“Reports on the theft of the latest installment of Harry Potter underscores that robbery of intellectual property extends far beyond the movies, to music, publishing, computer software
and other creative outputs that are the foundation of our modern information economy.”

Glickman then goes on summing up the familiar made-up statistics we read in every MPAA press release. Nothing spectacular, just the regular anti-piracy propaganda piece.

They seem to care a lot about copyright, but we’ve shown that the MPAA is not that concerned with others’ copyrighted works at all. In fact, they have been caught “robbing intellectual property” several times.

Earlier this year we reported that the MPAA used “Forest Blog” software without authorization. It had been completely stripped of his name, and links back to his site, thereby violating the linkware license. The MPAA later said that they were only testing the software. Not that it makes any difference, but why should one (willingly) remove all credits to the developer if it’s only a test?

But the MPAA doesn’t only steal software, they also pirate films. For those who haven’t seen the great documentary “This Film Is Not Yet Rated“, the MPAA openly admitted that they made unauthorized copies themselves. Kirby Dick, the producer of the documentary found out that the film that he submitted for screening purposes was copied without his permission. Say what?

I guess there’s an inner pirate in all of us.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

We first spotted it on mininova, when a reader tipped us off. It has also shown up on several other BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, whose admins have refused to take down any of the “Deathly Hallows” torrents, despite admirable efforts by J.K. Rowling’s publishers.

According to the reader, who chose to remain anonymous, the torrent contains a PDF of the first ten chapters and a text file with a message calling for assistance in transcribing the book from the photos:

We are looking for help in finishing the book. With enough people it goes quickly. Please contact harry7pottah@hush.com to get in contact with us. No skills beyond reading and writing are required and help would be greatly appreciated.

It seems rather ludicrous that this is happening mere days before the book’s release. Why bother typing out the entire book from photos when it will hit bookshops all over the world in less than a week? The only plausible reason seems to be a trait of rabid fanboyism only seen among Harry Potter readers and users of Apple’s Macintosh computers.

But it looks like some people aren’t even ready to believe the book has actually been leaked! MTV blogger Jennifer Vineyard claims that the book’s a fake:

First of all, there are multiple versions that contradict one another. One table of contents, for instance, calls chapter 10 “Kreacher’s Tale,” while another table of contents calls the same chapter “The Reflection in the Mirror.”

We will only know whether the leaked photographs are photoshopped or not when the book is released a few days from now, but for argument’s sake I’m going to point out that “The Reflection in the Mirror” is the 10th chapter in a fake fan fiction torrent of the book that has been floating around the Internet for days, if not weeks. In the leaked photographs, the 10th chapter is “Kreacher’s Tale”. It looks like the MTV guys have been downloading torrents. For research purposes, of course.

update: chapters 11-21 are transcribed.

update: all chapters are transcribed.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

We first got wind of this when two torrents of the book appeared on Demonoid.com. They became immensely popular with over a 1000 leechers and seeders each. But after some time were removed by either the uploader, or more likely, the moderators, in a move to avoid the attention of bloodthirsty publishers.

Not surprisingly, both those torrents spread over to mininova and several other sites and are still going strong (update: mininova removed the torrents). One of the torrents only has the first 495 pages of the book, whereas the second is the complete book.

Over the past couple of weeks, numerous torrents have surfaced online claiming to be the 7th and last Harry Potter book. They are all fakes. Fan fiction. This one, on the other hand, is the real thing. Someone has managed to get their hands on the American edition of the book and has photographed each page of the book and uploaded it to BitTorrent.

The main complaint that’s coming up in comment threads on these sites is that the quality isn’t great. You can just barely manage to read each page. And as some downloaders promptly noted, a few pages cannot be read at all without editing the images in Photoshop.

Die-hard fans of the series will undoubtedly rush to grab a copy of the torrent for themselves. But anybody else would really have to see whether reading the book a week before the rest of the world is worth risking their eyesight and brains, squinting to make out what happens when Harry confronts He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named for the last time.

If you’re the type of person who likes spoilers, check out this page.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Files being distributed via BitTorrent and purporting to be a copy of the final book in J.K Rowling’s series were not leaked copies of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows” but a piece of Potter fan fiction called “The Seventh Horcrux”, written by Melindaleo.

Melindaleo, a dedicated fan to the end, gives her work away for free on the internet. However, she denies that she had anything to do with the renaming of the .torrent files that gave quite a bit of extra publicity for her work.

Melindaleo, worried that she could have inadvertently given her community a bad name, said “I got nervous that I’d be jinxing the whole fanfic writing thing for everyone”. She also showed concern that she may attract the attention of Rowling’s lawyers, something that uploaders of this particular torrent won’t have to be concerned about.

Back in 2004, J.K. Rowling gave her blessing to fans who wanted to write their own Harry Potter books and put them online. A spokesman said she was “flattered people wanted to write their own stories” based on her characters.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.