Torrents Not Guilty?

Sofia. The owner of the Internet site “arenabg.com”, Eliyan Geshev, was released from the arrest after the Regional Court of Sofia decided that there was no grounded assumption against him. No measures would be taken against Geshev. The court’s decision can be appealed in three days' term. If that happens the next sitting will be held on March 27 from 10 AM.

FOCUS News Agency has already reported that the owners of the Internet site "arena.bg" was arrested yesterday on the grounds of three accusations.
As soon as the decision was announced journalists were struck by the security guards while trying to interview Eliyan Geshev on his way out of the courtroom. The journalists intend to file a complaint.


Read more on Focus Information Agency

Piracy Kills Adventure Games

The Longest Journey and Dreamfall are two successful adventure games that were developed by Funcom. Even though I could not bare to finish The Longest Journey, being on of the most buggiest and boring adventure games I’ve ever played, others have still loved it crazy and it got quite high reviews from the fans. It was followed by the anticipated part 2 Dreamfall game, and the company seemed to be doing quite well. Today however I read in the news that Funcom, the developer of the adventure game series have decided to abandon all “offline” games development, and will go for the MMO games instead. The main reason behind that decision they say is the high ratio of games piracy. They estimate that over 200,000 illegal downloads of Dreamfall were made before it was even released! They estimate also that for every copy they sell, 3 to 10 illegal copies are made.


Read more on BlogAllAlong

Russian IT minister pledges piracy clampdown

Russia's IT minister said his country will step up its work to fight intellectual property violations, part of an effort to boost foreign technology investment in Russia and gain admittance to the World Trade Organization.

Last month the International Intellectual Property Alliance named Russia as one of the world's worst offenders for violating U.S. software and music copyrights, second only to China.

During a press conference Thursday at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, Leonid Reiman, the Russian minister for IT and communications, acknowledged the problem and said his country is stepping up its efforts to tackle piracy.

"I can assure you this is something very important that we are paying a lot of attention to, and we will continue working to solve the issue," he said, answering a question from a reporter.


Read more on ComputerWorld

Man's Best Friends Help Movie Industry Crackdown on Piracy

By Kristi Mattes

The Motion Picture Association of America loaned Malaysia two black Labradors, the country's latest weapon to fight music and movie piracy. Lucky and Flo began at Malaysia's biggest international airport sniffing out shipments of contraband discs.

The MPAA says its members, including Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox and Universal, lost $1.2 billion to Asia-Pacific movie pirates in 2006.


Read more on News10.net

id Software talks piracy (again) at GDC 2007

The GDC conference is always an interesting one to follow, even if some people think otherwise. It is one of those shows that is run by developers, presumably for developers, and doesn't always come off cleanly to the public. We imagine that must be the case for why the CEO of id Software talked about piracy - again.

It seems like just last year that Hollenshead stood in a panel of industry members to discuss piracy. Oh, wait, that's because it was. At E3, Todd and others from the industry went on to say how rampant piracy costs the industry billions, and game developers would stop producing games. A cautionary note was sung about developers moving to consoles, where piracy is nowhere near as rampant.


Read more on bi-tech.net

Don’t Let Fear of Piracy Rob You of Profits

JK Rowling is famously known amonst online book circles as the highest profile author to refuse to allow digitization of her books. This has not deterred individuals from offering a home brew ebook version of every title in the Harry Potter series. In fact, Book 6 was released at midnight and online reports told of the ebook version available less than twelve hours later. Recently, the High Court of Delhi required eBay to halt four auctions on eBay India of illegal ebook versions of Potter’s book.

If one can get past the piracy issue, it is important to understand that there were purchasers of this illegal ebook version. Which means that there is a market for the ebok version and rather than the market being filled by a legitimate source, authorized by Rowling, the market is filled with illegal versions for which Rowling will receive no royalties.


Read more on Dear Author

Paying for Piracy

On February 28, the Recording Industry Association of America announced a new policy to crack down on illegal music downloading on college campuses. The association sent 400 letters to 13 universities and asked that the universities forward the letters to the individual users. The letters will offer the recipients an opportunity to pay a discounted settlement amount in lieu of a potentially costly lawsuit.

And the RIAA has a warning to college students here in the Valley, and nationwide - this is only the beginning of a long-term effort to eradicate illegal downloading the only way that seems to be effective: by hitting you in the wallet.



Read more on College Times

DRM Security Startup: $13M

Arxan on Monday announced it has attracted $13 million from investors interested in its potential to protect digital media from piracy.

The funding includes new investors Legend Ventures and TDF, as well as existing investors EDF Ventures, Paladin Homeland Security Fund, Solstice Capital, and Trident Capital.

Bethesda, Maryland-based Arxan refers to its protection technology as “little modules of code” that can get inserted into a program. The company said its code works better than existing protections because it functions on a binary, or ones and zeros, level of programming.


Read more on redherring.com

Russia among top 10 worst countries for copyright piracy

The annual report by the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) on global piracy has ranked Russia in the top 10 of the world's worst offending countries for property rights.

The report ranks Russia together with India, Pakistan, and Nigeria as the worst countries for piracy, with Bangladesh at the top of the list.

"Russia's economy is ingrained with high-levels of piracy", the report said, adding that the country had failed to protect property rights.


Read more on RIA Novosti

Recording industry takes action against piracy on campus

By David Cabanero

The Recording Industry Association of America launched a new initiative Wednesday intensifying the crackdown on music theft on college campuses nationwide.

UT was listed in the association's top 25 university offenders in illegal file transfers.

The association, which represents 90 percent of U.S. recording industries, sent 400 pre-litigation settlement letters to 13 different universities Wednesday. Individual students were contacted with pre-trial negotiations, Sherman said.

The letters allow the infringer the opportunity to negotiate with the association before the lawsuit is filed for public record. RIAA sent 33 pre-litigation letters to UT on Wednesday, which they are requesting the University to forward to the students.


Read more on The Daily Texan

Forget party schools: The RIAA lists the top piracy schools in the US

Ohio University, Purdue University, and the University of Nebraska have made it to the top of a list, but it may not be something the universities want to brag about. The RIAA recently named the top 25 music-pirating schools in the country, an act that involved sending over 14,500 copyright infringement notices (so far) during the 2006-2007 school year. This was nearly triple the number of notices sent during the 2005-2006 school year, according to the RIAA. The group says, however, that they are taking advantage of new software tools to improve the tracking of illegal file sharing, which may be part of the reason why the numbers have skyrocketed.


Read more on arstechnica.com

Drastic software piracy

The author of the Mac program "Display Eater" got tired of piracy, and said that he coded the program such that if it detects a pirated version of itself, it'll destroy files from your home directory. It was all a hoax to scare people into buying the real version.

This turned out to be a major mistake and a PR catastrophy. As the developer explains in this statement on his home page:
People started buying multiple keys, which I never intended, and when the protection was in place, people who did not even know they had committed piracy or what piracy was were left in the dark. Legitimate and prospective users started fearing the program, which I never imagined.

A reporter called me today, and suggested that I make it free, and or open source. I plan to do both. Once the code is cleaned up, a GPL'ed version will be released.


Read more on The Butt Ugly Weblog

Piracy and Public Perception

The editors of the Wheeling News-Register are rather disgusted by college students who download music illegally, a fact they make very clear in an unsigned editorial:

To their credit, some universities are cutting off campus Internet access to culprits. Good. They should do all they can to help enforce the law — which happens to involve copyrights, much the same as those college professors have on the textbooks they write.


Read more on The Chronicle

Want a Better Product? Try Piracy

When Napster was public enemy number one, the music industry made the point that downloaded music was often of inferior quality than the original CD - which was often true. Strange, then, that some TV studios are providing legal downloads via iTunes that fall short.

The story begins with Jeff (I'm sure he has a last name, but I don't know what it is) over on the-ish.com, who noted that when he buys an episode of Lost on iTunes, it has a 4:3 aspect ratio, which is cropped from the 16:9 widescreen image that HDTV viewers see.

Read more on PC World's Digital World