As mass file-sharing litigation lawsuits go inter-continental, not everyone is proud to be associated with this type of work. Lawyers Tilly Bailey & Irvine in the UK have been hard at work this month, editing large chunks of their own Wikipedia page in an attempt to hide their involvement and also earning themselves a copyright infringement warning.
The Pirate Party of the UK has released its list of candidates for the forthcoming national elections. The ten candidates, spread across England and Scotland, were announced by the party executives earlier this week, along with a plea for funding to help contest the election.
Warner Bros Entertainment UK is recruiting tech-savvy students to help the company with their anti-piracy efforts. During the 12 month internship the students will have to maintain accounts at private BitTorrent sites, develop link-scanning bots, make trap purchases and perform various other anti-piracy tasks.
In a desperate cry for media attention, the filmmakers behind the flopped Danish movie Winnie & Karina have accused Piratgruppen of stealing their film. In two libelous press releases they fabricated a piracy threat from the local group of copyright critics, hoping to draw attention to the upcoming DVD-release.
After an ISP refused to hand over the identity of a customer to anti-piracy lawyers who claim him to be the first uploader of a pre-release movie, they took the case to court. Shrouded in secrecy the case is heading for the Supreme Court but even if the anti-piracy group wins, they’re going to get the ID of the wrong guy.
The Web-Sheriff has made quite a name for himself, targeting dozens of torrent sites in recent years for clients such as Prince, Michael Jackson and The Village People. This week, however, a painful mistake was made when the anti-pirate tried to take down a torrent from Legit Torrents.
After being voted favorite male artist at the People’s Choice Awards last month, during his acceptance speech Keith Urban showed why the people love him. Speaking of his music the star said: “I don’t even care if you download it illegally, give it to your friends, I really don’t care.” Just a month later he says he didn’t mean that at all.
Install0us is an application used by iPhone users to browse, download and install millions of pirated applications. After becoming uneasy over its legal status, its creator has taken advice from a lawyer. The conclusion is that the risk is too great and development of the software will stop. Of course, others already have plans to fill the gap.
The Finnish record label Lion Music has announced that it will not sign any new musicians until politicians have managed to stop piracy. Illegal downloading is killing music, they say, and the label has rallied up its rock stars to spread the word.
A whole new and exciting year lies ahead of us, so this is an opportune time for some BitTorrent predictions for 2010. On the upside, video streaming sites will begin experimenting with BitTorrent. One of the negatives is that a major BitTorrent client will be sued by the entertainment industry for assisting copyright infringement.