piracy

It was one year ago today that an unprecedented outcry against the Stop Online Piracy Act proved to Washington officialdom that sufficiently irritated Internet users are a potent political force. After Wikipedia, Google, Craigslist and other major sites asked their users to contact their representatives, the deluge of traffic knocked some Senate Web sites offline, and votes on both bills were indefinitely postponed.

The massive public outcry that, by some counts, involved more than 10 million Internet users concerned about the proposals' impact on free expression has turned the protests into a cautionary tale on Capitol Hill. Aides now worry … Read more

Convicted file-sharer Jeramiah Perkins has been handed the longest prison sentence even given in a U.S. file-sharing lawsuit: five years.

The 40-year-old man from Portsmouth, Va., was given the sentence today by U.S. District Judge Arenda Wright Allen, according to Wired. During his lawsuit, Perkins pled guilty to conspiracy to commit copyright infringement by file-sharing movies, music, games, and more on the Internet.

Perkins -- a.k.a. Butch Perkins, Stash, and theestas -- is said to have been the head of a group that went to theaters, camcorded the movies, recorded the audio, synched the files, and … Read more

Google and Yahoo's advertising networks are accused of financially supporting those who pirate music and movies online, according to a report from the University of Southern California.

The school's Annenberg Innovation Lab studied which ad networks placed the most ads on sites accused of infringing music and film copyrights and today issued a list of the top 10. Google is No. 2, and Yahoo came in at No. 6.

OpenX, a company based in Pasadena, Calif., that supplies digital and mobile advertising tools, was the top advertiser on pirate sites, the report said. To help compile the list … Read more

This was the year of Internet activism with a sharp political point to it: Protests drove a stake through the heart of a Hollywood-backed digital copyright bill, helped derail a United Nations summit, and contributed to the demise of a proposed data-sharing law.

In 2012, when Internet users and companies flexed their political muscles, they realized they were stronger than they had thought. It amounted to a show of force not seen since the political wrangling over implanting copy-protection technology in PCs a decade ago, or perhaps since those blue ribbons that appeared on Web sites in the mid-1990s in … Read more

The U.S. and Russia have agreed on an "action plan" to fight the theft of intellectual property, including online piracy of copyrighted materials.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative announced the agreement yesterday, saying that the plan's priorities include, quote:

"Combating copyright piracy over the Internet, including actions such as takedowns of infringing content, action against persons responsible for IPR [Intellectual Property Rights] crimes, coordination with rights holders, cooperation and information exchange between IPR enforcement officials, and devotion of resources and personnel to law enforcement agencies to combat piracy over the Internet.

Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg is being released from solitary confinement and moved to a different prison in Sweden to finish his sentence tied to his role in illegal file-sharing.

According to torrent site TorrentFreak, Warg is due in May to finish a sentence for his role in running The Pirate Bay, a resource for finding torrent files that can be used to download both legal and illegal content.

His detainment in solitary confinement apparently wasn't tied to the Pirate Bay case specifically. When he was deported from Cambodia to Sweden this summer, Warg was accused of hacking … Read more

A United Nations summit has adopted confidential recommendations proposed by China that will help network providers target BitTorrent uploaders, detect trading of copyrighted MP3 files, and, critics say, accelerate Internet censorship in repressive nations.

Approval by the U.N.'s International Telecommunications Union came despite objections from Germany, which warned the organization must "not standardize any technical means that would increase the exercise of control over telecommunications content, could be used to empower any censorship of content, or could impede the free flow of information and ideas."

The ITU adopted the confidential Y.2770 standard for deep packet … Read more

Apple's iTunes platform could make its debut in Russia tomorrow.

An Apple PR person in Russia has sent out an event invite to a small number of people in the country for a music event the company plans to host tomorrow night, TechCrunch, which obtained a copy of the invite, is reporting. The invite did not say that iTunes will be launching, but did acknowledge that the iTunes team will be holding the event.

Russia is one of the more difficult digital-music markets to crack. The country has several legitimate download services, including one from search firm Yandex, but … Read more

WASHINGTON D.C.--The technology sector is supposed to be one of the new power players in national politics. But you might be wondering what happened to its newfound political capital after watching its hapless attempts to lobby Congress to pass the Internet Radio Fairness Act (IRFA), a bill that would reduce the music royalties paid by Web radio services.

At a hearing yesterday before a House subcommittee studying IRFA, the tech world seemed to be the same amateurs in navigating Washington as they were before January's triumph over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Pandora and the other … Read more