TorrentFreak

While Thou Shalt Not Steal is one of the best known ten commandments, there is no directive ordering Thou Shalt Not Copy. This glaring loophole in God’s law, which runs contrary to established entertainment industry doctrine, apparently allows priests to watch pirated Oscar review copies of major movies without concern. Meanwhile, over in the Vatican, pirates are having the time of their lives downloading some quite eye-watering media.

A group of hackers have managed to gain access to a prominently placed advertising billboard located in the crowded Republic Square in the center of Belgrade, Serbia. For a while the billboard displayed the Pirate Bay logo alongside Ghandi’s quote “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” The people responsible for the stunt claim the hack was done to demonstrate how little attention people pay to IT security.

In a just a few days time the 2013 Oscar nominees will be announced and as usual there are plenty of great movies in the running. One of them, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, is currently getting a huge thumbs up from the Internet. Over the weekend a perfect review copy leaked online and in just 24 hours racked up 500,000 downloads. The Hobbit, currently the most popular Oscars leak, has more than 2 million downloads to date with a week’s head start over Tarantino’s western.

Last year Sweden found itself with a new religion when the Church of Kopimism was officially recognized by authorities there. Now, just a year later, there has been another great achievement for the somewhat discordant Kopimism movement. In a list just published by the body responsible for the advancement and cultivation of the Swedish language, ‘kopimism’ has been officially accepted as a brand new word.

The MPAA tends to leave no opportunity unused in its quest to show that online piracy is devastating the movie industry. However, this supposed devastation is not visible at the box office this year. In 2012 North American movie theaters showed more movies than ever before, and for the first time in history domestic box office grosses surpassed $10.7 billion The new record comes in a year where two academic studies have shown that “piracy” isn’t necessarily hurting box office revenues .

Hackulous, perhaps the Internet’s most famous cracked app community, has dramatically closed its doors. The community shut down yesterday but that isn’t the only damage. Apptrackr, the web-based partner index for cracked apps and Installous, the app used by millions to transfer cracked apps to their iDevices, have also been disabled. The operators cite lack of activity for the shutdown but it seems unlikely that’s the only reason.

After revealing that employees at Hollywood movie studios are pirating movies themselves, we now move on to some other high profile organizations. As it turns out, the Big Three record labels are also using BitTorrent to pirate movies and software. And they’re not alone, we also found plenty of pirates at the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the U.S. House of Representatives and at various European Parliaments.