It seems as if the powers at be have realized they are fighting an uphill battle. After a laborious trial in Sweden, Time Warner has decided that they can’t beat The Pirate Bay, so they’ll join them.

After years of hostility, lawsuits, police raids and heated invective between the two groups, the Pirate Bay has today announced they have settled their differences with US media conglomerate Warner Bros. The largest BitTorrent tracker has sold out to Hollywood and the two have agreed a deal. - TorrentFreak

Honestly, I feel that this was the right move from the start. The Pirate Bay is no more responsible for pirating software than Google. Technology and the Internet have always been about innovation and moving forward. The Pirate Bay took the existing technology of BitTorrent and simply capitalized on it before anyone else thought to. Now that the major industries are taking a page from TPB, you can expect to see a number of changes in the way we view and purchase media online.

What does it all mean?

Well, personally I feel that this will have a major impact on the distribution of online media. If the major powers of distribution and production cannot adopt this new market of media sharing they will fall victim to the next TPB. Warner Bros. should not revamp or close down TPB, instead they should embrace its tech-savvy, intelligent user base and find a way to grow the community as well as make their fair share.

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acquire, BitTorrent, BitTorrent tracker, File sharing, Google, Pirate Bay, sweden, TorrentFreak, Warner Bros Hide

The most important day in file sharing history has taken place. Remember the first time you downloaded an Mp3? How about the first time you used Napster or Limewire?

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past 10 years, you’ll have heard the stories of silicon swashbucklers and rampaging record companies. Perhaps the largest contributor to the pirate software scene is The Pirate Bay. Hosted in Sweden, this website tracks and indexes BitTorrent files (.torrent) for almost every flavor of data. You can find movies, games, albums, programs, and pretty much anything else of digital value all for free. Most of the sites content is uploaded by its 3.4 million user base.

Of course, this cant last forever.

The Swedish Government has been after TPB for years. After a raid in 2006 and 3 days of downtime, officials pushed to bring TPB to court for their blatant disregard for copyright law. The trial began Feb 16th, 2009.

Prosecutor Håkan Roswall read out the charges that can be best summarized as “commercial copyright infringement”. The plaintiffs are Warner Bros, MGM, EMI, Colombia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Sony BMG and Universal. Lundström’s lawyer pointed out that the prosecutor may have drawn up some charges incorrectly. Interestingly, Lundström is the only one of the defendants with two lawyers, one of which is a copyright expert. - TorrentFreak

It was apparent that the prosecution had made an error in judgment when choosing their  ‘Computer Expert’. A live audio broadcast revealed the frantic clicking of their witness fumbling to get his PowerPoint presentation to display. He was later asked to “stick to the papers”. Unable to define the difference between Megabits and Megabytes, an EPIC FAIL sticker was quickly slapped on the prosecution’s case.

After the Second day, it had become apparent that the prosecution had clearly not done their research. According to TorrentFreak, at least half of the charges were dropped, sighting that the TPB did not host any copywritten materials, but only the .torrent files tracking them. It seems as if the court has realized that this site is a Torrent search engine, and not a distributor of pirated software. It is anticipated that the prosecution will fall flat on its face.

You can read more about the trial at http://trial.thepiratebay.org/ and http://torrentfreak.com/

Information is free.

LONG LIVE THE PIRATE BAY.

Related articles

• Charges Against The Pirate Bay Partly Dropped (mashable.com)
• Half The Charges Against The Pirate Bay Dropped, But The Circus Ain’t Over Yet (techcrunch.com)
• The Pirate Bay trial to begin in Sweden (news.cnet.com)
• Pirate Bay filesharing trial begins (guardian.co.uk)
• Case Against the Pirate Bay Loses Steam (appscout.com)
• Pirate Bay file-sharing defended (BBC) (techmeme.com)
• Pirate Bay Trial Watch Day 2: Half of the Charges Have Been Dropped [BitTorrent] (i.gizmodo.com)
• Charges dropped against Pirate Bay (guardian.co.uk)
• D’oh! Prosecution Stumbles Badly in Pirate Bay Trial (technologizer.com)
• At The Pirate Bay Trial, No One Wins [I Saw A Pirate Bay Sticker On A Cadillac] (idolator.com)

20th Century Fox, BitTorrent, Copyright infringement, File sharing, Pirate Bay, Sony BMG, TorrentFreak, Warner Bros Hide

The most important day in file sharing history has taken place. Remember the first time you downloaded an Mp3? How about the first time you used Napster or Limewire?

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past 10 years, you’ll have heard the stories of silicon swashbucklers and rampaging record companies. Perhaps the largest contributor to the pirate software scene is The Pirate Bay. Hosted in Sweden, this website tracks and indexes BitTorrent files (.torrent) for almost every flavor of data. You can find movies, games, albums, programs, and pretty much anything else of digital value all for free. Most of the sites content is uploaded by its 3.4 million user base.

Of course, this cant last forever.

The Swedish Government has been after TPB for years. After a raid in 2006 and 3 days of downtime, officials pushed to bring TPB to court for their blatant disregard for copyright law. The trial began Feb 16th, 2009.

Prosecutor Håkan Roswall read out the charges that can be best summarized as “commercial copyright infringement”. The plaintiffs are Warner Bros, MGM, EMI, Colombia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Sony BMG and Universal. Lundström’s lawyer pointed out that the prosecutor may have drawn up some charges incorrectly. Interestingly, Lundström is the only one of the defendants with two lawyers, one of which is a copyright expert. - TorrentFreak

It was apparent that the prosecution had made an error in judgment when choosing their  ‘Computer Expert’. A live audio broadcast revealed the frantic clicking of their witness fumbling to get his PowerPoint presentation to display. He was later asked to “stick to the papers”. Unable to define the difference between Megabits and Megabytes, an EPIC FAIL sticker was quickly slapped on the prosecution’s case.

After the Second day, it had become apparent that the prosecution had clearly not done their research. According to TorrentFreak, at least half of the charges were dropped, sighting that the TPB did not host any copywritten materials, but only the .torrent files tracking them. It seems as if the court has realized that this site is a Torrent search engine, and not a distributor of pirated software. It is anticipated that the prosecution will fall flat on its face.

You can read more about the trial at http://trial.thepiratebay.org/ and http://torrentfreak.com/

Information is free.

LONG LIVE THE PIRATE BAY.

Related articles

• Charges Against The Pirate Bay Partly Dropped (mashable.com)
• Half The Charges Against The Pirate Bay Dropped, But The Circus Ain’t Over Yet (techcrunch.com)
• The Pirate Bay trial to begin in Sweden (news.cnet.com)
• Pirate Bay filesharing trial begins (guardian.co.uk)
• Case Against the Pirate Bay Loses Steam (appscout.com)
• Pirate Bay file-sharing defended (BBC) (techmeme.com)
• Pirate Bay Trial Watch Day 2: Half of the Charges Have Been Dropped [BitTorrent] (i.gizmodo.com)
• Charges dropped against Pirate Bay (guardian.co.uk)
• D’oh! Prosecution Stumbles Badly in Pirate Bay Trial (technologizer.com)
• At The Pirate Bay Trial, No One Wins [I Saw A Pirate Bay Sticker On A Cadillac] (idolator.com)

20th Century Fox, BitTorrent, Copyright infringement, File sharing, Pirate Bay, Sony BMG, TorrentFreak, Warner Bros Hide

Image via CrunchBase

Spore, Will Wright’s opus that puts you in control of a whole species from birth the death, is a game that has split opinion right down the middle, at least in terms of the game itself. But while some argue it’s too simple, and their opponents argue it is genius, everyone seems to agree on one thing: the DRM sucks.

In its wisdom, Electronic Arts decided to release Spore with a draconian DRM limit in place which means every purchaser of an official copy of the game is restricted to three activations. This is intended to prevent one copy being shared by friends and installed on multiple computers. In tandem with the disc needing to be in the computer to be playable, and the online activation requirements, this should have made the game piracy-free. Except it hasn’t. In fact, Spore is the most pirated game ever.

The problem that EA faces is that by including such draconian DRM limitations, it gives the pirates an excuse to legitimise their activities. The argument being that with such intrusive DRM included, why the hell shouldn’t we all download the game illegally and stick one to the huge corporate machine.

This virtual punch in the face for EA is made possible by the fact that the DRM is removed from the game when it’s pirated. So rather than harming the pirates and their activities, stupid decisions such as the one taken by EA only harms the customers willing to pay full price for the game, and not the people who want a copy for free.

Check out more at Blorge

TorrentFreak reports that Spore has been the most downloaded torrent on The Pirate Bay, the largest and most notorious BitTorrent site, for over a week now. Which is a rarity. The game has been downloaded over 500,000 times over the various torrent sites since it was released on September 2nd.

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BitTorrent, Digital rights management, DRM, EA, Electronic Arts, Pirate Bay, Spore, Will Wright Hide