TorrentFreak

A woman who went to the cinema to watch a movie says she was “treated like a criminal.” First of all cinema staff searched her looking for camming equipment, but found candy instead which they demanded she turn over. She refused and wouldn’t leave the building when told to either, despite the security guards.

While the entertainment industries push for harsher copyright laws, public opinion steers in the opposite direction. Two recent studies from Canada and Spain found that half of the Internet users use p2p networks to download music, software and films. Less than 5% of the respondents believe that people who download copyrighted content are engaging in criminal behavior.

Camcording pirates pose a serious threat to the profits of Hollywood, according to the MPAA at least. In order to stop the cammers in their tracks, theater owners have been equipped with night-vision goggles. That’s not all though, the latest Hollywood blockbusters may soon come with watermarked audio that can pinpoint a pirate’s seat number.

Myka, a new BitTorrent enabled set-top box was about to enter the market last year, and received widespread coverage online. The project soon went silent, but this weekend they have made the news again with another promise to ship soon. Don’t fall for it though, it has scam written all over it.

The banking industry has received billions of dollars recently and the US auto industry had its share as well. Both have a history of bad decision making, with the auto industry in the US resisting advances in technology. The music and movie industries have also made bad decisions, and rejected technology, so it has to be asked – are they next in line with the begging bowl?

An inflammatory article published by Richard Bennett in The Register makes the claim ‘BitTorrent will kill the Internet’, or at least VoIP and games. However, are Bennett’s claims based in reality, or is it just another round in the FUD war that envelops the Internet?

After Atari received some bad press recently for mistakenly accusing an elderly couple of pirating one of its games, the company has now stopped the anti-piracy campaign in question. The “witch-hunt”, carried out by the UK law firm Davenport Lyons on behalf of Atari, based on spreadsheets full of IPs gathered by a company named Logistep, continues to lose credibility.