Awesome Techs

The major record labels Warner, Sony BMG, EMI and Universal are being accused of pirating 300,000 tracks. This is Reported in  Michael Geist website by David Basskin, the President and CEO of the Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency Ltd.

The post says,

The infringer has effectively already admitted owing at least $50 million and the full claim could exceed $6 billion. If the dollars don’t shock, the target of the lawsuit undoubtedly will: The defendants in the case are Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG Music Canada, EMI Music Canada, and Universal Music Canada, the four primary members of the Canadian Recording Industry Association.

The CRIA members were hit with the lawsuit [PDF] in October 2008, after artists decided to turn to the courts following decades of frustration with the rampant infringement (I am adviser to the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, which is co-counsel, but have had no involvement in the case). The claims arise from a longstanding practice of the recording industry in Canada, described in the lawsuit as “exploit now, pay later if at all.”  It involves the use of works that are often included in compilation CDs (ie. the top dance tracks of 2009) or live recordings. The record labels create, press, distribute, and sell the CDs, but do not obtain the necessary copyright licences.

Instead, the names of the songs on the CDs are placed on a “pending list”, which signifies that approval and payment is pending.  The pending list dates back to the late 1980s, when Canada changed its copyright law by replacing a compulsory licence with the need for specific authorization for each use. It is perhaps better characterized as a copyright infringement admission list, however, since for each use of the work, the record label openly admits that it has not obtained copyright permission and not paid any royalty or fee.

Over the years, the size of the pending list has grown dramatically, now containing over 300,000 songs. From Beyonce to Bruce Springsteen, the artists waiting for payment are far from obscure, as thousands of Canadian and foreign artists have seen their copyrights used without permission and payment.

After years of claiming Canadian consumers disrespect copyright, the irony of having the recording industry face a massive lawsuit will not be lost on anyone, least of all the artists still waiting to be paid.  Indeed, they are also seeking punitive damages, arguing “the conduct of the defendant record companies is aggravated by their strict and unremitting approach to the enforcement of their copyright interests against consumers.”

At some point of time everything just backfires. I’m happy it did in this case. What’s your opinion about this?  Post comments.

Recently following the launch of IPred in Europe, It was reported that, 18 percent jump in legal music sales. Now in Sweden, the Local is reporting that illegal file sharing is back in full force, reaching new record levels.

Because of the cutdown of the bittorrent traffic, it came down to 40%. In my opinion everyone might have given a try for the originals. But no matter what, they came back to the old ages, where get things “free” is considered better than pay and get the things.

This will be more clear when different companies’ release their statistics. Anyway now streaming contents are getting more and more users. If you have good internet plan, why waste time and space by downloading the entire content, when you can watch it on the fly while its getting streamed.

“Spotify and the various television channels ‘Play’ sites haven’t yet released their statistics. There is guaranteed to be certain increase in file sharing, but it isn’t possible to tell exactly how much, Then you have the illegal video streaming sites, which aren’t file sharing in the traditional sense, but which play the same role for users. Watching a movie via a streaming video directly in your web browser is becoming more and more popular.”

Researcher Kristoffer Schollin Schollin said.

Kristoffer Schollin, Ph. D. intellectual property law, is post doc researcher and lecturer at the Department of Law and CIP – Center for Intellectual Property studies.

I think people of Sweden are not liking the laws which help Millionaires to become Billionaires.

In a blog post in their official blog they said Mininova limits its activities to content distribution service.

“Mininova was one of the largest BitTorrent index sites. It is a directory and search engine for many kinds of torrent files. It does not, however, host its own tracker.”

Mininova was sued by BREIN, a coalition of Dutch publishing, music film and software lobbies. In August the court ruled it must remove links copyright material or face a €5m fine.

Well this left no choice except 2 for mininova, either to go for an appeal, or remove all the infringing torrents. In their blog post they says they are thinking about going for an appeal. But to save their own a** they removed all the infringing torrents. Now the website is almost as good as empty.

They do offer this so called “Content Distribution Service”, but the question is whether it worth? I dont think so. The whole concept of torrent came for filesharing. But almost all of the users are using it, for getting copyrighted materials, which are not available for free.

The blog post says,

“Unfortunately the court ruling leaves us no other option than to take our platform offline, except for the Content Distribution service. According to the verdict (Dutch link) we have to prevent uploads of torrents to Mininova that refer to certain titles or to similar-looking titles. We’ve been testing some filtering systems the last couple of months, but we found that it’s neither technically nor operationally possible to implement a 100% working filter system. Therefore, we decided that the only option is to limit Mininova to Content Distribution torrents from now on. We are still considering an appeal at this moment.

We launched our Content Distribution service in 2007. This service allows producers and artists to easily publish and distribute their content for free through Mininova. The launch of Content Distribution has proven to be a success. Countless content owners have used Content Distribution to distribute their content (e.g. albums and documentaries) for free to millions of users. For example, the Dutch band Silence is Sexy released their complete album on Mininova and received the Interactive Award 2009 for doing so. The Dutch television broadcaster VPRO decided to start using Content Distribution in 2009 in order to distribute documentaries.”

NASTY OLD PEOPLE

This is Mette’s story. Member of a neo-Nazi gang, her day job is to take care of four seniors that all are just waiting to die. Her life becomes a journey into a burlesque fairytale, where the rules of the game are created by Mette herself. Mette is indifferent about her way of life, until she one night assaults a man, kicking him senseless. Waking up the day after, she realizes that something is wrong, and accompanied by the crazy oldies, she longs for respect and love. Together, they create a world of their own. A world you never knew existed.

BEHIND THE SCENES
In the autumn of 2007 Hanna Sköld took a private bank loan of 10 000 euro to make her debut feature film “Nasty Old People”. Now she continues to ignore the middle men in the film industry by distributing it together with the film collective RåFILM’s Luffarbion, aka Vagabond Cinema, and the file sharing site The Pirate Bay. In addition, she releases it under a creative commons license so that anyone can download, share or remix the film.

For more info, please visit
http://www.nastyoldpeople.org

This version of Nasty Old People is licensed BY-NC-SA, meaning that you are free to copy, distribute, transmit and remix the work under the following conditions:

BY: Makers of this movie must be attributed - do this by linking to  

http://www.nastyoldpeople.org

.This version of Nasty Old People is licensed BY-NC-SA, meaning that you are free to copy, distribute, transmit and remix the work under the following conditions:

BY: Makers of this movie must be attributed – do this by linking to

http://www.nastyoldpeople.org

NC: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. If you have interest in using this film commercially, please contact hanna@tangramfilm.se. If you want to screen this film to an audience, please contact hanna@tangramfilm.se for the purpose of us keeping a
record of where this film has been shown.

SA: If you alter, transform or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. This is because we want people to be able to build upon what we (and you) have done without restrictions.

Please, for all uses of this film, also include a link to the original license:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/deed.sv

EVER WANTED to run The Pirate Bay from your OWN computer? Well now you can as some bright spark as created a downloadable 21.3GB index file of the site which has already seen over 1600 downloads.

.

It’s not all the files the website has access to, just the main index which provides access to those 873,671 torrent files.

The afore-mentioned bright spark, who wishes to remain anonymous, told Torrentfreak he was disappointed with the sale of the Pirate Bay and wanted to create a backup.

After leeching this file you can be your own torrent site, but it also means the likes of the RIAA and IFPI can also download it and possibly gain access to the IP addresses of those who used the site.

The legal actions resulting from that would keep the lawyers in Gucci for a year or two.

If you feel throwing caution into the wind, get the torrent from here piratebay.

The Pirate Party is off to a running start in the UK.

Days after officially registering and announcing it would be running in the next general election on a copyright and surveillance reform platform, the party confirmed online publicity had helped drive hundreds of members to sign up each hour.

“I’m trying to get hold of my web guys to confirm exact sign-up rates, but I believe we peaked at over 100 memberships an hour when Slashdot ran the story at the same time Stephen Fry twittered about us, and I’m sure we were over 100 forum sign-ups and hour,” party leader Andrew Robinson told IT PRO in an email.

Slashdot is a popular tech news aggregation site, while Stephen Fry is well-known for his Twitter power.

Robinson told the Register that “donations have been coming in so fast that PayPal were concerned we were a fraudulent site.”

The party’s treasurer Eric Priezkalns said the number of new members wasn’t yet confirmed, but would be made public over the weekend. “It is still very early days, and we have been overwhelmed by the response, which has exceeded all our expectations,” he told IT PRO.

The party was also up to 1,700 members on Facebook, topping even the Conservative party’s 1,200 fans – although the party itself has stressed it needs people to become members of the political party, not just follow it on social networking sites, in order to succeed.

For more on the Pirate Party’s plans for the UK, click here.