After huge FBI busts in 2004, paranoia in secret piracy circles was riding high. A year later and even the general public were becoming attracted to this shadowy and uncertain world. Following primitive attempts to dramatize the piracy scene in 2005, an award-winning short film has just received its online premiere, combining movie piracy, risk-taking, paranoia and sex to reach its target audience.
The file-sharing, copyright and piracy debate continues to burn just as aggressively today as it did with the dawn of Napster. When compared to the seemingly endless wars of words over religion, however, it’s only just begun, but the opposing sides in both debates seem equally polarized. So, for an argument that will probably never end, let’s bring them both together.
Pirate Bay co-founder and former spokesperson Peter Sunde gave a talk at the Campus Party 2010, where he went over the site’s history and how it became the number one enemy of Hollywood and the music industry. Aside from reminiscing about some classic pranks and the famous raid on The Pirate Bay’s servers, Peter said that he hoped the site would be soon replaced by something better, as it really sucks.
A man has been charged with fraud and copyright offenses after being accused of camcording several Hollywood flicks, including the Jennifer Aniston movie The Bounty Hunter. Unlike other countries around the world, recording a movie in a theater is not specifically illegal in the UK so considering the serious nature of the charges, why is this man facing a potential jail sentence?
On the eve of the iPhone 4 jailbreak by the iPhone Dev Team, and with the recent positive rulings over jailbreaking’s legality, concerns over the purpose and impact of opening Apple’s line of iOS devices still exist. Dissident from Hackulous explains why he believes piracy does not ruin the image of jailbreaking, and gives insight into the real effects piracy has on application developers.
For many years movies have been released onto the Internet, trickling down the so-called ‘piracy pyramid’ from elitist and private sites. Now a new breed of release groups are starting to make waves, bringing media directly to the masses. Today we take a closer look at this scene and speak to groups on the frontline to see what makes them tick.
Online movie piracy has largely enjoyed a fairly predictable structure during the last decade. New releases have generally hit the Internet on high-security ‘topsites’ first and then trickled down to become widely available on peer-to-peer networks. TorrentFreak now takes a look at a new wave of release groups who operate with a fresh and BitTorrent-powered philosophy.
In 2003 a group of friends from Sweden decided to found Piratbyrån (the bureau of piracy), a lobbying organization to promote the sharing of information and culture. A few months later the group took a decision that would change the Internet – the launch of a BitTorrent tracker named ‘The Pirate Bay’. Today marks the end of an era with the announcement that Piratbyrån has disbanded.
This week Swedish police arrested three individuals on suspicion of copyright infringements. The trio are suspected of having connections to ‘Scene’ warez servers known as ‘Darkside’. According to anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån, the servers carried huge amounts of data making the case the biggest so far in Sweden, and possibly in Europe.
The UK Government has discovered that BitTorrent is the cheapest and most effective method of sharing large files with the public. As part of the UK Prime Minister’s transparency initiative, the Treasury has today released several torrents with details on how the Government spends the public’s money.
In common with many websites, several torrent sites have their own Facebook fan pages that are used to interact with users. These pages usually update fans on site news and do not link to torrent files. Despite this, Facebook does not seem tolerant of all torrent site fan pages, and has just removed one of the popular ones.
