If an entity is being threatened with extinction it has two options: evolve, or die. The Pirate Bay has chosen the former, shutting down its BitTorrent tracker and moving instead to a decentralized DHT system.

The Pirate Bay

The Pirate Bay is refusing to die. It’s been the largest and one of the most popular torrent trackers in the world for a few years now. But its notoriety and ability to taunt copyright owners meant trouble was never far away.

The Pirate Bay’s legal woes came to a head in February when a three-year investigation into the site arrived in court. By April, the four defendants had been found guilty and it looked as though this was the beginning of the end for TPB.

Continue Reading…

What do you do if your current policy is failing to pay dividends? Change your strategy and try something new or up the current efforts to even more extreme levels? If you’re the MPAA you do the latter. Oh, and the change the name of what you’re doing as well. Like it matters.

Piracy Peaks

The people who run the big media companies clearly have a vested interest in keeping everything the way it is, or at least was maybe a decade ago.

While piracy has always existed in some form or another, the popularizing of the Internet and the trend for file-sharing saw the “problem” get a little out of control as far as those in charge are concerned.

If It Don’t Work, Don’t Fix It?

The problem is, rather than embrace the new technology or even trying to fight piracy by offering innovative and fair alternative means of obtaining digital copies of movies, television shows, music, games, etc. they try to maintain the status quo. Even though the horse bolted a long time ago.

The latest attempt at locking the stable door is to change the terminology used from “anti-piracy” to “content protection” and to push even harder against illegal file-sharing. Because that will clearly work.

Continue Reading…

Hollywood has just enjoyed a record breaking Summer at the U.S. box office. This despite the studios and filmmakers constantly warning us that online piracy is the devil’s own work and that if movies continue to be shared illegally we’re all doomed. Which is clearly a myth.

Hollywood Hype

Following in the fine tradition set by the music industry a decade ago, Hollywood is set on going after online piracy and the illegal sharing of copyrighted movies. Fair enough, I suppose, as an industry it’s the logical thing to do to try and keep a vice like grip on how we all consume movies.

However, logic will only get you so far. And I’m afraid Hollywood is missing the bigger picture that’s been proved time and again in the last few years: that movie piracy isn’t harming the film industry in the way it would have us believe.

Continue Reading…

The Pirate Bay was one of the biggest and most notorious torrent sites around. Loved by users, hated by content owners. The Pirate Bay was well known and highly regarded. But something so good was never going to last.

After The Pirate Bay lost its high-profile court case, the end was nigh. And the founders took the easy way out of the situation, agreeing to sell the property lock, stock, and barrel.

The Acquisition

The people behind The Pirate Bay agreed to sell the site at the end of June for $7.7 million to a Swedish software company, Global Gaming Factory X AB. GGF planned to turn the site into a legitimate business, working with rather than against the same media companies who fought TPB just month before.

Continue Reading…

The music industry took far too long to adjust to the new realities which the Web brought, and look at the state it’s in now. Hopefully the movie industry will learn the lesson a bit quicker, and it seems to be doing exactly that with the launch of Epix, a new Hulu for music type TV channel and conjoined Web site.

Hollywood Vs. Pirates

Hollywood is becoming increasingly worried about movie piracy, and with good reason. There’s evidence to suggest the majority of people don’t see anything wrong with it, and even those who do see why it’s a bad thing still do it regardless.

The recent leak of X-Men: Wolverine a full month before it was due for release and the consequent downloading of the file by millions of people show that if movies are available online, people will want to watch them, regardless of the legality or otherwise of how they are obtained.

Continue Reading…

The verdict on the The Pirate Bay court case has been announced by the Swedish court. All four defendants, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström, have been found guilty of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. All will receive a 1 year jail term and fines that total $3,620,000.

This is a tragic blow to the file sharing industry in what is the biggest file sharing and Internet piracy case to date. We took a look at the case and how we arrived at this point yesterday, but the Web has also shared its views on the outcome of the trial. Here is a smattering of opinions from around the Internet.

Continue Reading…

X-Men Origins: Wolverine has leaked on the Internet a month before it is officially released. Clearly a serious breach of the anti-piracy measures put in place over the past several years. But what will the fallout of this leak be?

Movie Leaks

Movies leaking online isn’t new or unusual. In fact, much to the movie industry’s chagrin, you can find pretty much every movie ever released online these days. There are the obvious legal options but there are also a multitude of options for illegally downloading or watching movies and television content on the Internet.

The problem for the movie industry is that once one file is made available and disseminated, it’s almost impossible to stop the flow outward. All the while one copy of the movie is available on a peer-to-peer service then someone, somewhere will be able to get hold of it illegally. And millions do exactly that on a daily basis.

Continue Reading…