It seems then, that instead of hiring, or listening to people who will tell them the truth, or at least explain what happens in a way they can understand, they listen to lobbyists who tell them a bunch of lies, and hand over some cash to ‘prove it’s true’. There can be little other reason for the actions of Congressman Howard L. Berman at a recent US Chamber of Commerce panel on ‘antipiracy’ held in Hollywood.

Variety is reporting that at the end of this get together, Berman promised legislation that will require ISPs to send warning letters to their users, if they access ‘pirated content’. He has reportedly said he’ll introduce legislation to this effect soon, maybe next month.

Now, whilst Congressman Berman is in some ways being a good politician, and representing his constituents (his district covers Hollywood) in this he will be acting in no-one’s best interests, except those of the rights-holding clearing houses. This scheme differs only slightly from the current questionable practice of sending letters, or filing John Doe suits, and attempting to intimidate regular citizens into paying large sums of money, by making the ISPs send the letters out automatically, without a rights holder noticing, and collecting evidence.

There are some problems, however, with the basic feasibility of this scheme. They are:

1. There is no easy way to tell if data being transmitted via a protocol such as bit-torrent, is protected by copyright at all
2. There is then no way to tell if the data is being transmitted by the rights holder, or with their permission.
3. Even if the data is copyrighted, and without the rights-holder’s permission, it may still fall under fair use.
4. ISPs are having enough problems with network capacity. To then have to devote more money and manpower to this will reduce further their ability to expand their services to cope with the latest demands.
5. Finally, since at least 95% of all material on the net is copyrighted to someone; it will take only a day or so before every net subscriber has acquired enough letters to warrant disconnecting their service.

Eric Clifford, founder of Fair Use day likened such legislation to “an information police state”. He then added, “what happens if I access my music files at home remotely?”

Of course, such a system would only work if everyone only used sequential, single-source, plain text data streams. Any requirement for ISPs to be able to monitor usage in the way Berman wants, would have to require this, and so it makes online identity theft easy and simple , no encryption, nothing from multiple sources, or out of order. In short, he wants to cripple one of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century, in order to preserve the 1970s business practices of some parasitic middlemen, whose entire reason for being is to make money off other people’s creative efforts. Rep. Berman, for your own sake, fire the fools advising you of things like this, and start listening to someone who knows what they’re talking about.

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

The script was uploaded to a popular semiprivate BitTorrent tracker by a certain “xbadwolfx” 6 days ago. He claims that it is the original copy, and that he has “friends in the company”, but reminds downloaders that the production team might have made slight changes to it after the time of his receiving it.

What’s interesting is that one of the concept images xbadwolfx uploaded to the torrent site displays the title of the movie as “Jurassic Park: New Dawn”, while another image says “Jurassic Park IV”. Both these images don’t match the title of the script, which is “Dawn of Extinction: Jurassic Park”. Also, one of the concept images has the year “2006″ printed on it.

Despite those discrepancies, the script itself seems to be legitimate. According to the uploader, it is confirmed that all the original Jurassic Park (1) characters are back. What’s yet to be seen is whether Hollywood will actually go ahead and make this movie.

We’re not linking to the torrent for obvious reasons. Although, it’s rather easy to find.

Update: Turns out, the script’s a fake. I guess we should have taken a hint when we found three different titles for the movie. Thanks to Icaterus for letting us know.

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

Swedish secretary of state Dan Eliasson confirmed the information stating:

I know that the USA has opinions as it comes to the effectiveness of our system when it comes to copyright and that Sweden and other countries aren’t following thier international agreements. There are sanction mechanisms in the USA, and this has been pointed out from their side.

The threats were successful, and Swedish politicians demanded the takedown of The Piratebay, which is obviously wrong. Toba from the Piratebay says:

In Sweden it is considered very important that the politicians do not interfere with certain cases of police work. So you might understand why people here are so pissed off about Bush, MPAA, fucking Tom Cruise or whoever it was being behind this big sabotage against The Pirate Bay.

More details in the subtitled Swedish news item below.

The torrent can be found here

Or watch in on Youtube

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

Soderbergh discussed the possibilities BitTorrent has for Hollywood together with the MPAA’s Dean Garfield and Ashwin Navin from BitTorrent at the Tribeca Film Festival.

This is not the big breakthrough, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Via

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