With over 10 million customers, Netflix is a huge player in the online DVD rental business in the United States. Aside from sending out DVDs by mail, customers can also stream movies directly to a wide variety of devices. Despite these services, there are still plenty of people who cancel their accounts. Just for the record, Netflix wants to know through a survey if they are perhaps ‘pirates’.
TPB-AFK, the upcoming documentary about The Pirate Bay and its founders, is expected to be released during the fall of 2011. To complete the project, Swedish filmmaker Simon Klose is starting a campaign tomorrow through which he hopes to crowdsource the funding. True to BitTorrent’s nature, peers are asked to contribute to the project.
The booming popularity of e-book readers has added a new focus to the piracy debate. As with MP3s in the late 90s, and video and movie files during the last decade, the technology to read digital books has become mainstream. What does this mean for the print industry and book publishers?
With hundreds of thousands of unauthorized downloads, StarCraft 2 is the most pirated game of 2010 thus far. Although Blizzard Entertainment is probably not too excited by this honorary title, the company also benefits from BitTorrent. In fact, StarCraft 2 is probably the most legally downloaded game on BitTorrent too.
For many years movies have been released onto the Internet, trickling down the so-called ‘piracy pyramid’ from elitist and private sites. Now a new breed of release groups are starting to make waves, bringing media directly to the masses. Today we take a closer look at this scene and speak to groups on the frontline to see what makes them tick.
Online movie piracy has largely enjoyed a fairly predictable structure during the last decade. New releases have generally hit the Internet on high-security ‘topsites’ first and then trickled down to become widely available on peer-to-peer networks. TorrentFreak now takes a look at a new wave of release groups who operate with a fresh and BitTorrent-powered philosophy.
The Yes Men are a culture jamming activist duo who expose the lies and social problems caused by governments and corporations. In their much awarded films they impersonate people in power to bring out the truth. Because the US Chamber of Commerce is suing their asses, they have now turned to BitTorrent to get their message out.
Following the recent scares in the United States after the authorities took down and seized the domains of several sites connected to the streaming of movies and TV shows, TorrentFreak received news that a popular fansubbing site had also been taken down. Legendas.TV, a target of earlier anti-piracy action, recently displayed a message saying it had been taken down by ICE, but all was not as it seemed.
The head of a prominent lobby group for the music industry is being touted as a new entrant to the UK’s House of Lords. According to sources close to new Prime Minister David Cameron, UK Music chief Feargal Sharkey is being considered for a life peerage as reward for his efforts in the music industry.
After filing more than two dozen World Intellectual Property Organization disputes in recent months, Rapidshare has come away with substantial victories. After pursuing several sites it claim abused its trademarks and offered unfair competition, the file-storage site has now taken control of many of these. However, not all complaints were successful.