TorrentFreak

Cory Doctorow held a presentation just before the turn of the year, showing how the current copyright wars are just a skirmish in the battles yet to come. It is a very strong omen that gives you an idea just how much is at stake in the coming two decades.

With hundreds of thousands of warnings already sent out, chances are that soon most French Internet users will know someone who has received one. Unsurprisingly, scammers are now riding the wave of publicity and uncertainty by sending out fake Hadopi emails which trick users into requesting more information about their ‘infringements’ which cost them money.

A new paper to be published in the upcoming issue of Marketing Science shows that removing DRM from music leads to a decrease in piracy. Or phrased differently, DRM appears to be an incentive for people to pirate music instead of buying it. The researchers from Rice and Duke University used analytical modelling to come to this seemingly common sense conclusion.

A hacker working on a jailbreak for Apple’s upcoming iOS 5 says he is considering introducing a very controversial feature. Stefan Esser, known online as i0n1c, says the idea of installing his own DRM in order to block pirate apps is going “ping pong” in his head. The team behind Installous, the world’s largest cracked app repository, informs TorrentFreak this is a very bad idea.

Following reports that security features were damaging the playing experience of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, today CD Projekt will release an update to remove all DRM from the game. But while the company informs TorrentFreak it was pleased to avoid a pre-release on this major title, as promised it will monitor and go after illegal file-sharers.

Controversy over Nintendos’s new Terms of Service (TOS) for its 3DS is heating up, particularly over the fact that the company is threatening to remotely destroy any devices that are found to be modified. Nintendo says that “any existing or future unauthorized technical modification of the hardware or software of your Nintendo 3DS System, or [...]

An advisor to the European Court of Justice has said that an ISP involved in a long-running file-sharing dispute cannot be forced to block or filter copyright-infringing files at the behest of copyright holders. Such an action would amount to an invasion of customers’ privacy and violate rights guaranteed under EU law.