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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2011 has been a poor year at the box office, with audience numbers and revenue down to their lowest levels since 1995. But don’t blame piracy, as the list of the most-pirated movies released in the past 12 months suggests bigger issues are at play here.

Hollywood Box Office

Hollywood has had a bad year, with attendances and revenues down by 4- to 5-percent on 2010. This despite both being up during the summer. In other words a poor second half of the year has killed any lingering hopes that 2011 was to be the year the movie industry turned things around.

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If you’re the source for a pirated movie which then spreads across the Internet like wildfire you could face time in prison. Possibly. If you get caught. Unfortunately for Gilberto Sanchez he did get caught. And is now in jail as a direct result.

Wolverine Pirated

In April 2009, X-Men Origins: Wolverine leaked on the Internet. This wasn’t your typical a-day-after-release kind of affair as experienced by most movies these days, this was a-month-before-release type of deal. And made headlines as a result.

The version which found its way onto the Web was a ‘workprint’ copy of the comic book film, without the special effects having been fully finished. But apart from that the movie was intact.

The movie was first uploaded to Megaupload.com and by the time the authorities managed to get it pulled from the site it had already spread to torrent sites galore.

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Believe it or not things aren’t as black and white as they may at first appear when it comes to copyright infringement laws.

Which means YouTube is awash with videos that could be legal or illegal, depending on who is arguing the case.

No Copyright Infringement

Andy Baio recently wrote a fascinating article discussing how a new generation see copyright infringement very differently than previous generations. Mainly thanks to YouTube.

His kicking off point was the pronouncement, “No copyright infringement. I only put this up as a project,” placed by the uploader on a video showing Pulp Fiction in chronological order. That’s the full Pulp Fiction movie, distributed by Miramax, with its scenes rearranged.

This video is far from alone, with hundreds of thousands having some sort of copyright disclaimer attached to it. Even though doing so makes no difference to whether a video is infringing or not. The problem is no one quite knows what is and isn’t infringing when it comes to YouTube videos.

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It’s OK to hate Louis C.K. I do. But you should love his latest comedy special.

Not for the content, necessarily, but for the way in which he has distributed it. Hammering another nail into the coffin of Internet-hating big media companies as he goes.

Louis C.K.

Louis C.K. isn’t for me. I’ve tried, I really have. But while everyone else seems to love the guy and thinks he’s hilarious, I can’t stand him. Because he just isn’t funny. In any way. To me, at least, because I understand comedy is subjective.

What is funny, however, is the way Louis C.K. has just got one over on big media. Funny, but also brilliant. And an important step along the road down by which the middle-men will be completely removed from the equation.

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In many ways Google owns the Web. The majority of people use its search engine to find what they’re looking for, and most of the advertising you see as you travel around belongs to them. Which puts it in a tricky position as arbiter of what is good and bad.

Google Censorship

Since the beginning of the year Google has been filtering its search results with ‘Autocomplete’ and ‘Instant’ services. A few big terms related to peer-to-peer, including “torrent,” “BitTorrent,” and “RapidShare,” were initially removed as Google fended off accusations it was encouraging piracy.

Now, according to TorrentFreak, more terms have been added to the blacklist with individual websites being added as well as the more generic terms. Sites including The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, BTJunkie, and KissAssTorrents now won’t be offered as a suggestion when the first few letters are typed in to Google.

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