If Sweden’s Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive was crafted to scare the hell out of the country’s Internet population, it seems to have had the desired affect. Swedish Internet traffic dropped by a third on Wednesday after the law, which allows copyright holders to force ISPs to divulge the IP addresses of computers sharing copyrighted material, was implemented.
U2 manager Paul McGuinness must be beside himself. Despite the band’s best efforts to prevent its new album, “No Line on the Horizon,” from appearing prematurely on the Internet, copies are being distributed there a week prior to its scheduled release. It’s not the fault of the ISPs, never mind that they are, according to McGuinness, “destroying the recorded music industry” by failing to tackle piracy.
Microsoft’s renewed antipiracy push isn’t currying much favor among PC users running pirated software. In China, a nation where 82 percent of all software is unlicensed, many are lambasting the company over its Windows Genuine Advantage program, which blackens the desktop backgrounds of PCs running unlicensed copies of Windows and pesters their owners with constant warning messages.
Like consumer OS adoption rates, piracy rates for Windows XP are much higher than for Windows Vista. And with XP scheduled to be discontinued once and for all next year, Microsoft is stepping up efforts to stem its spread through piracy. To that end, the company has declared Tuesday Oct. 21 Global Anti-Piracy Day.
Just hours after RealNetworks filed a preemptive lawsuit against the major Hollywood studios to avoid outcry over its RealDVD DVD-ripping software, Hollywood responded in kind. The Motion Picture Association of America asked a federal court in Los Angeles for a temporary restraining order to halt the sales of RealDVD, arguing it illegally bypasses DVD copyright protections. Said the MPAA, “RealNetworks’ RealDVD should be called StealDVD.”
Turns out RealNetworks Inc.’s new DVD ripper RealDVD is as legal as its creator is litigious. Real debuted RealDVD this morning and along with it a preemptive lawsuit against the Hollywood interests that will inevitably attempt to litigate it into oblivion. Brought against the DVD Copy Control Association and a who’s-who of major studios, the suit asks the court to rule that RealDVD complies with the DVD Copy Control Association’s license agreement.
According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, 99 percent of all digital music distributed via the Internet in China is pirated. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be monetized, as Google hopes to prove. Today the company launched a new music search service that allows Internet users in China to legally download music–for free.
Talk about life imitating The Onion … Apparently the recording industry’s institutional memory is about as solid as its crumbling business model. As recently as 2007 it was paying radio stations to play its music. Today, it’s accusing them of pirating it.
China’s state-run newspaper, the Shanghai Securities News, has got it all wrong. Beijing isn’t investigating whether Microsoft engaged in discriminatory pricing. Nor does it plan to file an antitrust lawsuit against it once the country’s anti-monopoly laws are enacted in August. At least that’s what China’s State Intellectual Property Office is claiming, anyway.
If Bono is U2’s geopolitical pragmatist, the band’s manager, Paul McGuinness, is its neo-Luddite. At the Music Matters confab in Hong Kong, McGuinness slagged broadband Internet service providers, accusing them of aiding and abetting music piracy while CD sales and royalty payments to musicians plunge.
Gaming piracy is as antiquarian a concept as PONG. So says Atari founder Nolan Bushnell. And who are we to disagree with the man who invented the world’s first (or second, depending on your view) video arcade game?
If there was an Emmy Award for legislation production, NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker would surely win it. Last October he called upon Congress to pass a bill that would create a dedicated intellectual-property enforcement bureau and today it’s looking more and more like he’s going to get it.
This week members of the House [...]
I hope DVD-D Germany Ltd. has a nice big landfill out behind its corporate offices, because it’s going to need it if its new disposable DVD technology takes off.
Produced with a chemical coating that renders them unreadable after 48 hours or so, the company’s Einmal (German for “once”) discs posit a play-once-and-toss model that, at [...]
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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