Despite being accused of non-violent crimes, Peter is being held in a high-security unit and without concern for his dietary needs. As a result he’s literally wasting away.

Following the tragic death of his father who recently succumbed to a long-standing set of illnesses, the week delivered yet more bad news. Although the prison would allow him to attend the funeral, Peter was told he could expect to carry his father’s coffin wearing handcuffs.

Understandably the news provoked much outrage. Why would a non-violent and now-frail man with with just a few days left on his sentence try to escape from not one but two prison guards? As that improbable situation was discussed among supporters online, a much less traditional support group were asking the same questions.

Hollywood director Lexi Alexander has been a vocal supporter of Peter and earlier this year broke with the usual Tinseltown position by calling for his release.

While her outspoken approach is uncharacteristic of a Hollywood worker, it may come as a surprise that she is definitely not on her own. During recent weeks the director and actress, who has several movies under her belt, called for other like-minded individuals in Hollywood to make themselves known.

The result was the publication a few minutes ago of a video dedicated to the uncuffing, release and support of Peter Sunde.

“We created this video in solidarity with Peter as he attends his father’s funeral today,” Alexander told TorrentFreak.

“Originally I had planned to do this over the next few weeks, but when I heard about Peter’s father’s death yesterday, we scrambled and got it together within a few hours.”

While a few of the people in the video have understandably chosen to remain anonymous, others have been very happy to show their faces. With the famous Hollywood sign in the background, first up, Julie Bush.

“Julie Bush was pro-piracy before I even knew what file-sharing meant,” Alexander told TF. “She used to be a writer on the show Sons of Anarchy and now she’s writing a major property for Universal Studios: Robert Ludlum’s The Sigma Protocol.”

Bush has written on a number of occasions about Hollywood’s “dumb” approach to piracy.

“Many showrunners and executives I know not only pirate stuff all the time but also privately endorse the idea that piracy is good for the industry, a great way to advertise, and essential to building a healthy audience,” she explained last year.

The gentleman holding up the sign calling for the un-cuffing of Peter is actor Ross McCall. He appeared in Band of Brothers, Alexander’s movies Green Street and Green Street 2, before moving on to star in TV series including Crash, White Collar and Luther.

“The pretty blonde [0m 53s] is producer Catrin Cooper. Very outspoken about her opposition to criminalizing file-sharing,” Alexander continues. Cooper has worked in several roles on movies including Casino Royale, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and Batman Begins.

“The guy with ‘Free Peter Sunde’ on his shirt is a writer and actor named Edward DeRuiter, one of his movies was just released last month,” Alexander adds.

“Then there’s Brent Weichsel, who against my advice decided to put his name and union on the sign. He’s Local 600 Camera Assistant.”

It’s quite something and particularly brave for these individuals to put their name to the support of someone described by studio bosses as someone intent on the ruination of the industry. That said, and as clearly pointed out on one of the signs held up in the video, Hollywood workers are not only writers and directors, they’re also humans too.

The video, which features writers and authors, directors, producers, a screenwriter, a cinematographer, an engineer and a dialect coach, is embedded below and available on Lexi’s blog.

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

“Megaupload was built on an incentive system that rewarded users for uploading the most popular content to the site, which was almost always stolen movies, TV shows and other commercial entertainment content,” Fabrizio commented when the MPAA filed its suit.

However, data from Megaupload’s database shared with TorrentFreak shows that employees of MPAA and RIAA member companies had hundreds of accounts at the file-storage site. This includes people working at Disney, Warner Bros., Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Universal Music Group, Sony, and Warner Music.

In total, there were 490 Megaupload accounts that were connected to MPAA and RIAA members, who sent 181 premium payments in total. Together, these users uploaded 16,455 files which are good for more than 2,097 gigabytes in storage.

Remember, those are only from addresses that could be easily identified as belonging to a major movie studio or record label, so the real numbers should be much higher.

But there’s more. The same companies that are now asking for millions of dollars in damages due to massive copyright infringement were previously eager to work with Megaupload and Megavideo.

As we noted previously, Disney, Warner Brothers, Fox and others contacted Kim Dotcom’s companies to discuss advertising and distribution deals.

For example, Shelina Sayani, Digital Marketing Coordinator for Warner Bros, offered a deal to syndicate “exciting” Warner content to Megaupload’s Megavideo site.

Subject: Warner Bros. – Looking for Content Manager
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2009 08:55:50 -0800
From: Sayani, Shelina
To: demand@megavideo.com

Dear Megavideo,

I’m writing from Warner Bros., offering opportunities to syndicate our exciting entertainment content (e.g. Dark Knight, Harry Potter, Sex and the City clips and trailer) for your users. Could you please pass on my information to the appropriate content manager or forward me to them? Thanks so much for your time.

Shelina Sayani
WB Advanced Digital Services
3300 W Olive Ave, Bldg 168 Room 4-023
Burbank, CA 91505
818.977.4668

Similarly, Disney attorney Gregg Pendola reached out to Megaupload, not to threaten or sue the company, but to set up a deal to have Disney content posted on the Megavideo site.

Subject: Posting on Megavideo.com
From: “Pendola, Gregg”
Date: 8/13/2008 10:06 AM
To: love@megavideo.com

My name is Gregg Pendola. I am Executive Counsel for The Walt Disney Company. Certain properties of The Walt Disney Company have content that they would like to post on your site.

However, we are uncomfortable with a couple of the provisions of your Terms of Use that we feel may jeopardize our rights in our content. We were hoping that you would be amenable to reviewing a 1-page agreement we have drafted that we would like to use in place of your Terms of Use.

Is there someone I can contact to discuss this? Or someone I can email the Agreement to for review?

Thanks. Gregg

Gregg Pendola
Executive Counsel
The Walt Disney Company

For Fox, the interest in Megaupload wasn’t necessarily aimed at spreading studio content, but to utilize Megaupload’s considerable reach by setting up an advertising deal. In this email former Senior Director Matt Barash touts FAN, the Fox Audience Network.

Subject: Fox Ad Partnership
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2009 08:09:14 -0800
From: Matt Barash
To: sales@megaupload.com

I’m reaching out to see if you have a few minutes to discuss the recently launched Fox Audience Network.

FAN is now up and running and fully operational, utilizing best of breed optimization technology to bring cutting edge relevancy to the ad network landscape.
We are scaling rapidly and seeking the right 3rd party publishers to add as partners to our portfolio.

Please let me know if you have some time to chat this week about how we can work together to better monetize your inventory.

Best,
Matt

Matt Barash
Director, Publisher Development
Fox Audience Network

The above are just a few examples of major industry players who wanted to team up with Kim Dotcom. Now, several years later, the same companies accuse the site of being one of the largest piracy vehicles the Internet has ever seen.

If the MPAA and RIAA cases proceed, Megaupload’s defense will probably present some of these examples to highlight the apparent double standard. That will be an interesting narrative to follow, for sure.

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

When you are challenging a copyright industry lobbyist over the concept of public libraries, and ask them if they are opposed to people having access to such culture and knowledge without paying, they are smart enough to not deride public libraries – as this would weaken their political position considerably. However, online sharing of culture and knowledge is the Analog Equivalent Right to the public libraries we’ve had for 150 years. Lobbyists will sometimes try to change the subject around this, or more commonly, lie using one of three myths. Here are those myths and lies, and why they are untrue:

Lobbyist lie: The library buys all its books. Therefore, it’s not comparable with online sharing of culture.

Fact: Laws in most countries say that for every, every, book published, the publisher must send a number of copies of that book to certain large libraries at their own cost, to be available without charge for reading by the public.

When the copyright industry complains that they “can’t possibly accept” laws that mandate them to “give away their product for free”, as they tend to put it, it’s only prudent to point out rather sternly that those laws already exist, and have done so for more than a century. The key difference with online sharing is that the analog-equivalent mechanism wouldn’t incur any cost at all to the publishers, something that would normally be seen as a good thing, both from a political and publishing perspective.

Obviously, it’s true that many if not most libraries buy additional books and additional copies of books. However, the main point here is that there are already laws on the books that say that every single book published must be supplied to a library, in order to be available to the public free of charge.

In addition, this ignores the point that the copyright industry doesn’t get to “accept” or “not accept” laws. They get to run a business in a particular legal environment or choose to not do so, and that’s where their prerogative starts and ends. On a functioning free and fair market, entrepreneurs do not and should not have any say whatsoever in what the legal environment looks like. (We still have some distance to go with regards to this point in replacing clueless and dangerous yes-men politicians.)

Lobbyist lie: The rightsholder gets paid when a book is borrowed from a library.

Fact: This is a myth on two fronts – what we would call a “double-fault” in popular sports such as Counter-Strike.

It is true that, under certain conditions and in several countries, some spare change is sent to somebody when a book is borrowed from a library. However, that somebody who receives money is not the rightsholder, nor is it some kind of compensation for a lost sale. In most European countries, it is a governmental culture grant intended to boost the amount of culture available in the local language. Therefore, and this context is crucially important, that spare change has absolutely nothing to do with the exclusive rights of the copyright monopoly. It is a unilateral cultural governmental grant that happens to be based on library statistics, as they are a convenient measure.

If a book in Swedish is borrowed from a Swedish library, then the person who made it available in Swedish gets a very small amount, provided they hit a minimum threshold and hasn’t hit a maximum threshold. Sometimes, this happens to be an author that wrote originally in Swedish, but much more often, it is somebody who translated a book into the Swedish language. Other countries have similar arrangements.

To wit: When somebody borrows Harry Potter in Swedish translation from a Swedish library, J.K. Rowling – the rightsholder – doesn’t get a single penny from that. The myth is just not true on any account.

Lobbyist lie: A library can only lend its book to one person at a time, and therefore, this limit must be artificially imposed in the digital age.

Fact: This was a physical limitation, not a conceptual one. If a library could lend its books to multiple people, it would have done so in a heartbeat long ago. To argue that this physical undesirable limitation should form a basis for limiting legislation in a new environment where the limitation doesn’t exist is worse than a logical fallacy; it makes no sense on any level.

The purpose of the public library is not and was never to “lend books”, as is asserted in this myth. It was, and is, to “make knowledge and culture available to as many people as possible at no cost to them”. What’s possible has expanded greatly with online sharing, and it is only proper that we take advantage of this fantastic potential.

The online sharing of culture and knowledge is the greatest public library ever invented, and the ability for all humankind to take part of all culture and knowledge 24/7 is arguably one of the largest steps of civilization of this century. All the technology has already been invented, all the tools have already been deployed, the ability to use it has already spread to all of humanity: nobody needs to spend a dime to make this happen. All we have to do is to lift the stupid ban on actually using it.

What we need to do is to replace the yes-men politicians who let themselves be puppeteered by an obsolete but lucrative gatekeeper industry in order to make this great leap of civilization. Often, the mere trend to replace such politicians is enough for bad policy to change on a dime.

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

These lists give insight into people’s interests over the preceding 12 months. On Google, for example, in 2012 “What is SOPA” was the most asked question typed into Google in both the U.S. and Australia.

But what about BitTorrent? With billions of searches every year it’s worth taking a look at the most-entered keywords on the dominant file-sharing network.

Unfortunately there is no central database of searches available, but Kat.ph, one of the top 3 torrent sites in terms of visitors, was kind enough to share the most popular search terms of 2012 with us. This list is based on millions of searches and gives an indication of what people were looking for on BitTorrent during the last 12 months.

Topping the lists this year is the TV-show The Walking Dead, followed by the more general keywords 2012 and French. The latter two are used to find recent content and French language releases respectively.

The top 10 further contains six movie related searches including Ted, Taken 2, The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises. Besides movie titles the top 50 also contains other video related searches such as DVDrip, 720p, 3D and Movies.

Traditionally, TV-shows are much sought after on BitTorrent as well, and it’s no different this year. After The Walking Dead, Homeland is the most popular TV-related search phrase in 12th place, followed by Game of Thrones and Sons of Anarchy further down the list.

Besides movies and TV-shows the list is completed with a few unavoidable adult related searches, and the relatively rare software and game related keywords such as Windows 8, PSP and Android.

Perhaps most surprising of all, music isn’t all that popular on public BitTorrent indexes, as we find no music related terms in the top 50 at all.

Ita, a term used to find Italian content, dropped from first place last year to 31st this year. This is not really surprising as Italian ISPs were ordered to block access to the site in May.

Below is the full list of the 50 most-entered search phrases on Kat.ph. This list will be different on other public BitTorrent sites, but we assume that the top searches will be popular on other indexes as well.

—

1. the walking dead
2. 2012
3. french
4. ted
5. dexter
6. batman
7. taken 2
8. the dark knight rises
9. the avengers
10. brave
11. skyfall
12. homeland
13. game of thrones
14. 720p
15. the hunger games
16. dvdrip
17. 1080p
18. windows 8
19. prometheus
20. sons of anarchy
21. 3d
22. the amazing spiderman
23. looper
24. arrow
25. revenge
26. yify
27. twilight
28. battleship
29. total recall
30. glee
31. ita
32. movies
33. psp
34. supernatural
35. resident evil
36. x art
37. windows 7
38. magic mike
39. telugu
40. android
41. fringe
42. minecraft
43. once upon a time
44. harry potter
45. madagascar 3
46. wwe
47. breaking bad
48. family guy
49. american horror story
50. 2011

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

However, when Rietveldt bought a Harry Potter DVD in 2007, he discovered his music being used in the anti-piracy ad without his permission. In fact, it had been used on dozens of DVDs both in the Netherlands and overseas.

In order to get the money he was owed, Rietveldt went to local music royalty collecting agency Buma/Stemra who had been representing him since 1988 but had failed to pay him any money for the anti-piracy piece previously registered with them.

Eventually Stemra sent Rietveldt an advance of 15,000 euros along with a promise to forward a list of all the other DVDs that the composer’s music had been used on. That list never arrived, but according to the Amsterdam Court this week it amounted to at least 71 commercial DVDs.

In January 2009, Rietveldt wrote to Stemra informing them that the amount paid thus far wouldn’t cover the amount owed. Despite much wrangling, by 2011 Stemra still hadn’t provided Rietveldt with the necessary data but did pay another 10,000 euros ‘advance’.

“This dispute lingered on for some years, but in 2012 Stemra arranged a settlement with BREIN legal parent NVPI for the unpaid royalties,” Arnoud Engelfriet, a lawyer specializing in Internet law at the ICTRecht law firm, told TorrentFreak.

“Under the settlement Stemra would receive 60,000 euros. Rietveldt sued because he had calculated he was due at least 164,974 euros.”

In June, Stemra paid Rietveld another 31,000 euros but this week the Amsterdam District Court ruled that Stemra had indeed been negligent in their handling of the case. They were fined 20,000 euros, ordered to pay Rietveldt’s legal costs, and told to continue efforts to pay all money due to the composer while keeping him fully informed of developments.

The case caused a scandal in the Netherlands last year following discussions Rietveldt had with Buma/Stemra board member Jochem Gerrits about getting the money he was owed.

In order to help, Gerrits suggested that the composer should sign his track over to High Fashion Music, a label owned by Gerrits himself and one that would take 33% of Rietveldt’s royalties for its trouble.

“This prompted TV news organization PowNews (who had recorded the conversation) to assert corruption, but Gerrits later claimed he was speaking as director of his record company, and it is standard that a record company gets 1/3rd of the mechanical royalties,” Arnoud Engelfriet explains.

Although Gerrits resigned his position, he later initiated a defamation lawsuit against PowNews. But the embarrassing ripples caused by the case didn’t end there.

“While traditionally these societies operate as private institutions (self regulation), this affair has prompted the under secretary of state Fred Teeven to announce regulations to forbid the conflict of interest that Gerrits was in. More regulations may also appear,” Engelfriet concludes.

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

Thompson was involved in movie piracy, but not just with any old group. Wicked1, as he was better known online, was a member of Centropy, the world’s leading movie piracy group.

Today, 7 years on, Thompson is sharing with TorrentFreak readers an excerpt from his forthcoming book, This is the Scene.

This is the Scene

My name was Wicked1 and I was a member of Centropy. For people not around in the early 2000’s and/or think the pinnacle of movies comes from the likes of IMAGiNE or aXXo, allow me this chance to correct you.

Centropy (CTP), when we existed, was the biggest release group in the world. Most people tend to think of ISO games groups as the leaders of The Scene, but there has always been more than one group operating at a given time. During my time, there was Razor1911, Fairlight, and Deviance. There was only ever one group the quality of Centropy in the movie scene.

We were the pioneers in how to pirate a movie in theaters. Our releases of The Matrix Reloaded, and Star Wars Episode 2 were part of the reason why one of the most common phrases in the pirating of new release movies was “I’ll wait for the Centropy”. The quality of our releases is virtually unmatched to this day.

Through our former DivX release partners in Deity, and later under our own spinoff, Brutus, we also released some of the largest DVD copies of movies ever, such as Lord of the Rings The Two Towers. Our most famous release was the March 1st release of The Return of the King, almost 2 and a half months before it came out on DVD.

What was my job in the two years I was a member of CTP? Was I the guy sitting in the movie theaters or the guy who uploaded movies to our encoding boxes? No, I was the guy who supplied computer hardware to the guys who sat in movie theaters and the person who found the suppliers who gave us the vast majority of our movies.

I was also one of the guys in The Scene who people would come to with fast business Internet connections to help set up topsites for Centropy, like a site run out of Michigan in a Comcast datacenter.

I became a member of Centropy in 2002 after having been a member of some very different groups. First, there was A-Team, a scrubby movie release group. Our only claim to anything was a subpar release of the first Harry Potter movie.

After bouncing around a few other groups like Esoteric and Obus, I ended up helping the TV group FFN pay for the internet connection for one of its cappers. It got me a leech account on some of the better sites around then, and it helped me join the racing group Enrage.

The leader of Enrage, a guy who went by the name of Blackjack, was someone fairly high in the Scene. After I had left Esoteric, he came to me one day telling me that Centropy was looking for someone to help keep their supplier happy. Within two months, I was supplying hardware, money, and bringing in new potential suppliers. Random topsites like AKSISO, a gigabit site in the Czech Republic, decided to give me site-op privileges in hopes that Centropy would become an affiliate of the site.

Things were great for me as a pirate; I had access to whatever I wanted and was a member of some of the biggest groups that have ever existed. Then Operation Fastlink happened.

Operation Fastlink was a multi-year, joint-operation run by the United States Department of Justice and the Computer Crimes and Intellectual Property Section of INTERPOL designed to take out the groups Fairlight, Kalisto, Echelon, ProjectX, and Class.

I had been around somewhat in 2001 during Operation Buccaneer, but that had very minimal effects on the world of piracy. Fastlink was different, as Fairlight (FLT) and their associated acts were some of the largest groups and some of the most secure in all of warez.

I woke up the morning of April 22, 2004, to what could pretty much be called chaos on IRC [Internet Relay Chat]. The private Centropy IRC server was down, and nobody from the group was on Efnet or Linknet, and virtually all of my sites were down for security reasons.

When I finally got in touch with a few of my other Scene buddies, they had told me that FLT and most of their sites had been busted and that I should probably lay low for a while. The fact that FLT had been busted didn’t bother me all that much; what bothered me was that their two US sites, Optical Illusion and DOH, were both sites I was on and both had been busted.

Like most rational people who are scared of going to prison would do, I freaked out and destroyed my hard drives and burned every burned CD and DVD I had in a random field outside of my town. For the next two months, I disappeared from piracy until my friends korax and Dact told me about this cool gigabit US topsite run by a guy named Griffen.

That topsite’s name was CHUD, or Can’t Hold us Down. Griffen and his site would later come back to haunt us in the biggest way imaginable….

—————————-

Want to hear more? We certainly do. Matthew is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to raise funding to continue work on his forthcoming book, This is the Scene.

The campaign page and accompanying video are available here.

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

Immediately thousands of fans jumped on the release and according to figures collated by TorrentFreak, in the days that followed it was downloaded half a million times. While this may very well be a record for a “CAM” movie, it failed to exceed the download numbers of several other movies that were available in higher quality.

Record or not, the movie’s distributer Disney must have been terrified by this early release. However, this weekend the suits at the studio were able to breathe a sign of relief, or rather, start popping open the Champagne.

With more than $200 million in box office revenue, The Avengers had the most successful first weekend in movie history. It broke the record set by Harry Potter last year by more than $30 million, despite the “massive” piracy.

But is this really such a big surprise? Not when you look at the numbers.

Of all the people who downloaded a pirate copy of the film about 20% came from the US. This means that roughly 100,000 Americans have downloaded a copy online through BitTorrent. Now, IF all these people bought a movie ticket instead then box office revenue would be just 0.5% higher.

Not much of an impact, and even less when you consider that these “pirates” do not all count as a lost sale.

We don’t think that there are many movie fans who see a low quality camcorded version of a movie as a true alternative to watching a film in a movie theater. The two are totally different experiences, and not direct competition at all.

If anything, downloading a camcorded movie could be compared to downloading a low quality bootleg of a concert. People who download these are collectors, passionate fans, or just curious. But in no way do these bootlegs seriously hurt concert attendances.

The same might be said for advance leaks of games. These pre-release copies are often downloaded by tens of thousands of people, but not necessarily those who refuse to pay. The people who download these buggy and sometimes hardly playable games are often curious game fanatics who tend to buy the official game when it comes out.

The claim that camcorded films are killing the movie industry is nonsense and spending millions of dollars on anti-camcording technologies is simply not worth it.

But does this mean that piracy is not an issue for the movie industry at all? Well not so fast.

A recent study showed that the US box office is not suffering from movie piracy, but that there is a detrimental effect on international box office figures. The researchers attribute this impact to the wide release gaps, which sometimes result in a high quality DVD copy being available on pirate sites while a movie is still showing in theaters.

These high quality copies are more likely to “compete” with movie theater attendance and if a movie is not showing in local theaters at all, it definitely has the potential to impact future attendance.

This is even more true for the DVD-aftermarket and VOD sales. High quality pirated copies are direct competition and can impact revenues.

The challenge for the movie industry is to make legal offerings more appealing than pirated counterparts. Of course it may not always be able to compete with “free,” but there is still a lot of ground to make up when it comes to availability and quality of legal offerings.

But in no way are camcorded copies killing the US movie industry.

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

As statements go, they don’t get much more harsh than that, so one might think that hostilities between Megaupload and the member companies of the MPAA are a long-standing thing.

But as we know, despite all the rhetoric the likes of the usually-aggressive Disney never sued the Hong Kong based file-hosting service, and instead opted to let the FBI do their work for them.

While this government-financed approach will have proven substantially cheaper than dragging Megaupload through civil court, some potentially embarrassing things would have inevitably come out in such a case – such as this selection of emails just obtained by TorrentFreak.

In an eyebrow-raising email penned by Disney attorney Gregg Pendola, the counsel contacts Megaupload not to threaten or sue the company, but to set up a deal to have Disney content posted on the Megavideo site.

Subject: Posting on Megavideo.com
From: “Pendola, Gregg”
Date: 8/13/2008 10:06 AM
To: love@megavideo.com

My name is Gregg Pendola. I am Executive Counsel for The Walt Disney Company. Certain properties of The Walt Disney Company have content that they would like to post on your site.

However, we are uncomfortable with a couple of the provisions of your Terms of Use that we feel may jeopardize our rights in our content. We were hoping that you would be amenable to reviewing a 1-page agreement we have drafted that we would like to use in place of your Terms of Use.

Is there someone I can contact to discuss this? Or someone I can email the Agreement to for review?

Thanks. Gregg

Gregg Pendola
Executive Counsel
The Walt Disney Company

In another email, Shelina Sayani, Digital Marketing Coordinator for Warner Bros, offers a deal to syndicate “exciting” Warner content to Megaupload’s Megavideo site.

Subject: Warner Bros. – Looking for Content Manager
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2009 08:55:50 -0800
From: Sayani, Shelina
To: demand@megavideo.com

Dear Megavideo,

I’m writing from Warner Bros., offering opportunities to syndicate our exciting entertainment content (e.g. Dark Knight, Harry Potter, Sex and the City clips and trailer) for your users. Could you please pass on my information to the appropriate content manager or forward me to them? Thanks so much for your time.

Shelina Sayani
WB Advanced Digital Services
3300 W Olive Ave, Bldg 168 Room 4-023
Burbank, CA 91505
818.977.4668

In a later email, Joshua Carver from Warner’s Advanced Digital Services department made inquiries as to how the company could save time by using RSS “to upload our content all at once.”

Subject: Media RSS Feed from Warner Brothers
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2010 09:38:49 -0800
From: Carver, Joshua
To: idea@megavideo.com

Hello Megavideo,

My name is Joshua from the Warner Bros. Advanced Digital Services department.
I would like to know if your site can take a Media RSS feed for our syndications.
We would like to upload our content all at once instead of one video at a time.

Thank you for your time and funny content,

Joshua D. Carver
Associate Marketing Services Specialist
WB Advanced Digital Services

Jonathan Karron, Director of Marketing at Turner Broadcasting System, contacted Megaupload suggesting a partnership to “promote some of Turner’s great properties” and “original programming.”

Subject: Promotion of Turner Broadcasting videos on Megavideo
From: “Karron, Jonathan”
Date: 5/7/2009 9:29 AM
To: sales@megavideo.com

Hi

My name is Jonathan Karron and I oversee digital marketing for tbs.com, TNT.tv and TCM.com. I’d like to talk to someone in editorial/marketing about your site and how we might be able to work together to promote some of Turner’s great properties and lineup of on Megavideo. I’ve attached some basic information on our websites for your review.

I’m unable to find any contact info you your site so can someone please email me or call me at the # below to start the conversation?

Best,
Jonathan Karron
VP/Digital Marketing
TBS/TCM/TNT
404-575-6855

For Fox, the interest in Megaupload wasn’t necessarily aimed at spreading studio content, but to utilize Megaupload’s considerable reach by setting up an advertising deal. In this email former Senior Director Matt Barash touts FAN, the Fox Audience Network.

Subject: Fox Ad Partnership
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2009 08:09:14 -0800
From: Matt Barash
To: sales@megaupload.com

I’m reaching out to see if you have a few minutes to discuss the recently launched Fox Audience Network.

FAN is now up and running and fully operational, utilizing best of breed optimization technology to bring cutting edge relevancy to the ad network landscape.
We are scaling rapidly and seeking the right 3rd party publishers to add as partners to our portfolio.

Please let me know if you have some time to chat this week about how we can work together to better monetize your inventory.

Best,
Matt

Matt Barash
Director, Publisher Development
Fox Audience Network

So as we can see, as recently as November 2010 member companies of the MPAA were making contact with Megaupload and trying to do business with the company. According to the authorities the investigation into Megaupload took two years, meaning that these contacts and the start of a criminal investigation could have been just weeks apart.

More on Kim Dotcom’s response to the US indictment is published in our feature article.

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

In April the High Court’s Justice Kenneth Parker sided with the government and “upheld the principle of taking measures to tackle the unlawful downloading of music, films, books and other copyright material.”

In October, BT and TalkTalk were given permission to appeal, with Lord Justice Lewison stating that the ISPs should be allowed to argue that the Act “was enacted without following proper procedures and that it may breach the EU’s E-Commerce Directive, Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive, Data Protection Directive, Authorization Directive.”

As long as certain conditions are met, under EU law Internet service providers are not liable for the data carried over their networks, a situation known as the “mere conduit” defense. But today it’s being claimed that staff from both BT and TalkTalk gave advice to customers that they knew had intentions of breaching copyright.

According to a ThisIsMoney report, ‘mystery shoppers’ were asked to call ISPs asking questions about using file-sharing sites.

Perhaps conveniently considering developments due in court today, the allegations focus on advice given by BT and TalkTalk staff. However, based on the information given in the article, first impressions suggest that only one call is worthy of immediate attention and the rest seem potentially overblown.

During that call, made to BT, the ‘customer’ says they want to use Pirate Bay or isoHunt to download movies such as Harry Potter or Cars 2. The BT staff member allegedly noted that the films could be downloaded from those sites “in less time than it would take to watch the film”.

In another call to TalkTalk, the investigators claim that the customer services operator admits to using BitTorrent himself and says that The Pirate Bay would perform best with an ‘unlimited’ broadband package. But there are millions of items on The Pirate Bay, plenty of them legal, and the advice is good, piracy hasn’t been condoned and certainly no laws have been broken.

The report goes on to state that “a string of similar calls elicited no warnings about the potential illegality of such activity” and in every call “the use of such sites is mentioned clearly by the caller as a reason for signing up to a faster broadband package.”

While the initial item which references specific copyright works might be problematic, it is not up to an ISP to attempt to police customer activity or predict which content someone might access on The Pirate Bay. It is certainly not up to telesales operators to try and understand the intricacies of copyright law and then give impromptu advice in response to casual comments by ‘customers’.

Both BT and TalkTalk say that they only want customers to use the Internet for legal activities but Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI who have been critical of the ISPs’ opposition to the Digital Economy Act, says what has happened is unacceptable.

“It is shocking if broadband providers have been boosting their revenues selling broadband to customers who make it clear they intend to break the law,” he said. “This is not the behavior we should expect from responsible companies.”

As highlighted earlier, the information provided in the report is not exactly detailed, so it will be interesting to read the full transcripts of the calls – we’ve asked for copies from the editor and we’ll report back should we received them.

Later today, appeal judges Lady Justice Arden, Lord Justice Richards and Lord Justice Patten will give their decision on the future of the Digital Economy Act and announce whether BT and TalkTalk have been successful.

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

After the record companies of the RIAA settled with LimeWire last year for $105 million, Twentieth Century Fox, Viacom, Disney, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. now want their share of the spoils.

“The illegality of LimeWire has been fully and finally adjudicated by the Court,” the complaint as published by Courthouse News reads.

“In a related case, Arista Records LLC v. Lime Group LLC … the court found defendants liable for engaging in and facilitating massive copyright infringement.”

The complaint lists 53 infringed works including TV shows South Park and Family Guy, and movies such as Avatar, Shrek and Harry Potter.

In exchange for the relatively small outlay of filing the case, there could be a good payout for the studios if the court agrees their rights have been infringed. Which it almost certainly will.

Kerching!

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