Salon.com > Piracy

The music business gets off the gurney

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 19:42:00 +0000

Global music sales rose in 2012 for the first time since 1999, reports the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

The rise wasn't huge, just 0.3 percent, and the total sales figure of $16.5 billion did not come close to the music industry's peak year bonanza of $38 billion, but growth is always better than relentless decline. People are giddy.

From the New York Times:

“It’s clear that 2012 saw the global recording industry moving onto the road to recovery,” said Frances Moore, chief executive of the federation, which is based in London. “There’s a palpable buzz in the air that I haven’t felt for a long time.”

At TheAtlantic.com, Derek Thompson provides four interesting reasons for why sales are up, including the intriguing possibility that successful government crackdowns on piracy have given new life to "legitimate" listening options. Or maybe the industry is just now finally figuring out new business models to use in a world of easily shared content.

Kim Dotcom launches new privacy site

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 16:22:00 +0000

Kim Dotcom is taking Mega to the next step. The New Zealand hacker, who faces extradition to the U.S. over charges that his former file-sharing cite facilitated mass online privacy, launched new file-sharing site Sunday. Simply named "Mega," the new offers encrypted cloud storage.

With a gala and launch party at his New Zealand home, the hacker celebrated Mega's launch exactly one year after the New Zealand authorities raided the mansion and shuttered Megaupload. According to reports, the party even featured a spoof raid re-enactment.

Dotcom said half a million users registered for Mega in its first 14 hours, the AP reported. Mega, which Dotcom has dubbed "the privacy company," functions similarly to cloud storage platforms like Dropbox but with encryption and decryption of files as standard. This not only offers privacy for users, but protection for the company itself. Only users hold the keys for decoding files; Mega can't see the content of the shared files and thus, according to DotCom, can't be held liable (as he was for copyright infringing materials shared over MegaUpload).

Aaron Swartz, freedom fighter

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 18:07:00 +0000

For Aaron Swartz, the act of sharing was a "moral imperative." In his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, released to the Web in July 2008, he specifically targeted the "world's entire scientific and cultural heritage," which he said "is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations." Swartz called for those with access to such knowledge to make it available to others.

You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not -- indeed, morally, you cannot -- keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends ... Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

In July 2011, Swartz was arrested on charges of illegally downloading 4.8 million documents from JSTOR, an online archive of scholarly articles. Facing a maximum possible prison sentence of 35 years and a fine of as much as a million dollars, Swartz killed himself Friday night, just two days after prosecutors rejected a plea bargain deal that would have allowed him to avoid jail time.

The Pirate Bay becomes raid-proof

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 20:47:00 +0000

Popular file-sharing site The Pirate Bay bills itself as "the world's most resilient" site of its kind. As a top facilitator of illegal downloading around the planet, The Pirate Bay has, since its inception in 2003, taken pains to conceal the location of its servers from the authorities.

Now, according to TorrentFreak.com, TPB has headed for "the cloud" -- all its servers will now be virtually hosted, without the need for any persisting physical server locations.

“Moving to the cloud lets [The Pirate Bay] move from country to country, crossing borders seamlessly without downtime. All the servers don’t even have to be hosted with the same provider, or even on the same continent,” The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak. "If the police decide to raid us again there are no servers to take," the site said, explaining that hosting content virtually leaves little to be taken in a raid.

The Pirate Bay was raided once before in 2006 in Sweden (where the site originates from). Police took all the site's servers at the time, but it was still back online and more popular than ever within three days. According to Torrent Freak, the site's move to the cloud may have been prompted by rumors that another police raid was imminent in Sweden. The powerful Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have long pressured authorities to crackdown on the site, which, since moving to the cloud, boasts the epithet "the galaxy's most resilient bit torrent site."

Internet providers to bring in six-strike plan

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 20:58:00 +0000

Major U.S. Internet service providers, including Comcast, AT&T, Cablevision Systems, Time Warner Cable and Verizon are implementing a plan to punish illicit file sharing. Wired reports that "providers by year’s end will institute a so-called six-strikes plan, the 'Copyright Alert System' initiative backed by the Obama administration and pushed by Hollywood and the major record labels to disrupt and possibly terminate Internet access for online copyright scofflaws."

The plan works by implementing "mitigation measures" on a user's IP address after offenses of file sharing are detected; the measures might include reducing Internet speeds and redirecting a user's service to a webpage about copyright infringement.

According to the group behind the initiative, the Center for Copyright Information, the aim of the program is to be more educational than simply punitive.

Wired detailed step-by-step how the new plan will work:

Is piracy a radical force?

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 14:30:00 +0000

The Sea was given by God for the use of Men, and is subject to Dominion and Property … the Law of Nations was never granted to them a Power to change the Right of Property.

—Judge Nicholas Trott at the trial of Stede Bonnet and crew, 1718

In an honest service there is thin commons, low wages, and hard labor; in [piracy], plenty and satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power; and who would not balance creditor on this side, when all the hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a sour look or two at choking.

—Pirate captain Black Bart Roberts, circa 1720

The modern day pirates at issue in this litigation do not wear tricornes and extract their ill-gotten booty at cutlass point, but with a mouse and the internet. Nonetheless, their theft of property is every bit as lucrative as their brethren in the golden age of piracy.

—U.S. District Judge Mark Bennett, after awarding the maximum judgment of $4 million to pornography company Private Media Group in a “shot across the bow” of online piracy, 2012