TorrentFreak

Despite many crackdowns over the years, camcorder piracy is still alive and bringing the latest blockbusters to the masses. What is perhaps less well-known is that this is not a new phenomenon. There are documented instances of camming dating back to just after World War I. Cammers in 1920 were as cunning as their modern-day counterparts and had to contend with surprisingly sophisticated anti-piracy measures.

A few months ago 21-year old Travis McCrea participated in the Canadian federal elections as candidate for the Pirate Party in Vancouver Centre. Aside from his political ambitions, McCrea also described himself as an entrepreneur. As with his political views, his business ventures are also focused on file-sharing related ideas, and most recently he started a torrent site to promote the distribution of movies.

The administrator of a growing private BitTorrent tracker is reporting that he has been raided by the authorities. The admin of XtremeSpeeds says that he was questioned on suspicion of being involved with leading P2P release group IMAGiNE. While the investigation is underway, XtremeSpeeds will remain offline.

Delivering his keynote address at this week’s annual CA Expo in Sydney, former Google CIO Douglas C Merrill added to the growing belief that punishing and demonizing file-sharers is a bad idea. Merrill, who after his Google stint joined EMI records, revealed that his profiling research at the label found that LimeWire pirates were iTunes’ biggest customers.

A London-based music label and a German music magazine are having an escalating high-profile row over two leaked albums. Ninja Tunes have publicly accused Backspin magazine of leaking promos sent to them earlier this month, accusations the magazine aggressively denies. So who leaked what and when? TorrentFreak takes a look.

Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, the team behind indie platform game Super Meat Boy, are taking a particularly pragmatic approach to game piracy. The pair, collectively Team Meat, say that their PC and Xbox 360 title was hugely pirated. “We don’t fucking care,” they told the DarkZero podcast. (1hr 9mins in) “If there are, let’s [...]

A popular indie zombie-style RPG game has been taken offline due to an unofficial feature made available in a cracked copy. The developers of the game say that they usually turn a blind eye to piracy since it could have benefits for their project, but when pirates keep using their servers to get updates instead of using BitTorrent, they had to make a stand.