Naughty, Naughty: Annual Section 301 Report From US Trade Representative

Posted on April 28, 2008 by Kraig Baker

The US on Friday placed nine countries on a "priority watch list" for allegedly failing to protect American producers of movies, computer software and other copyrighted material from widespread piracy.  This will subject them to extra scrutiny and could eventually lead to economic sanctions - if the administration decides to pursue complaints before the World Trade Organization.  The countries were China, Russia, Argentina, Chile, India, Israel, Pakistan, Thailand and Venezuela.  Four countries were removed from the list:  Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and Ukraine.  Not surprisingly, a large part of the report focuses on China.   Ultimately, the report is a fascinating read on what the priorities are for the US in terms of intellectual protection (mainly pharmaceuticals and entertainment).  It's also an interesting treasure trove of where to get pirated materials when wandering the markets of the Czech Republic or Buenos Aires.  http://www.ustr.gov/Document_Library/Press_Releases/2008/April/USTR_Issues_2008_Special_301_Report.html

 

Tags: , , ,

Leakage

Posted on February 7, 2008 by Brian Kennan

Waxy.org crunches some piracy numbers:

This year, all but six of the 34 nominated films were available in DVD quality by the last week of January. This is about consistent with past years, but we're seeing a shift towards studios releasing DVDs closer to their theatrical date. This trend, combined with the new availability of high-quality Region 5 rips from overseas, is making the screener leak less meaningful. After all, why bother releasing the screener if the retail DVD or a direct-from-film transfer is already out?

More here.

Tags: ,

Another Legal Storm Hits The Pirate Bay

Posted on February 6, 2008 by Brian Kennan

Legal threats are nothing new for The Pirate Bay, of course, as you can see from their helpful legal threats page. What appears to be new is that the Danish government wants an ISP to block access to the notorious site. According to Reuters,

A Danish court has ordered Denmark-based Internet service provider Tele2 to shut down its customers' access to the popular file-sharing site Pirate Bay, Danish IT magazine Computerworld reported on Monday. Computerworld said on its Web site that a court had ordered Denmark's Tele2 -- one of the Nordic country's largest Internet providers -- to close access to the site at the request of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

Never heard of TPB? Here's a quick overview from Wikipedia:

The Pirate Bay website allows users to search for and download torrent files (torrents), small files that contain the machine-readable information necessary to download the data files from other users. The torrents are organized in the categories: Audio, Video, Software applications, Games, and, for registered users only, Pornography. Registration requires an email address and is free; registered users may upload their own torrents and add comments to torrent descriptions. Downloading of data files from other users is facilitated by the Bittorrent tracker that also runs on a Pirate Bay server.

Never heard of BitTorrent? The bottom line is that it's a P2P file sharing technology:

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) communications protocol. BitTorrent is a method of distributing large amounts of data widely without the original distributor incurring the entire costs of hardware, hosting and bandwidth resources. Instead, when data is distributed using the BitTorrent protocol, each recipient supplies pieces of the data to newer recipients, reducing the cost and burden on any given individual source, providing redundancy against system problems, and reducing dependence on the original distributor.

Again, that's from Wikipedia.

Tags: , ,