piracy
eBay Thinks Sandra Bernhard Is A Pirate!
How does eBay tell if you’re a pirate? Your peg-legged swagger? Your use of arghs as punctuation? The foul-mouthed parrot crapping on your shoulder?
Windows XP Now Calls You A Pirate
If you’re using Windows XP with a product key of dubious origin, you may have noticed that your computer just got a lot more obnoxious.
France Furthers Anti-iPod DRM Bill
Liberte, Egalite, no DRM? The French are voting on legislation that would restrict iTunes and its ilk from from limiting upon which devices the music can be played or how the songs can be shared. [Photo from recent student demonstrations outside the Sorbonne, just imagine the mattress represents a giant iPod and we’re good to go.]
MPAA Says: “DRM Exists To Annoy Honest Customers”
We saw this astonishing quote from Dan Glickman of the MPAA over at the Beeb, when asked about the effectiveness of DRM:
Ice Cream Man Convicted for Pirating Videogames
100,000 or $174,345.29 in unilateral decision making money.
Authors of StarForce Threaten Lawsuit Upon Criticism
Please excuse our breach of form this morning, but the Deals Round Up will have to wait, because we work up cranky and then the internet was full of stupid again. It seems that Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing discovered StarForce, the malignant copy-restriction curse suffered by many PC gamers, only to be threatened with a lawsuit after criticizing the product as “malware.”
MPAA Pirates Documentary In The Name Of The Children
In a delicious turn of events that could only be matched by Microsoft discovering it was using warezed copies of Windows on its office computers, the MPAA has been busted for pirating a film submitted to them for rating—called, appropriately enough, ‘This Film Is Not Yet Rated.’ The film’s a documentary currently debuting at Sundance, investigating the unaccountability of the MPAA’s rating board, the inscrutability of its unpublished ratings guidelines and the hypocrisy of Hollywood’s preference for sadistic violence over soft-core sex. Apparently, the film was worrying enough for the MPAA to secretly distribute unauthorized copies to many of its employees. The problem? By the MPAA’s own definition, “ALL forms of piracy are illegal and carry serious legal consequences.”
