TorrentFreak

In case you missed it, March 28th was Document Freedom day. The goal of the day was to spread awareness about the increasing need to adopt an open standard for public as well and privately held documents. The e-book industry is one which is in dire need of such a standard. Currently, ebooks are often [...]

Cory Doctorow held a presentation just before the turn of the year, showing how the current copyright wars are just a skirmish in the battles yet to come. It is a very strong omen that gives you an idea just how much is at stake in the coming two decades.

With the European Greens’ adoption of the Pirate perspective on the copyright monopoly, I have received a few questions from entrepreneurs, the copyright industry lobby, and libertarians why we want to ban Digital Restrictions Management. It’s a good question that deserves a good answer.

A new paper to be published in the upcoming issue of Marketing Science shows that removing DRM from music leads to a decrease in piracy. Or phrased differently, DRM appears to be an incentive for people to pirate music instead of buying it. The researchers from Rice and Duke University used analytical modelling to come to this seemingly common sense conclusion.

Following reports that security features were damaging the playing experience of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, today CD Projekt will release an update to remove all DRM from the game. But while the company informs TorrentFreak it was pleased to avoid a pre-release on this major title, as promised it will monitor and go after illegal file-sharers.

A subset of Garry’s Mod users have been noticing a hugely annoying bug lately. Upon launching the game they get the message that it’s “unable to shade polygon normals,” after which the Steam-run game quickly crashes. In a response to thousands of complaining users, the game’s creator has now admitted that the bug is actually a feature, but one that only affects those who pirated the game.

Avatar, the long-awaited science fiction epic from James Cameron will launch this week, but already some lucky individuals have seen the movie. The same cannot be said of attendees at a 3D preview showing in Germany yesterday though. The movie’s DRM ‘protection’ system failed and the video could not be decoded.