Exactly a year ago one of the largest torrent sites shut down for good, and a month later the owner was ordered to pay a 110 million dollar fine. We catch up with TorrentSpy owner Justin Bunnell, who’s still in court fighting the MPAA, to see how he views the developments of the past year.
A new study by the RAND corporation has attempted to put the focus on ‘movie piracy’ squarely on the shoulders of terrorist groups and criminal gangs. The report, which claims to have been ‘peer reviewed’, seems to show that no matter which gang, thug, or terrorist – they all pirate movies.
TorrentSpy, once the most frequently visited BitTorrent site, has appealed the ruling in their case against the MPAA. Last year, they were ordered to pay a $110 million fine after the court terminated the case, but TorrentSpy’s lawyer Ira Rothken believes that the issues at stake warrant an appeal.
Yesterday saw the announcement of the 2009 Oscar nominees. This year there were 26 movies put forward, and by nomination day, 23 of them were already being shared online in DVD quality, many of them copies of voter’s DVD Screeners.
The banking industry has received billions of dollars recently and the US auto industry had its share as well. Both have a history of bad decision making, with the auto industry in the US resisting advances in technology. The music and movie industries have also made bad decisions, and rejected technology, so it has to be asked – are they next in line with the begging bowl?
Following the banks and the car companies, the movie industry might be the next to be hit by the economic downturn. No bail-out plan has been suggested as of yet, but MPAA chairman Dan Glickman is worried that piracy will grow to a new high during the current financial crisis – and he might just have a point there.
Fanedits are fan-created versions of officially available movies. Fans spend huge amounts of time with sophisticated software to add, cut or alter scenes to improve the original or simply create different versions of a movie. Fanedit.org is the largest such community in the world and the MPAA has, in the words of the admin, just ‘castrated’ the site.
The European Parliament has voted in favor of an amendment that will prevent member states from implementing three-stikes laws. Disconnecting alleged file-sharers based on evidence from anti-piracy lobby groups restricts the rights and freedoms of Internet users, according to the amendment.
Following on from the IFPI-inspired Italian blockade of The Pirate Bay, the MPAA’s President has been in Italy offering ideas on how to deal with the ‘problem’ of unauthorized file-sharing. Not wanting to flirt too much with originality, Robert Pisano is backing a 3 strikes-and-you’re-out policy. Just how far will the Italian government go in its currently tough anti-piracy mood?
P4P is touted as the new and improved P2P. The technology has the potential to lower bandwidth costs for ISPs and speed up downloads for P4P enabled filesharing clients. There is a dark side to this new technology though. The strong anti-piracy connections are fuel for conspiracy theorists, and Net Neutrality might be at stake.
After it was ruled that a hacker who obtained unauthorized emails from TorrentSpy on behalf of the MPAA did not technically intercept them under the WireTap Act, the EFF has filed a friend-of-the-court brief. EFF describes the recent decision as a “dangerous attempt to circumvent privacy laws,” and wants to see it overturned.
