RSS
Consumerist
yahoo
Posts Tagged “
Piracy
”
yahoo
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.
More »
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 »
fair use
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
taking it seriously
MPAA Takes Unfairly Blaming College Students For Illegal Downloading Very Seriously
WHO: The MPAAWHAT: 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.
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 »
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 »
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]
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 »
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 »
Media companies including CBS Corp., Microsoft Corp., News Corp.'s Fox and MySpace, Viacom, Walt Disney and NBC have all agreed to some über-pact of copyright "guidelines" to protect their work, and have said they will announce the details later today. "The agreed principles include using technology to eliminate copyright-infringing content uploaded by users to Web sites and blocking any material before it is publicly accessible." [Reuters]
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 »
digital rights
Die Hard DVD Will Ship With Ripped Movie File Included
20th Century Fox has announced that the special-edition DVD for "Live Free or Die Hard" will include a "DRM-free" computer file of the movie, playable through Windows' PlaysForSure software. We suppose you can call this DRM-free, but it obviously doesn't mean it's not restricted. To access the file, you will have to insert the disc into your computer, then enter an authorization code that's included in the DVD case. Once it's copied over, you can play it on your PC or portable media players that use the PlaysForSure software. More »
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 »
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 »
punishing the ones that don't steal
