Pirate Releases

Anyone who regularly visits street markets or ‘car-boot’ sales in the UK will tell you that illegal goods are easily found. Counterfeit movies, audio CDs, clothing, sportswear and cosmetics are all on show every week, even though there has been an nationwide effort to reduce availability. It’s fairly easy to spot most of these ‘rogue traders’ with just a cursory examination of the goods. People can recognize the fakes and copies since not much effort is put into disguising them and the quality is generally fairly poor - and cheap. There are some ‘good’ copies but they’re in the minority.

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The subject of universities and (illicit) filesharing has been slowly gaining prominence over the past year, and more now than ever, with the passage of the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2008. We have taken a look into the different ways universities around the US are dealing with the subject. In part one, Missouri University of Science and Technology.

Initially a mining school, the university, known until the start of the year as University of Missouri–Rolla, is not exactly the largest around. Even though the university has just over 6,000 students, they have not been ignored in the scattergun campaign that is Internet-copyright-enforcement by organizations such as the RIAA.

In a recent press release, however, the university claims to have reduced its influx of notices, and credits it to a new system. This groundbreaking system is a multiple choice test, that students have to get completely correct each time, before being allowed access to filesharing applications. Once the test is ‘aced’ the student is granted 6 hours of p2p access. In a month, a student can use no more than 8 six-hour periods (48 hours total) a month.

In theory, this could work, but as more things move to a p2p based distribution model, having the ability to access things only on a timed basis is somewhat shortsighted. The content industries are pushing for this kind of restriction, and might see this as a promising development, but have been quiet on Missouri S&T’s program.

Also, the restriction on what can be seen as ‘mainstream p2p’ could lead to an increase in p2p that is harder to monitor and notice, as students will most likely encrypt their traffic or attempt to access content in ways not restricted. Sites that host files like rapidshare wouldn’t be affected by the time restrictions, and internal dc++ hubs, to share what is transferred in during the 6-hour windows would spring up.

It is also unclear which protocols are counted as p2p for these purposes. Newsgroups, as well as showing a resurgence in popularity for file sharing, are also a valuable tool for information exchange in general (and one sometimes embraced by major content producers. Michael Straczynski has been posting posts regularly to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated, and Terry Pratchett is a regular on alt.fan.pratchett). However, it’s one potential way to prevent WoW addiction in students.

Requests to the university’s system security analyst, Karl Lutzen, were not answered at the time of publication.

Source TF

The Textbook Torrents tracker is considered to be the largest library of textbooks on BitTorrent. The site had been flying under the radar for quite some time but this changed a month ago. On July 1st, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story on the site, which was picked up by Slashdot and later the LA Times blog.

All this attention led to thousands of new visitors to the tracker, but the publicity also had a downside. Geekman, the administrator of Textbook Torrents told TorrentFreak that their host, xlHost, and their domain registrar, Dreamhost, both received a takedown request a few days after all the press coverage. “We received a DMCA notice from Pearson Education a week or so prior, which we complied with, but it was a group of publishers that contacted our host,” he told us.

Although the tracker was pretty popular, with around 20,000 peers trading files at any given point in time, Geekman said he had never received takedown notices from big publishers before. “We had a couple of emails from individuals before, but nothing from organizations. One was an editor complaining about being cheated out of his 10¢ per copy commission.”

On July 5th Dreamhost suspended Geekman’s account, and despite his many efforts to contact them, they simply didn’t respond to his inquiries. It took more than a week before he was allowed to transfer the domain. Now, more than a month after the site went down, TextbookTorrents returns, and it’s not planning to go away anytime soon.

Geekman plans to focus on making the site’s resources redundant, to reduce vulnerability and to make sure the site remains online. In addition he will work on the legal issues and improve the privacy of the site’s users. One of the most drastic changes is the decision to stop the logging of IP-addresses, which means that the site will stop ratio tracking. Making the tracker public will ensure the privacy of the users, in case the server is compromised.

“I want to see the textbook industry change such that we are no longer needed,” Geekman says when we ask him about his main motivation to bring the site back, while mentioning cheap books and responsible business practices as examples of positive change.

He doesn’t think publishers should give away their books –even though some authors profit from doing so– but he does think most books are too expensive. “The companies may be corrupt, but they have a right to make money. They can’t be expected to give their material away for free. After all, there is a significant amount of work involved in the production of a textbook. We need a middle ground,” he says.

“I’m not naive enough to say that if something can be distributed in a digital form it should be free but there needs to be some adaptation here,” Geekman added. For now, however, all the publishers see is a threat to their revenue stream, as Allan Ryan of Harvard Business Publishing put it: “We have been fairly vigorous in monitoring these sites and in requesting that they take down our copyrighted content.”

They sure have something to monitor now, as TextbookTorrents has made its return…because you still can’t torrent beer. Currently, the site can only be accessed directly via the IP-address, however, the domain should be working again shortly.

SOURCE TORRENTFREAK

Over the past few months, many countries have looked into the possibility of disconnecting file-sharers from the Internet. Today, France is the first to present their new “3-strikes” law, which allows anti-piracy outfits such as IFPI, RIAA and MPAA to police the Internet.

A few weeks after the University of Washington showed that “copyright infringement warnings” are based on reckless tactics, France announces to use these notices to disconnect pirates from the Internet. The warning emails, sent by anti-piracy organizations, often carry the force of law with an ISP, despite being a blind unproven accusation. Lobby groups have pushed for these notices to be all the evidence needed for punishment in some countries, and France is the latest to follow the lobby money, with a 3-strikes law just proposed.

The new legislation will make it possible to disconnect people from the Internet, if they receive more than two copyright infringement warnings. The warnings will be sent out by the ISPs, solely based on data gathered by anti-piracy organizations.

Christine Albanel, the French Minister of Culture presented the new bill today. She hopes the bill will significant reduce online piracy, and is quoted as saying at a press conference: “We know that we are not going to eradicate piracy 100 percent, but we think that we can reduce it significantly.” President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has spoken out in favor of the new legislation before, backed the Minister, and commented: “There is no reason that the Internet should be lawless.”

If the new bill passes, anti-piracy organizations will be in complete control of the Internet subscriptions of French citizens. There will be a new agency that will forward their complaints to ISPs, who will then send out the warning emails. One of the major problems is, however, that the data gathering techniques, as used by IFPI, MPAA and RIAA, are far from accurate.

Interestingly, the French law goes directly against the European Parliament who, this April, condemned state plans to authorize the disconnection of suspected file-sharers from the Internet. European Parliament said that disconnecting petty file-sharers would be “conflicting with civil liberties and human rights and with the principles of proportionality, effectiveness and dissuasiveness”.

The controversial bill will come before parliament this autumn, and if it passes, the new legislation will become effective on January 1st, 2009.

Wow, this is some sad, shocking, and vile news. Recent leaked information points the Canadian Conservative Government a participating member in international talks (aka G8 neocon agenda meetings) to develop a new international anti-piracy agreement under the guise of an anti-counterfeiting shroud. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement would see Canada join the U.S. and the European Union in a coalition against copyright infringement. The leaked anti-counterfeiting strategy purportedly originated from the U.S. government. The talks, taken behind closed doors so that regular people don’t get to know about until it’s too late, will grant almost unlimited powers for the police and government to monitor any and all activities of Canadian file-sharers.

The legislation will encourage ISPs to monitor the online activities of their customers, and report any and all activity that may infringe copyright law. The agreement covers the copying of information or ideas in a wide variety of contexts. For example page three, paragraph one is a “Pirate Bay killer” clause designed to criminalize the non-profit facilitation of unauthorized information exchange on the internet. Border guards and other public security personnel could become copyright police under the deal. They would be charged with checking laptops, iPods and even cellphones for content that “infringes” on copyright laws, such as ripped-off CDs and movies. The guards would determine what infringes copyright. The agreement says any copied content would be open for scrutiny — even if it was copied legally. This new agreement goes way beyond the bound of reasonable, it’s Orwellian, unethical, police-state and Nazi-ideologist. I will do everything in my power to educate the public about this horrible modern atrocity that could come to realization if we do not take a stand immediately. This effects everyone, not just Canadians, this agreement is international covering Japan, Switzerland and the European Commision.

Source : Globe and Mail

The best way to deal with piracy is to go in hard - real hard. It doesn’t matter if you upset non-pirates or alienate your customers, it doesn’t matter if you make children cry. Pirates are evil and they need to be dealt with severely - this documentary shows how it’s best done, using intimidation and violence.

In the time it took you to read the introduction to this post, movie pirates have cost the MPAA $12.7m in lost revenue, several thousand people in the movie industry have lost their jobs, and civilization (as we know it) is under threat.

Faced with this nightmare scenario, drastic action is called for, as any delay could exacerbate the already horrendous losses listed above. It’s time to stop movie piracy in its tracks - right now - by letting loose the “Movie Screening Security Guards”, armed with the bluntest instruments known to man - and night vision goggles.

MSSG is a four-man security team, here to serve and protect the integrity of the Hollywood movie industry. They say they’re here to hunt down strange people - the type that download stuff from the Internet and anyone carrying large bags “like a suicide bomber” into a movie theater.

Their training allows them to see things normal people can’t, so when they’re confronted with what appears to be a kid with a cellphone, they do the right thing - and immediately destroy it, rightly terrifying the child.

“The world needs morals and integrity,” says the MSSG boss, “and when someone’s going around recording films that cost millions of dollars to make, and showing them to all their little snot-nosed friends while they’re picking their noses, well that’s just wrong. When you take morals and integrity away from a human being, I ask you: What then? What do you have left then?

Enjoy the documentary. More @ torrentfreak.com