Dear Hollywood: If illegal downloads hurt your industry, Avengers should have flopped

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… Continue reading Dear Hollywood: If illegal downloads hurt your industry, Avengers should have flopped

Piracy cut in half in France, yet music and movie revenues fell

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… Continue reading Piracy cut in half in France, yet music and movie revenues fell

Everything You Know About Piracy is Wrong

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… Continue reading Everything You Know About Piracy is Wrong

BitTorrent’s Wave Becomes a Tsunami with 100 Million Active Users

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… Continue reading BitTorrent’s Wave Becomes a Tsunami with 100 Million Active Users

Halloween’s Most Popular Costume? Pirates!

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… Continue reading Halloween’s Most Popular Costume? Pirates!

How The MPAA Is Using The Law To Protect Its Business Model

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… Continue reading How The MPAA Is Using The Law To Protect Its Business Model

UK ISPs Profit From Invading Customer Privacy

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,… Continue reading UK ISPs Profit From Invading Customer Privacy

This Time, The Porn Watches You

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… Continue reading This Time, The Porn Watches You

Google Pitching Pay-Per-View – And Maybe This Time It’ll Work

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,… Continue reading Google Pitching Pay-Per-View – And Maybe This Time It’ll Work