Entertainment industry lobbyists are desperately pushing to get tougher anti-piracy legislation implemented worldwide. The Pirate Prisons Project followed these developments closely and sees it as a business opportunity. It has now opened up their prison construction project to investors, while pirates are given the chance to book a cell in advance.
As the year moves toward its conclusion we have been taking a a look at the most pirated titles in various categories in 2008. Following our Top 10 games and movies posts, we now take a look at the most downloaded TV-shows. Lost is without a doubt the most downloaded TV-show, with over 5 million downloads for one single episode.
Sony claims that there is a downward trend for pirated PSP games, and that more people are handing over money for games, to join what the company calls “the good side”. It is unclear where Sony sourced this data, but statistics gathered from BitTorrent trackers show an increase in PSP piracy.
For years the RIAA has been filing lawsuits against thousands of individuals who allegedly shared copyrighted music. Following recent court setbacks, the lobby group has announced it will stop mass lawsuits. Instead, it will focus on cutting deals with ISPs to disconnect ‘IP-addresses’ that repeatedly share copyrighted music.
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.
‘Resident Evil: Degeneration’ is the first CG animation film inspired by the popular video game. Although it skips most US theaters and is scheduled to be released on DVD no sooner than late December, it has been downloaded on BitTorrent close to a million times already – in just four days.
Touted as the biggest ever anti-piracy collaboration, the MPA and several major anti-piracy groups have announced that by the time the 2012 Olympics begin, they will have made London “a fake-free zone”. This impossible mission to stamp out DVD piracy was launched by Intellectual Property Minister, David Lammy.
An amendment designed to protect Internet users from the anti-piracy lobby has been rejected by President Sarkozy of the European Council. The rejection goes against the will of the European Parliament, where 88% of the members already voted in favor of the amendment, which was originally destined to protect file-sharers from Internet disconnection under the ‘3 strikes’ framework.
After Atari received some bad press recently for mistakenly accusing an elderly couple of pirating one of its games, the company has now stopped the anti-piracy campaign in question. The “witch-hunt”, carried out by the UK law firm Davenport Lyons on behalf of Atari, based on spreadsheets full of IPs gathered by a company named Logistep, continues to lose credibility.
Seven Hollywood studios including Paramount, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Warner Bros and Disney have teamed up to sue iiNet, Australia’s third largest ISP. iiNet is accused of doing little to stop its subscribers from sharing copyright works via BitTorrent. The ISP denies the accusations.
A recently published survey on the ‘criminal’ habits among 15 year old Finns has revealed that more than two thirds of the youngsters have used file-sharing applications to downloaded copyrighted material. Online piracy was by far the most prevalent form of ‘criminal behavior’ among Finnish youth.
