Thirty years ago yesterday the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled that time-shifting of TV shows using video recorders was legal. The ‘Betamax’ case, or Universal v Sony for its real name, has proven one thing for certain. When it came to the level of damages the industry predicted would be…
Two weeks ago ABC stopped offering free access to its TV-shows the day after they air on television. The TV-studio took this drastic step in the hope of getting more people to pay for their content, but this idea just backfired. TV viewers are outraged by the decision and have…
Two months ago a Moscow court entered a verdict against Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm after he was found to be listed as contact for some of the largest Russian pirate sites. The authorities ordered him to shut down these sites and pay the legal fees. Talking to TorrentFreak, a…
KISS guitarist Gene Simmons is back again with a new anti-piracy tirade. After blaming the fans for "killing music" and wishing that everyone at Napster had been thrown in jail and then forced into work as the "Allies did with the Nazis", he suggests that a "Great Wall of China"…
For many people BitTorrent is synonymous with piracy, but the popular file-sharing technology has much more to offer. Over the past year BitTorrent Inc. has intensified its efforts to help artists reach millions of new fans, and not without result. A bundle of tracks from Moby's latest album Innocents, which…
Despite the growing availability of legal music services, piracy is still seen as a major threat to the industry. Today we take a look at the most pirated artists on BitTorrent in 2013, with Bruno Mars, Rihanna and Daft Punk topping the chart. Interestingly, the number of pirated downloads are…
The introduction last year of a new anti-piracy law in Russia has seen a huge increase in the number of legal content buyers, the Government claims. Describing the new law as a "turning point", the country's Minister of Communications says the number of Internet users purchasing legal content has gone…
Malware, viruses and fake files have been populating BitTorrent sites for years, but computer security company Symantec has a solution to counter this threat. A new patent application submitted by the company describes a technology which can spot malicious torrents before they are downloaded. The system evaluates the "reputation" of…