The Pirate Bay has effectively been banned in the UK after the High Court issued a court order demanding ISPs block their customers from accessing the site. Not that doing so will make a scrap of difference, naturally.

Block The Pirate Bay!

The British High Court has ruled that six major ISPs – BT, Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, O2, and Everything Everywhere – must start blocking their customers from having access to The Pirate Bay. Five are bowing to pressure, while BT has requested extra time to consider its position.

This is hardly the first legal woes that The Pirate Bay has faced. Similar court orders have been handed down in Italy, The Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, and Finland previously, while a major police investigation into the site led to some of the people behind the site being found guilty of breaking copyright laws.

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Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water assume Viacom’s lawsuit against YouTube for copyright infringement was dead and buried, an appeals court brings it back to life once again. When will this madness end?!

Background

The background to this long and winding case in a nutshell: YouTube was born, thousands of clips were uploaded to the site, many of them infringing on copyrights. Google acquired YouTube, Viacom pulled its content, and then sued the search giant for $1 billion on 63,000 alleged copyright infringements. Let the fun and games begin.

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Wait, what? There’s a music label executive who thinks the Internet is a force for good? Wonders will never cease. Unfortunately his viewpoint will not enable German music fans to watch music videos on YouTube anytime soon.

GEMA

In Germany GEMA handles the rights of copyright owners. Unfortunately its monopoly position means it has pushed for higher rates per performance. With music videos on YouTube the group asked Google to pay 16 cents per stream, and music videos have consequently not been available in Germany since March 2009.

From what I gather this is a lot higher than the rate set by other performance rights organizations around the world. Many of which Google is happy to work with to ensure music videos are playable and that everyone gets paid fairly.

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Hollywood will, and has been for many years now, tell us all that piracy is the big, bad wolf that is threatening to burn Hollywood down. This is not actually the case. There is a much simpler explanation for dwindling box office takings.

Piracy Isn’t Killing Hollywood

Piracy isn’t killing Hollywood. In fact, it’s having no discernible effect on U.S. box office receipts. It is harming international box office receipts, but for one very good reason: the delay between movies being released in the U.S. and being released elsewhere around the world.

This is according to a paper from researchers at the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College titled, ‘Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Film Piracy on International Box Office Sales.’

The research finds that there is no evidence that piracy is affecting box office takings in the U.S. Internationally there is evidence of such, but it’s directly proportional to how long a delay between the U.S. release and the international release. In other words, release a film in every country simultaneously and minimize the problem at a stroke.

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MegaUpload is no more, at least in its former capacity. We can now look forward to a long and expensive legal battle, and no difference whatsoever being made to how content is shared over the Internet.

MegaUpload Goes Down

One of the biggest websites in the world, and the most-trafficked cyberlocker services on the Web, MegaUpload, has been taken offline. Furthermore, several of the company’s key employees, including founder Kim Dotcom, have been arrested and charged.

The takedown and arrests were the culmination of a two-year investigation into the site and its alleged breaching of copyright infringement laws. 20 search warrants were executed in at least seven countries.

The U.S. Department of Justice alleges that those involved with the company made millions of dollars by turning a blind eye to the file-sharing of copyrighted content that was happening on MegaUpload’s servers. This despite MegaUpload complying with DMCA notices from media companies.

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If you download movies from the Internet then there’s a small chance you’ll get caught. If you run a site offering the movies for download then the chances of being caught ramp up considerably. Especially if you’re the public face of said site.

NinjaVideo

Hana Amal Beshara, the co-founder of NinjaVideo [domain seized], a website which offered downloads of first-run movies, has been sentenced to 22 months in prison followed by two years of supervised release. In addition she will complete 500 hours of community service and have to repay the $209,826.95 she is alleged to have earned from the site.

NinjaVideo was one of nine websites taken down in June 2010 as part of Operation In Our Sites. In the two years the site was running it brought in around $500,000. Beshara is one of five admins convicted over the site, all of whom have pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy and copyright infringement.

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The Hurt Locker BitTorrent lawsuit is dead, or at least it should be. Unfortunately someone forgot to tell the lawyers. or perhaps the lawyers conveniently forgot to tell the ISPs. That is, at least, according to TorrentFreak.

The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker was a huge critical hit, eventually winning the 2010 Oscar for ‘Best Picture’. Unfortunately it didn’t do quite as well at the box office, only taking $49 million worldwide. It’s taken more since thanks to DVD and Blu-ray sales, but not enough to warm the hearts of the studio behind it.

That studio is Voltage Pictures, which blamed piracy/file-sharing (depending on your point of view) for that poor box office performance. It may not have helped, but to blame it entirely was way over the top. The next step was to go after thousands of alleged pirates looking for compensation.

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