It was a problem that had been solved for all intents and purposes years ago when YouTube put the power into the hands of major copyright owners. Now, WSJ has uncovered that a new round of full-length movie uploads has been creeping onto YouTube, some of which have received millions of views. Google launched the Content ID tool and gave it to 4000 major publishers such as Disney and Sony in 2007. The problem of illegally uploaded content shifted away from YouTube and onto torrent sites and other file-sharing services. The shift didn’t last forever. The fight against content piracy was revolutionized…

Dependent entirely on how you feel about piracy, it will either tickle you previously undefined shades of pink or break your heart to learn that BitTorrent has reported that its tools BitTorrent, Mainline and µTorrent now have an active userbase of 100 million per month. It seems like only yesterday we were forced a peek at Bram Cohen’s attractive* face as he panhandled for donations every time we closed the original BT client. Flash forward and 20 million are logging on per day from 220 nations to share files. Legally, of course. What makes these figures ever-more impressive is that they don’t…

Porn is really easy to get, isn’t it? Porn has always been the internet’s biggest business, but most of us would-be consumers are generally asking ‘what business’? Porn is perfectly easy to get for free. That’s just what porn producers are worried about, and they’re rallying to change it. Studio Pink Visual has rallied adult content providers the world over to Arizona for a ‘Content Protection Retreat’ in October, to figure out a plan. “People were willing back then [at the advent of filesharing services] to pay top dollar for porn,” says PV’s president Allison Vivas. “Now it looks like the majority…

Back in the day, there was no word for Peer-to-Peer filesharing. Today, the phenomenon is widely termed ‘piracy’. Maybe that’s a little unfair, but then again, it’s not secret that the vast majority of torrent files criss-crossing the internet are games, unreleased albums, and films that are barely in theatres yet. But now, it’s been posited that part of the problem may be the word ‘pirate’ itself. …