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El alquimista por bittorrent, y otras batallas perdidas
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The Pirate Bay Trial Begins, Pirates 1, Prosecution 0
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- Image via Wikipedia
The most important day in file sharing history has taken place. Remember the first time you downloaded an Mp3? How about the first time you used Napster or Limewire?
In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past 10 years, you’ll have heard the stories of silicon swashbucklers and rampaging record companies. Perhaps the largest contributor to the pirate software scene is The Pirate Bay. Hosted in Sweden, this website tracks and indexes BitTorrent files (.torrent) for almost every flavor of data. You can find movies, games, albums, programs, and pretty much anything else of digital value all for free. Most of the sites content is uploaded by its 3.4 million user base.
Of course, this cant last forever.
The Swedish Government has been after TPB for years. After a raid in 2006 and 3 days of downtime, officials pushed to bring TPB to court for their blatant disregard for copyright law. The trial began Feb 16th, 2009.
Prosecutor Håkan Roswall read out the charges that can be best summarized as “commercial copyright infringement”. The plaintiffs are Warner Bros, MGM, EMI, Colombia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Sony BMG and Universal. Lundström’s lawyer pointed out that the prosecutor may have drawn up some charges incorrectly. Interestingly, Lundström is the only one of the defendants with two lawyers, one of which is a copyright expert. - TorrentFreak
It was apparent that the prosecution had made an error in judgment when choosing their ‘Computer Expert’. A live audio broadcast revealed the frantic clicking of their witness fumbling to get his PowerPoint presentation to display. He was later asked to “stick to the papers”. Unable to define the difference between Megabits and Megabytes, an EPIC FAIL sticker was quickly slapped on the prosecution’s case.
After the Second day, it had become apparent that the prosecution had clearly not done their research. According to TorrentFreak, at least half of the charges were dropped, sighting that the TPB did not host any copywritten materials, but only the .torrent files tracking them. It seems as if the court has realized that this site is a Torrent search engine, and not a distributor of pirated software. It is anticipated that the prosecution will fall flat on its face.
You can read more about the trial at http://trial.thepiratebay.org/ and http://torrentfreak.com/
Information is free.
LONG LIVE THE PIRATE BAY.
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EA Owns themselves with DRM in Spore, Pirates Win
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Image via CrunchBase
Spore, Will Wright’s opus that puts you in control of a whole species from birth the death, is a game that has split opinion right down the middle, at least in terms of the game itself. But while some argue it’s too simple, and their opponents argue it is genius, everyone seems to agree on one thing: the DRM sucks.
In its wisdom, Electronic Arts decided to release Spore with a draconian DRM limit in place which means every purchaser of an official copy of the game is restricted to three activations. This is intended to prevent one copy being shared by friends and installed on multiple computers. In tandem with the disc needing to be in the computer to be playable, and the online activation requirements, this should have made the game piracy-free. Except it hasn’t. In fact, Spore is the most pirated game ever.
The problem that EA faces is that by including such draconian DRM limitations, it gives the pirates an excuse to legitimise their activities. The argument being that with such intrusive DRM included, why the hell shouldn’t we all download the game illegally and stick one to the huge corporate machine.
This virtual punch in the face for EA is made possible by the fact that the DRM is removed from the game when it’s pirated. So rather than harming the pirates and their activities, stupid decisions such as the one taken by EA only harms the customers willing to pay full price for the game, and not the people who want a copy for free.
Check out more at Blorge
TorrentFreak reports that Spore has been the most downloaded torrent on The Pirate Bay, the largest and most notorious BitTorrent site, for over a week now. Which is a rarity. The game has been downloaded over 500,000 times over the various torrent sites since it was released on September 2nd.
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The Threat is Real Internet Freedom
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How does this threat to Internet freedom affect you?
Such corporate control of the Web would reduce your choices and stifle the spread of innovative and independent ideas that we’ve come to expect online. It would throw the digital revolution into reverse. Internet gatekeepers are already discriminating against Web sites and services they don’t like:
- In May 2008, the Max Planck Institute released a comprehensive study that found both Comcast and Cox Communications to be deceptively blocking access to peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.
- In October 2007, the Associated Press busted Comcast for blocking its users’ access to peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like BitTorrent and Gnutella. This fraudulent practice is a glaring violation of Net Neutrality.
- In September 2007, Verizon was caught banning pro-choice text messages. After a New York Times expose, the phone company reversed its policy, claiming it was a glitch.
- In August 2007, AT&T censored a live webcast of a Pearl Jam concert just as lead singer Eddie Vedder criticized President Bush.
- In 2006, Time Warner’s AOL blocked all emails that mentioned http://www.dearaol.com — an advocacy campaign opposing the company’s pay-to-send e-mail scheme.
- In 2005, Canada’s telephone giant Telus blocked customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to the Telecommunications Workers Union during a contentious labor dispute.
- In 2004, North Carolina ISP Madison River blocked their DSL customers from using any rival Web-based phone service.
- Shaw, a major Canadian cable, internet, and telephone service company, intentionally downgrades the “quality and reliability” of competing Internet-phone services that their customers might choose — driving customers to their own phone services not through better services, but by rigging the marketplace.
This is just the beginning. Cable and telco giants want to eliminate the Internet’s open road in favor of a tollway that protects their status quo while stifling new ideas and innovation.
What they’ve got planned - SAVE THE INTERNET
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