The Pirate Bay has been portrayed by Hollywood as the enemy of everything that’s creative. They say the site is the death knell of the entertainment industry, causing hundreds and thousands of people to lose their jobs. Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay is helping out yet another indie artist to promote her work.
The Pirate Bay is going on a road trip through Europe, one they hope to end today in a former NATO bunker. After a move from Sweden to the Ukraine, The Pirate Bay has now arrived at CyberBunker, an ISP that can provide them with a facility that can resist a nuclear attack as well as electromagnetic pulse bombs.
Last Friday The Pirate Bay moved to Ukraine after its Swedish bandwidth supplier was forced to stop servicing the tracker. In the new setup, traffic to TPB is routed through The Netherlands, but anti-piracy outfit BREIN has now asked ISP NForce to stop handling TPB’s traffic. As a result the site is now down for most people.
On April 1st 2009, Sweden implemented its controversial IPRED law which promised to make it easier to track down those sharing illicit media via the Internet. Now, exactly 6 months on, what has been achieved with this legislation and what effect has it had on the country’s file-sharers?
Last week TorrentFreak reported that the Canadian Pirate Party had established its own BitTorrent tracker. The Pirates hope to show that BitTorrent is not a threat, but a great tool for artists to promote their work. Record label Thorny Bleeder agrees and is now offering free music via the tracker.
An ISP in the UK is set to introduce a voluntary customer Internet censorship scheme. Charles Dunstone, chief executive of Carphone Warehouse/TalkTalk said the company would introduce parental controls for subscribers which would include a feature to ban BitTorrent sites.
A UK music industry group claims that it has given an ISP evidence that thousands of its customers are pirating music but it has done nothing to stop them. Since February the BPI has harvested the IP addresses of 100,000 BT Broadband customers but is now labeling the ISP’s lack of action against them as “shameful.”
Controversial blogger Tucker Max has been telling the Internet about his drunken sexual encounters for many years. His antics will hit the big screen tomorrow in the movie release of his book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. If you’ve never heard of Tucker, now’s your chance. He says he doesn’t care if non-US citizens pirate the movie.
Despite seemingly insurmountable problems experienced with its proposed purchase of The Pirate Bay, Global Gaming Factory continues to surprise. Today it has announced that it will call a meeting for the election of new board members. Those suggested are music industry veterans and include a BPI council member.
The war against file-sharing has found a new figure-head. After she wrote an interesting post on MySpace, singer Lilly Allen’s words have been relayed around the world – she has even started a new blog where many artists are supporting her. But what if the new face of anti-piracy was just as bad as those she criticizes?
Dan Brown’s latest novel The Lost Symbol sold a million copies in the first day, and this success has carried over to various file-sharing sites. Both the unabridged audiobook and the ebook versions have already been downloaded tens of thousands of times through BitTorrent.
