However, those who thought that these landmark cases would change public opinion towards file-sharing are wrong. In fact, not even the draconian anti-piracy legislation that went into effect in Sweden this spring could change social norms towards downloading movies and music without the permission of copyright holders.

These findings are the result of the Cyber Norms sociological research project carried out by Swedish researchers. They conducted survey interviews among 1,000 people between the ages of 15 and 25 to measure the strength of the social norms towards illegal file sharing. The aim was to find out whether the newly implemented anti-piracy legislation (IPRED) had been successful in reducing the gap between legal and social standards.

The findings of the surveys show that despite stronger anti-piracy legislation, the attitudes of young Swedes towards piracy haven’t changed.

“Despite the intensive efforts of the government during the six-month performance period, social support for copyright law in relation to file sharing is still at a record low. Young people in the survey do not feel any social pressure to refrain from interchange, whether from adults or peers,” researcher Måns Svensson comments.

Interestingly, the new law does seem to have an effect on the file-sharing habits of the younger Swedes. The percentage of people who say they don’t download any files illegally has increased from 22 percent in February to 39 percent in September. However, as the norms do not reflect the letter of the law it will be hard to maintain compliance, which could result in an increase in piracy in the months to come if people feel less threatened by possible punishments.

“In cases where the law is not supported by the social norms, it makes it extremely difficult to maintain compliance. Humans tend to follow social pressure rather than the letter of the law. With regard to intellectual property and copyright provisions, the Internet and file sharing technologies have created new conditions. In a short time, the social norms have developed in a direction that gives very little support of the law,” Svensson explained.

The study emphasizes that the law does not reflect what the general public considers to be legal, fair use, or even moral. Most people don’t feel that they’re doing anything wrong when they download an MP3 or share a movie, often because the legal alternatives are hard to find, full of DRM or simply overpriced.

So, as long as the entertainment industries fail to innovate and offer some real competition to piracy, the social norms wont change.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Despite all these expensive and invasive efforts to catch camcording pirates, nearly every new blockbuster still leaks onto the Internet, though often in poor quality. One unsecured theater is enough to pirate a film. Nevertheless, the film industry treats millions of paying movie goers as potential criminals and acts surprised when the public complains about it.

In Germany the local authorities decided to do something about this. The state administration office of Sachsen-Anhalt ruled that movie visitors must be informed about the use of night vision goggles before they buy their tickets. This advance notice allows them to decide if they want to be spied on or not.

The ruling came in response to a recent move by film distribution company Warner Bros. that had instructed theater personnel to use night vision devices to prevent the film “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” from being camcorded.

The use of night vision goggles and other security gadgets has led to a handful of arrests worldwide, but has ruined the pleasure of “a night at the movies” for untold others. The measures taken by the film industry to prevent illegal recordings from showing up online are similar to the use of DRM, they annoy honest customers while pirates circumvent them.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The RIAA recently announced that it would stop its massive legal campaigns and limit the court visits to a minimum. No surprise there. Lawsuits are expensive and the RIAA lost more of those than they had hoped, so they turned their attention to lawmakers, local governments and ISPs instead.

The new plan is to get legislation implemented that will allow the entertainment industry to spy on the filesharing behaviors of individual Internet subscribers, and order their disconnection when they are suspected of repeated copyright infringements. Ideally they would like to make “downloading” a criminal offense of course, and this is exactly what the Pirates Prison Project is anticipating.

According to Dimitri Johnson, CEO of Pirate Prisons Project (PPP), billions of Internet users around the world will have to be thrown in jail if the anti-piracy lobbyists have their way. “Everyone is guilty by default: since nobody will want to do without Internet access, no matter what, everyone will end up going to jail. All of our kids, parents, friends and peers. Off to jail we go,” he writes.

“This trend has led PPP to foresee a gigantic business opportunity,” Dimitri adds, while introducing his plans to build thousands of prisons where these Internet pirates can be locked up. Investors can buy shares in these yet to be built prisons, and pirates have the opportunity to book a comfortable cell in advance. PPP currently offers three options:

1. Buy Shares

You can invest in the new prisons due to be built, which is a solid investment according to the PPP. 150 shares currently trade at $10,000, but people with a smaller budget can get 2 shares for just $200.

2. Denounce Someone

If you happen to know someone who pirates music, software or movies on the Internet, you can first report them, and then send them over to the PPP website to book their cell early on. There are several options to choose from, and early birds get the best picks.

3. Book a Cell Yourself

Last but not least, you can book a cell yourself, and make sure that you’ll have a comfortable time in prison once you’re locked up. If your budget allows it, you can book the “jail premium” package: the largest cell available, complete with broadband Internet.

TorrentFreak contacted one of the project leaders, who told us that he hopes to get the RIAA and MPAA on board as one of the main investors in the project. He’s right, it’s their future…

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The hacker, a high-school student using the pseudonym Ethan still lived with his parents when he first accessed they company’s servers by exploiting a weakness in their firewall. This was at the end of 2006, at a time when business was still good for MediaDefender, with its revenue standing at nearly $16m.

Soon after that, Ethan got access to the company’s email, its networked resources and even its telephone system. Logging in a handful of times each month through the summer of 2007, he started to get bored with “Monkey Defenders” – his pet name for the anti-piracy outfit. Deciding to go out with a bang, he and the Media Defender-Defenders gathered thousands of the company’s internal emails and published them on web.

The rest is history. On September 15, 2007 the database containing thousands of emails was uploaded to several BitTorrent sites. In the release note Ethan and friends wrote: “By releasing these emails we hope to secure the privacy and personal integrity of all peer-to-peer users. The emails contain information about the various tactics and technical solutions for tracking p2p users, and disrupt p2p services,” and “A special thanks to Jay Mairs, for circumventing their entire email-security by forwarding all your emails to your gmail account.”

The emails contained a wide range of information including server passwords, social security numbers, spoofing strategies and vacation pictures. And it didn’t end there. In the days after the email leak, Ethan and friends released a private telephone conversation between MediaDefender and the New York attorney general’s office, a P2P tracking database, which was followed up a few days later by all of Media Defender’s anti-piracy tools. The effect on the company and its operations was dramatic.

In a SEC filing, the financial damage started to become clear. As a result of the hacking, by November 2007 MediaDefender had lost nearly $1,000,000, which affected the stock price of parent company ArtistDirect significantly. Before the email leak, stock was around the $2.25 mark. Three months later stock plummeted to $0.63. Now, a year after the leak the stock price has hit rock bottom, at less than $0.01 per share.

Meanwhile, BitTorrent sites witnessed a decrease in MediaDefender activity following the leak. The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde, who sued some key players in the entertainment business for using MediaDefender, told TorrentFreak that there has been a significant decrease in activity from BitTorrent spoofers and decoyers. “It’s strange that no one has given much regard to the fact that the way MediaDefender works is probably illegal in most countries. Even in the US. I might even say, especially in the US,” Sunde added.

Decrease in activity or not, this spring the company still managed to make the tech headlines by sabotaging the BitTorrent tracker of the popular Internet TV network Revision3. Revision3 lost thousands of dollar in revenue because of the DDoS attack, but decided not to take any legal action. Meanwhile, the stock price on MediaDefender’s parent company continued its freefall.

So what does the future hold for MediaDefender? Currently, they have decreased their anti-piracy efforts, and started to explore options to use filesharing networks for marketing purposes. Eric Pulier and Teymour Boutros-Ghali, two former members of ArtistDirect’s board of directors who resigned last month announced that they were interested in buying MediaDefender, but it’s not clear what path they intend to take.

Perhaps a more realistic option, is for the company to file for bankruptcy, as The Pirate Bay predicted they would, long before the emails leaked.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Surprisingly, however, MediaDefender – best known for spreading fake files on BitTorrent – does not blame itself for their losses, but the music labels. In their latest quarterly report the company explains the huge drop in revenue as follows:

“Revenues related to MediaDefender’s anti-piracy activities declined in 2007 as compared to 2006 and management anticipates a further decline in 2008. The largest source of this decline is due to reduced spending on the part of the major music labels due to a significant reduction in their sales and profitability.”

So, MediaDefender argues that the music labels are spending less money because their revenue is going down. This is a strange argument, if you consider that the music labels blame piracy for the decrease in sales. MediaDefender’s purpose is to decrease piracy, so either they are not doing their job very well, or there might be another explanation that the labels stopped hiring MediaDefender.

Could it be that the bad press that resulted from the security breach at MediaDefender has something to do with it? Some of the emails that leaked at the time revealed some unique insight into the inner workings of these labels and i’m sure they weren’t too happy about that.

In the quarterly report last year’s email leaks aren’t mentioned at all, even though it could very well be one of the major causes of the decreased revenue. By November 2007 MediaDefender had already lost a massive $825,000 due to the leaks, and more financial damage was to be expected.

Before the email leak, stock was around the $2.25 mark, but this has dropped to less than $0.50. Last week we learned that MediaDefender is not only going after trackers from BitTorrent search engines, but that they’re also targeting businesses like Revision3. This wont do their image any good either, and might bring the company down even further.

So, what will happen now? Revision3’s CEO Jim Louderback said on Twit that they wont pursue the company in court after all. Nevertheless, I’m quite convinced that the company has the ability to walk the plank to bankruptcy, all by itself.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Imagine the scenario – you’re the head of a multi-million dollar label, someone has convinced you that your business is losing money due to file-sharing. What do you do? Call in the Ghostbusters? Or do what lots of companies do and call in the likes of MediaDefender to help them. As no anti-piracy system can do anything other than make a very small impact on file-sharing, it’s a far from satisfactory solution.

Early in 2005, established anti-piracy company Viralg of Finland burst onto the P2P scene with a staggering claim: With their technology it was possible to end 99% of all file-sharing.

In 2004, Viralg listed Electronic Arts, Vivendi, Microsoft Game Studios, Sony Computer Entertainment, Atari, Nintendo, Codemasters and THQ as just some of their customers. They were among the nominees for the ICT Prize 2005 and the winner of the Venture Cup business plan competition.

The portfolio certainly made them appear impressive at the time, so when an eBay auction caught the eye today offering to sell Viralg’s technology for a cool $1,000,000, TorrentFreak became a little curious.

So what’s on offer? Looks like Viralg’s ‘intellectual property’ in the form of some patent applications:

Viralg supplies technology aimed at preventing sharing of illegal content such as music, movies, GPS maps, games and software from being shared over P2P networks such as Gnutella. Viralg technology is in widespread use by record companies in Finland (90% of customers) and in the other Scandinavian countries. Technology has generated turnover of over 500.000 US dollars. The patent applications for sale cover the necessary key technology for the only possible effective protection against illegal P2P sharing. Depending on the source illegal P2P causes damages of 4 to 12 billion US dollars to media companies per year.

So should likely buyers (unhappy MediaDefender customers perhaps?) invest in this technology?

Viralg claimed to be able to create a corrupted file but with a working hash, giving it the appearance of a genuine file. As people downloaded they got a selection of genuine and corrupt parts sent to them rendering the final file useless. Although partially effective on the FastTrack network (KaZaA [R.I.P] )years ago, Viralg’s offer of 40 hours of training to use the system still doesn’t cut it in today’s BitTorrent dominated file-sharing world.

Before Prince gets any fancy ideas about buying this for the Web Sheriff to use against The Pirate Bay, this outdated system is pretty useless against BitTorrent, which renders its ‘Patented Virtual Algorithm’, well – useless.

TorrentFreak spoke to Dr. Ir. Johan Pouwelse, researcher on P2P technology at Delft University of Technology, who explained why: “Bittorrent uses a separate hash for every 1-4 MByte. This means you can still exploit the weakness in the protocol by sending bad data. However, clients are now generally so smart that they only accept maximum 1 fake 1-4MB block from an IP address.”

Of course to corrupt lots of files, you need lots of presence on file-sharing networks (servers, accounts, the whole MediaDefender-style setup) so the $1m tag is just the tip of an enormous iceberg.

Maybe some of the sales statistics will tempt prospective buyers? The system has been running since 2003, and in that time it generated a turnover of $500,000. Potential buyers are likely to be more interested in the bottom line, especially now that the bottom has fallen out of the FastTrack network.

Anyone with a bulging bank balance needing a guarantee of being able to corrupt files on the FastTrack network (and is unaware that MediaDefender’s tools are available for free) should hurry over to the eBay auction right now, there’s not long left to go – for the auction or Viralg

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Movie theaters in Canada are now taking extreme measures to cut down this figure, even if this means less comfort for their paying customers.

Serge Corriveau, Director of the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association, highlighted some of the measures they’ve taken and told CBC: “Having people searching knapsacks and people going up and down the aisles once the movie’s started to see if they can spot somebody camcording. You can see also people with night-vision goggles searching through the crowd trying to see if they can find something.” Corriveau added that metal detectors will also be used in theaters across Canada, specifically for pre-screenings.

And if this isn’t enough, CMPDA have also introduced a reward program for theater employees. Catching pirates is a lucrative business now, as they can earn upto $500 CAD if they identify a person who’s trying to record a movie on his phone or camcorder. More details can be found in the “theater employee camcorder training guide“.

The theater owners sure do all they can to please their customers. A few days ago we reported about a 19 year old girl who was arrested by the police after she recorded a 20 second clip from the movie “Transformers” that she wanted to show to her little brother.

Thanks to the night-vision goggles I guess…

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Although I’m familiar with the watermarks that are put in DVD’s, I never realized that theater releases are marked as well (see picture for the “dot pattern”).

However, sometimes release groups find a way to remove these watermarks. An example can be found in the NFO of the Mission Impossible III release by SaGa. In the NFO SaGa thanks ORC, for helping them out with “de-dotting” the release.

Here’s an interesting email I received from a reader who actually worked for an anti-piracy company. Some good info, and useful tips and tricks that “might” keep pirates under the radar ;).

—

Thought I’d let you know how the authorities are able to track down where CAM, TS, TC, SCR, DVD SCR, etc. copies are from. In all cases, the individual copies are watermarked and then kept in a database for later comparison. These watermarks are developed and instituted either by the companies responsible for the film (i.e. Kodak) or the prints (i.e. Deluxe, Technicolor). Each has a different method, some more effective than others.

Here is a Wikipedia article about them:

Generally the CAP codes are more for film elements (i.e. CAM, TS, TC releases). For the disc and tape copies (i.e. SCR, DVD SCR) there is usually some form of watermarking combined with a time stamp or individual code of some sort.

These types of protection sometimes work and sometimes don’t. A lot of groups have experience with obfuscating them and (usually successfully) hiding where they got their copy from.

Fortunately most of the companies focusing on anti-piracy are not actively trying to target the groups themselves, leaving that task to the DOJ or FBI to handle. Because of this, most of the media attention and an overwhelming amount of the resources are dedicated to people who are not close to the scene at all, so a lot of these anti-piracy methods don’t really work very effectively.

Most of the attention is actually on users and first propagators on BitTorrent and eDonkey, so I’d actually recommend using various forms of protection such as PeerGuardian and generally staying on private trackers or at least the less popular ones (NTI being a good example). Also safe is jumping on hugely popular torrents once they reach critical mass. There are simply not enough resources for anti-piracy companies to track what 5000 seeders and 8000 leechers are doing all at once and gather data that will be usable in a court of law.

—

Another reader pointed me at the new anti-piracy watermark system that Philips has started to rollout. Philips successfully equipped over 1300 cinemas with their new system called “Cinefence”. CineFence watermarks are believed to be harder to erase by pirates, and contain the time, place and date of the recorded Film. Forensic marking of digital Films is now a mandatory requirement, as specified in the Digital Cinema System Specification (pdf link).

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

We all know that “copyright holders” means “MPAA, RIAA and other anti-piracy groups”, that will claim their representing the copyright owners. So, in effect, if this bill is passed, Swedish legislation has given room for a situation where special interest groups can demand personal information from companies to conduct their own private investigations. So the new law will give the anti-piracy lobby more power, at least in Sweden. On the other hand, not far from Sweden, the Dutch anti-p2p organization BREIN recently lost a case where they demanded personal info about filesharing ip’s.

This new law would be in line with how Sweden has worked before. Last year, the police made a bust on a large Swedish ISP called Bahnhof, after an investigation from the Bureau of Anti-Piracy (a Swedish copyright owner interest group). The interest group filed a report almost immediately after the bust, indicating they had exclusive information from the prosecutor. The ISP then released all their logs, which indicated that it was the interest group that had hired a mole to use their computers to commit copyright crimes. Of course, this didn’t lead anywhere. And the Pirate Bay bust on May 31 should be proof that it did not discourage Swedish police and prosecutors to walk errands for copyright “representatives”.

But what frightens me is the prospect that this kind of behavior is getting legally sanctioned.

I made a translation of Linander’s blog entry and provide some further arguments on Piracy Unlimited.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

There’s a whole slew of companies trying to dream up ways to stop people from freely using CDs and DVDs they’ve bought and paid for, and let’s not forget all those high-priced lawyers getting fat on ‘copyright crime’.

Over in Hong Kong, they’re even churning out Intellectual Property Merit Badges for the Scouting movement (roll over, Baden-Powell) and back in the US of A, a whole industry has sprung up to print subpoenas so the software, moie and music cartels can sue their customers with greater facility.

Now, there’s something else.

You’re in the movie, watching the latest Hollywood disaster when suddenly kaPOWeee! A blinding light illuminates the person sitting next to you.

Would it be that bad? Probably not.

But you never know because the Georgia Institute of Technology says it’s prototyped a device that can locate a digital camera and then overwhelm it with, “white light to render any recorded images useless”.

However, “the device is unable to block conventional film or the SLR cameras, preferred by the paparazzi,” continues the BBC.

Heading up the development team is professor Gregory Abowd of the Georgia Tech College of Computing and, “In particular, his team is looking at ways to prevent photography in government buildings or at trade shows, where industrial espionage could be a problem,” says the Beeb, adding:

“The team is also working with the motion picture industry to prevent illegal copying of films, which has become a particular problem in parts of Asia.”

The Georgia Institute of Technology appears to have an inordinate fondness for this kind of gear

Last year, it came up with a system able to detect a digital camera and then blind it by shooting a beam of light at the lens and it, too, had a prototype. But this comprised a digital projector with a modified video camera mounted on top.

Nor are the Georgia Tech developers alone.

In 2005, Hewlett-Packard, an enthusiastic supporter of the entertainment and software cartels, applied for a patent on technology that could remotely blur pictures in digital cameras.

For now, however, the industry mostly relies on the alertness of staff at cinemas, which isn’t to say the MUTU (Movie Ushers’ Trade Union), representing movie ushers, isn’t alert to possible dangers. In fact, MUTU is contemplating a pre-emptive action against the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America).

Currently, Ushers wearing electronic night-vision optics are a principal form of defense against kids with cam-corders, made by the likes of Sony, one of the MPAA’s owners.

But, “Imagine what would happen if ‘blinders’ are widely adopted,” MUTU PR person Marigold Butekick told p2pnet.

“Thousands of cinema ushers and support workers such as pop-corn makers could suddenly find themselves out of work. Deprived of their livelihoods, they’d be evicted from their homes and their children would go shoeless and starve, and pretty soon ……….”

p2pnet

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.