The best way to deal with piracy is to go in hard - real hard. It doesn’t matter if you upset non-pirates or alienate your customers, it doesn’t matter if you make children cry. Pirates are evil and they need to be dealt with severely - this documentary shows how it’s best done, using intimidation and violence.
The sale of Bebo.com to AOL for $850 million last week sparked a fresh wave of opining about music piracy, with Billy Bragg and Michael Arrington both stepping into the ring. The problem is, they are both wrong.
If you are downloading stuff you wouldn’t have bought in the first place, according to economist Karen Croxson, you are probably doing the company that created the product a big favor. You, Mr ‘Good’ Pirate, are telling your friends, adding to the media ‘buzz’ and driving up sales.
The BBC has published a podcast which takes a look at piracy through the ages, also covering the modern concept of ‘intellectual property’. Of course, no story of piracy would be complete without discussing The Pirate Bay so Peter Sunde also plays a significant part in this 20 minute program.
It’s hard for large organizations that move at glacial speeds to compete with individuals taking their content and creating new distribution systems, revenue streams and business models, but the fall of the major record labels taught the rest of the corporate world a lesson. In many cases, piracy it is helping people to innovate and create new legitimate market spaces.
At a preview of his new ‘Change Congress’ project, the Stanford professor took a swipe at the Pirate Party of the United States. Whilst expressing skepticism about it’s utility, his main criticism seemed to be the name.
Last month we reported that Geremi Adam, producer of some of the highest quality pirate movie copies ever seen on the Internet, had been caught and had been ordered to appear in court in January. Adam, aka ‘maVen’ had other ideas - and has disappeared.
When the Oscars roll round every year, the movie industry goes to great lengths to stop nominated movies leaking to the Internet. Every year they fail, miserably. Here is a comprehensive list of piracy stats for all Oscars movies since 2003, from camcorder copies right up to DVD Screeners.
Just days after Sylvester Stallone had an armed guard deliver an advance screener copy of the new “Rambo” movie to Howard Stern, it’s shown that even these type of security measures can be rendered useless. A copy of the movie is now available on BitTorrent, likely leaked by an industry insider.
