The math is pretty straight forward. It was likely the most widely-downloaded camcorder recording of a movie ever. Following the thinking of the MPAA, this dramatically hurts the profits of ailing Hollywood studios because illegal downloads are the worst thing that has come out of the digital age. It stands to reason that they should spend millions on lobbying Washington for strict measures to end piracy and save Hollywood. The virally-popular pirated version of The Avengers (which came out a week before it’s US release) is the reason that the film flopped. Except it didn’t. It has already been…

France made waves in the P2P industry by implementing a controversial graduated response program in 2010 that was designed to reduce the amount of illegal downloads by establishing progressively-harsher penalties on file sharers. The results were strong, as shown in Hadopi’s report, with file-sharing activities traffic slashed by two-thirds in 2011. However, the goal of increasing revenues in the French music and movie industries did not materialize and revenues fell in both industries. The French music market fell 3.9% in 2011 while the video market fell 2.7%. As Ernesto of TorrentFreak…

One of the most compelling reasons for the rise in piracy over the past decade is the cost. We have the option of buying songs or movies from certain places or we can rip them for free. It can be quite enticing and has fueled the growth of an industry that is currently under fire for hurting other industries. When one looks at the “true” cost of piracy, opinions can change. That’s the perspective taken in the infographic below by BackgroundCheck. Click to enlarge.  Via: Background Check Resource…

Piracy has become part and parcel of discussions about media and the internet. And everywhere in online discussion, from the biggest tech blogs to the smallest forum, people seem to have the same basic idea about piracy. Piracy is an evil that stems from entitled people wanting to get things for free. Furthermore, if we could find a way to do away with piracy – with the illicit copying of media using digital tools – the world will be a better, more prosperous place place. But a new sweeping report, Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, lays bare a number of false assumptions about piracy and the laws we…

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…

Halloween is approaching, and boy do we have a treat for you. It appears that not only are pirates the most used costume during Halloween, but they are also the most heavy users of Internet traffic with BitTorrent. Coincidence? I think not! Halloween is a time of mischief and scary things. In the eyes of Hollywood, pirates are the same: they steal their product and, allegedly, threaten their industry. See the connection? Sandvine, a Canadian management company, recently revealed information that points to expanding P2P traffic; leading the P2P race is BitTorrent. The company reported that…

In what appears to be another shocking attempt to constrain and limit the functioning of the internet, US lawmakers are currently pushing an MPAA-backed bill that threatens to block American internet users from accessing sites that are deemed to be ‘dedicated to piracy’. What bill S. 3804 aims to do is twofold: first, for a site based in the US, it would force any US-based registrar (i.e. the people who hand out domain names) to shut a site down if it appears to be dedicated to piracy. And secondly, for sites not in America, it would insist that ISP’s block the domain from their traffic. So on its surface,…

ISPs in the United Kingdom are making money from the process of anti-piracy groups taking legal action against copyright infringing customers. When a copyright holder wishes to pursue those infringing their copyright, they must request customer information from their ISP. ISPs are giving up the information, and charging for the privilege. An executive at FAST, the Federation of Against Software Theft, spoke out about the practice. “In 2006, we ran Operation Tracker in which we identified about 130 users who were sharing copies of a security program over the web”. The end result? 100 names…

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…

So Google is pitching a YouTube pay-per-view service to Hollywood studios that would enable video rentals for five bucks a pop. That’s not… so bad, I guess. I mean, if you’re not already a Netflix convert. But we’ll go over that in a second. YouTube’s pay-per-view is, in fact, not new. Yeah, I was surprised, too. Open since January of this year, YouTube’s rental service has offered video rentals from indie and niche publishers from $1.99 – $3.99. That is nothing if not rad, but so far, no one’s really biting. With only 1500 views in its first weekend (featuring Sundance festival titles), and only…