TorrentFreak

In recent years the European Commission has promoted tougher anti-piracy legislation. The question is though, whether this is really in the best interests of European citizens. In a guest article for TorrentFreak, Joe Karaganis of the Social Science Research Council explores this topic.

Copyright holders and anti-piracy companies have been dealt a blow in their attempts to monitor and track down student file-sharers in Norway. Following a decision by the Data Inspectorate, universities will not be allowed to spy on the online activities of their students and data gathered for network maintenance purposes will kept well away from rightsholders and lawyers.

A 15 year-old schoolboy with a taste for BitTorrent went to trial yesterday after downloading and sharing 24 Hollywood movies. The case, however, has a worrying twist. Rather than being hunted down online by an anti-piracy company, the teenager was turned over to the police by the head teacher at his school. The prosecutor says he had no choice but to take action.

A breakthrough coalition of the MPAA, RIAA and other copyright holders have signed an agreement with AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon to curb piracy. Under the agreement the ISPs agree to send “copyright alerts” to subscribers whose Internet connections are used for copyright infringement. Repeated offenders will not be disconnected from the Internet, but could be slowed down instead.

For years the top record label executives have been claiming that it’s impossible to compete with free, but YouTube is proving them wrong. With billions of views every month the major record labels are making millions by sharing their music for free. For many people YouTube takes away the incentive to ‘pirate,’ but at the same time it may also cannibalise legal music sales.

When it comes to using physical force to resolve conflicts, there are few who do that better than the elite fighters of the SAS, the British Special Air Service. But an ex-SAS soldier, who has successfully exchanged his gun and explosives for pen and paper, believes the solution to book piracy lies not in head on conflict, but the art of persuasion.

A manga creator and distributor has offered to do something positive with thousands of unauthorized copyright files to be found on file-sharing networks. In what appears to be a first of its kind project, users will be encouraged to upload their illicit media to a website where they will be repackaged with advertising and subsequently reintroduced legally back into the wild.