His performance in Good Will Hunting earned Williams the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor but there can be few who didn’t warm to him in Mrs Doubtfire or marvel at his energy in Good Morning Vietnam.

However, there’s an old saying that people only truly appreciate something when it’s gone and judging by the response shown yesterday by fans, that certainly holds true for Williams.

Taking a look today at Amazon’s best-selling movie/TV list, we can see that various versions of five different Williams movies currently occupy nine spots in the top 20, but of course there are other ways that people can relive his greatest moments. The quickest and easiest way is to grab something from file-sharing networks, and that’s exactly what’s happening now on a pretty noticeable scale.

At the top of Amazon’s top-selling list is ‘Dead Poets Society’ so it comes as no surprise that this is currently the most popular Williams title being shared using BitTorrent.

The day before news of Williams’ death broke, approximately 100 users worldwide were sharing this 1989 classic on public networks. Yesterday, out of nowhere, it received more than 50,000 downloads. At the time of writing, a ‘YIFY‘ version of Dead Poets Society sits one place ahead of the Liam Neeson movie Non-Stop in The Pirate Bay’s Top 100 most downloaded chart.

In second place, both on Amazon and on public BitTorrent networks, is the 1993 comedy Mrs Doubtfire. The most popular copy is a ‘YIFY’ rip of the Blu-ray edition of the movie that was first uploaded back in September 2012. Again, activity on this release has gone through the roof in the last 36 hours.

Following close on the heels of Mrs Doubtfire both on Amazon and on BitTorrent networks is the 1987 war-comedy Good Morning, Vietnam. Famous for Williams’ improvised and high-energy broadcasts, the movie went on to become one of his most lucrative. Again, the most popular edition on torrent networks comes from YIFY.

Next on Amazon’s list is Good Will Hunting, the movie for which Williams’ earned his Oscar. Yet again this movie’s popularity ranking is mirrored on public BitTorrent networks, sitting a few places down from Mrs Doubtfire as it does on Amazon.

At this point Amazon and BitTorrent diverge a little. At position 13 in Amazon’s Top 20 sits the lesser-known Patch Adams. The title is currently outside The Pirate Bay’s top 100 downloads but with several thousand people now on the most popular torrent, a breakthrough could come at any time.

Finally and also of interest is how the legal market has adapted and is better able to cope with surprise demand. During similar events in the past, sites like Amazon have completely sold out of DVDs and Blu-rays, much as they have with the more popular Williams titles today. However, many of the currently “sold out” movies are also available to watch online, meaning that no one has to miss out.

BitTorrent has always had the same ability, of course, but even today it can offer something not available anywhere else.

A pretty huge torrent released yesterday by RARBG contains a total of 40 Williams movies, from Popeye in 1980 to Shrink in 2009. It’s off to a slow start in terms of seeders (as expected in a torrent of this size) but it probably offers the most comprehensive set of Williams memories available online today.

“Robin Williams was a legend and truly deserving of all our love and adulation,” a commenter on this torrent writes.

“I don’t know what more I can do to honor his memory than to re-watch his old films and reflect on how they shaped my sense of humor, filled my life with joy, and provided me a happy/funny escape from reality in an otherwise bleak and depressing world.”

Robin McLaurin Williams (July 21, 1951 – August 11, 2014)

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Exactly a year later Kim Dotcom made a comeback with a new file-storage venture. Together with several old colleagues and new investors, Mega was launched. The new service, which has a heavy focus on privacy and security, has expanded ever since.

This morning Dotcom posted an image showing how user uploads have increased more than 300% over the past six months. The graph doesn’t specify the scale, but the New Zealand-based entrepreneur told TF that the service now processes over half a billion uploads per month.

That’s more than 10,000 files per minute….

“We are experiencing massive growth. We can’t add new servers and bandwidth fast enough,” Dotcom tells us.

According to Mega’s founder there are several factors that have contributed to the increasing interest in the service. Ironically, Dotcom believes that the same people who destroyed Megaupload are now partly responsible for the success of Mega.

“There are several growth factors. People spend more time at the computer due to the cold weather, the lawsuits by MPAA and RIAA which advertised Mega, and the ongoing advertising from the dumbest ever U.S. Department of Justice case,” Dotcom says.

“Some users get pleasure from the fact that the US government and Hollywood hate Mega’s success and that I continue to expose them. The more people use Mega the more powerful our defense becomes. So, why wouldn’t Mega grow like crazy?” he adds.

The continuing debate about the NSA’s mass-surveillance is also likely to have helped Mega. Unlike other popular cloud hosting services, Mega encrypts all stored files so they can’t be snooped on. Similarly, the fact that former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice joined Dropbox may have also had an impact according to Dotcom.

During the months to come Mega will work on their recently announced backdoor stock market listing, which the company hopes to complete next year. In addition, the cloud hosting service will roll out many new features, all focused on counter surveillance.

“The people of the Internet love us. And we haven’t even launched our encrypted communication suite yet. That’s like a point-to-point encrypted Skype on steroids, running in your browser,” Dotcom tells us, teasing Mega’s upcoming tools.

With the ongoing legal battle against the U.S. Government and civil cases against the MPAA and RIAA, Mega is guaranteed a regular place in the spotlight. In any case, we certainly haven’t heard the last of Dotcom and his team yet.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

It fails laughably at the “necessary, effective, and proportionate” test, where a law must be necessary (meet an identified legislative need), effective (solve that problem effectively), and proportionate (not cause worse damage in the process).

Most of the time, the copyright monopoly fails all three tests, and when legislators have this pointed out to them, they shift uncomfortably in their chairs and change the subject.

I don’t know any profession except legislation that gets away with such abysmal quality assurance.

Most of the time, the discussion focuses on the “effective” and “proportional” parts of copyright legislation, illustrating how it is absolutely toothless in the absence of draconian privacy invasions, which is exactly what the copyright industry is tenaciously pushing for – which brings us to the “proportional” part right in the next sentence.

For once, though, “necessary” is up for debate. Is the copyright monopoly even necessary to solve a real problem? If so, what specific problem is it trying to solve? This passage is notably absent from most copyright monopoly legislations: “The purpose of this law is X”. If you were arguing for the introduction of such a monopoly today, how would you justify it? Could you conceivably do so?

To that effect, a new book, Without Copyright, was published recently. It reminds us of a sobering fact – even though the copyright monopoly was created in 1554 in England by “Bloody” Mary I in order to persecute political dissenters, it didn’t have much of an international effect until the 1900s. The copyright monopolies only protected authors of books in their own countries; outside the author’s own country, it was generally a free-for-all, and nowhere moreso than in the United States.

The international convention that turns copyright monopolies international is known as the Berne Convention, and it is overseen by the UN organization WIPO (the only UN organization to be funded by outside private interests). The United States ratified the Berne Convention only when it became geopolitically important to aggressively push its monopolies onto other countries, as described in The History of Copyright. More specifically, the United States ratified international copyright monopolies on March 1, 1989.

That’s very recent. To put it in perspective, that’s a newer event than Mario Bros, Die Hard, The Princess Bride, and The Legend of Zelda. It’s over fifteen years after the introduction of TCP/IP, the communications protocol of the modern Internet.

The U.S. had recognized some international monopolies to a very limited degree before that point. But before 1891, only citizens and residents of the United States could qualify for copyright monopolies at all. In today’s words of the United States: America was a rogue piracy state, plain and simple. That begs the obvious question – if there was no copyright monopoly, how did the writers make money, and since we have been told this always depends on the copyright monopoly, why were any books written at all in this time period?

But books were written before 1891. Tons of them. And there’s nothing to indicate more books were written after the United States accepted international monopolies, neither in the 1891 change nor in the 1989 change.

The answer, it turns out, was very simple. There wasn’t really any need for the copyright monopoly. There was a whole slew of tools available for publishers and authors to enforce business terms and make their agreed money, where – notably – not a single one of them involved lawyers. And this was considered modern times.

So that lets us return to the question:

How necessary is the copyright monopoly, anyway?

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Some libertarian movements echo aspects of the Pirate Party’s agenda, mainly its advocacy of free speech and open government. Other political groups, such as the European founded Greens, touch on elements of the party’s progressive thinking.

But the Pirate Party stands alone in driving a holistic vision of an information-based society, governed by principles of transparency in business and government while protecting the privacy of individuals.

Despite the common misconception, the legally protected torrenting of Hollywood’s latest blockbuster is not the party’s goal.

Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge, a frequent contributor to Torrentfreak, envisions a society comfortable in its new-found abilities to communicate horizontally. In a 2006 speech given during the first wave of attacks against perennially resilient torrent site, the Pirate Bay, Falkvinge declared copyright industries and hostile political forces could never hope to force the file-sharing genie back into the bottle.

“Yes, we’re pirates. But one who thinks being a pirate is a shame is mistaken. It’s something we’re proud of,” Falkvinge said.

“Because we’ve already seen what it means to be without central control. We’ve already tasted, felt and smelled the freedom of being without a central monopoly of culture and knowledge. We’ve already learnt to read and write – and we’re not about to forget how to read and write, just because it’s not fit in the eyes of the media of the yesteryear.”

The Pirate Party’s swift global expansion since those heady days of 2006 has finally come to Australia’s capital, a tiny city-state unimaginatively titled the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). The city itself is named Canberra, taken from the local people’s language, which means simply, “meeting place.”

Canberra represents a rare opportunity for the Australian wing of the Pirate Party – no other electorate contains such a unique set of factors that, when combined, deliver the party a genuine shot at gaining its first parliamentary representation in Australia.

Victory is by no means certain. The party faces many challenges, such as finding the right candidates and overcoming internal growth pains. Yet Canberra’s use of a proportional voting system combined with a progressive leaning population makes it fertile grounds for the new movement.

A democratic barrier exists in many parts of the world, blocking small parties and independents from electoral success. This barrier is most pronounced in countries like the United States. The US voting system gives enormous power to entrenched contenders and tends to crystallise democratic representation into the hands of just two groups. In practical terms, Democrats and Republicans reign supreme. So-called “third party candidates” are regularly shut out of the process because they have no chance of being elected.

European parliaments are often very different, generally favouring proportional voting. It is because of these systems that smaller and newer parties, such as the Greens, and more recently the Pirate Party itself, have been able to enter parliaments and influence governments.

Various Australian state, territory and federal parliaments employ a dizzying array of different voting systems.

Canberra has its own small parliament, served by a tiny electorate of a just few hundred thousand, yet its legislature enjoys all the constitutional powers of an Australian state government. Canberra also employs a modified proportional voting system, which has delivered a range of different parties and candidates into the local legislative assembly since it first came into existence in 1989. Currently, a “candy-cane” alliance of Greens and the union-movement based Labor Party form government. Canberra is due to hold its elections later this year.

“The drive for creating an ACT branch of Pirate Party Australia was [the] election due in October,” ACT Pirate Party spokesman Stuart Biggs told Torrentfreak.

“The proportional representational system that the ACT uses is similar to the representational systems in Europe where Pirate Parties have already seen electoral success, so it stands to reason that it’s a good place for Pirate Party Australia to focus it’s attention in these early stages,” Biggs said.

Biggs and his Pirate Party colleagues are currently engaged in a membership drive for the new ACT branch. Since launching two weeks ago, they have garnered a quarter of the one hundred Canberra-based members needed by June 30 to register as an official party.

The political establishment in Canberra is unlikely to view the Pirate Party as any kind of real electoral threat. The local voting population is notoriously wedded to the public-service friendly Labor Party, which currently rules at both a local and federal level.

But Australian style democracy is a strange beast by world standards. The final piece of the puzzle involves compulsory voting. Australia is one of the few countries in the world to force all adult citizens to vote, regardless of whether they have any knowledge of (, or even an interest in,) politics. Combine that with proportional voting, a known love of piracy, a progressive electorate and the words “Pirate Party” on the ballot sheet, and Canberra may just deliver the establishment a surprise come October.