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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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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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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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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