, but many users are complaining of many more »

file sharing

EFF Confirms Comcast Mucks With BitTorrent

The elite cyber-squad freedom fighters of the The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released findings today that Comcast does indeed meddle with peer-to-peer file sharing. They're also giving away some software you can install to test your own ISP. The FCC still has yet to respond to complaints and reports of Comcast's interference.

EFF Releases Reports and Software to Spot Interference with Internet Traffic [EFF]

1:01 PM on Thu Nov 29 2007
By Ben Popken
1,557 views, 10 comments

hollywood

Walgreen Planning DVD-Burning Kiosks To Sell Movies

Sometime next year, Walgreen will introduce kiosks where customers can select and purchase movies—mostly older ones that aren't as frequently stocked in stores—and have them burned onto DVDs while they wait (for about 15 minutes). Although the idea seems like one that someone should have had years ago, it wasn't a commercial possibility until last month, when the organization responsible for licensing CSS—the widespread copy restriction software that's coded into pretty much every Hollywood DVD release—expanded its licensing structure to make room for business models like this one. More »

10:24 AM on Mon Oct 29 2007
By Chris Walters
1,563 views, 22 comments

Latest by Consumer-X: I just bought one of these KEWL Dymo Disc Painter devices to make all my homemade DVD's look like professional copies. Personally, I love having hard copies of movies. [www.youtube.com] more »

no credit

Your Cash Isn't Good Enough For Apple's Precious iPhone

Four benjamins will no longer get you an iPhone, now that Apple is requiring credit cards for all iPhone purchases. The new policy, which is billed as an anti-piracy initiative, also prevents customers from buying more than two iPhones per visit. Apple claims the policy went into effect this Thursday, however we received the following tip more than a week ago: More »

8:45 PM on Sat Oct 27 2007
By Carey
7,689 views, 92 comments

music

"In Rainbows" Pirated A Lot, Despite Name-Your-Price Deal

Radiohead may have moved 1.2 million copies of its new album "In Rainbows" when it was released last week, but according to industry analysts, over 500,000 copies were downloaded through old-fashioned file sharing networks, eroding the perceived success of the distribution plan and possibly hindering similar release plans for other artists in the future. More »

11:22 AM on Thu Oct 18 2007
By Chris Walters
2,807 views, 58 comments

piracy

Appeals Court Says Hacking Your DirecTV Not The Same As Commercial Piracy

While piracy funds kills babies, we support the idea of people being free to modify devices they have purchased with they money they earned through blood, sweat and toil, so we were glad to hear that an appeals court said that hacking your DirecTV card shouldn't be penalized under a more punitive clause of the Federal Communications Act. More »

12:39 PM on Thu Sep 13 2007
By Ben Popken
3,694 views, 17 comments

avast

The MPAA's New Secret Weapon: DVD Sniffing Dogs!

The MPAA is serious about stopping piracy—so serious that they've hired DVD-sniffing dogs to patrol border-crossings. No, we're not kidding. DVD-sniffing dogs are real and they're already on the job! More »

9:23 AM on Wed Aug 29 2007
By Meg Marco
4,273 views, 17 comments

punishing the ones that don't steal

"Bioshock" Comes With Nasty DRM That Sets Off Anti-Virus Software, Ruins Everyone's Day

We've been hearing all this fantastic sh*t about how we omg, totally have to get Bioshock right now. Well, it seems that although the game is cool, the DRM is a huge pain in the ass. More »

3:39 PM on Thu Aug 23 2007
By Meg Marco
18,746 views, 51 comments

department of bullying teenagers

Teen Pleads Guilty In "20 Seconds Of Transformers" Piracy Case

The teenager who was arrested for filming 20 seconds of Transformers on her Canon Powershot camera (a still camera that takes short movies) has plead guilty to the charges, says Wired's Threat Level blog. More »

11:39 AM on Thu Aug 23 2007
By Meg Marco
30,355 views, 75 comments

big brother is watching

Is Warner Bros. Filming Audiences In An Attempt To Stop Piracy?

Here's the creepiest complaint we've received in a long, long time. Reader Sam says he was filmed by a security guard contracted by Time/Warner during a recent showing of The Invasion at an AMC movie theater. More »

12:28 PM on Mon Aug 20 2007
By Meg Marco
68,926 views, 84 comments

Consumerist

UPDATE: Ruby Tuesday Says Man Ordered Fatal Crab Dish

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