Escalating the war on piracy: domain names

Root servers

There have been several reports about the next stage in the War on Piracy (must avoid making off-topic comments about the inherent stupidity of declaring armed hostilities against abstract concepts). I am talking of course about “Operation In Our Sites” (must not comment about some poor smug bureaucrat who thought the pun was funny). [...]

Limewire, ISOHunt, PirateBay and the future of P2P

Wishful thinking?

It is perhaps an indication of how times have changed that the content industries have won some decisive legal battles in court against Limewire, isoHunt and the PirateBay, yet these have not prompted the same level of scrutiny that previous cases have.

The reason for this is quite simple. Whoever thinks that the legal victories [...]

Does Spain need to change its copyright law?

(via TechDirt) The New York Times has published an interesting article about how copyright owners are urging for a change in Spanish copyright law (as an aside, I should find another word to describe articles linked in this blog, “interesting” is seriously over-used). Allegedly, Spain is the pirate capital of Europe, in 2008 illegal movie downloads [...]

What’s the effect of piracy to the economy? Nobody knows!

(via Ars Technica) Just a couple of weeks ago yours truly was bemoaning the preposterous abuse of statistics in order to produce a set of dodgy figures about the cost of piracy to the European economy. Now a U.S. government institution has produced a report that pretty much tells us similar points, namely, that it is [...]

Digital Economy Bill passes

The Dark Lord of the Sith never rests

So, what many suspected has come to pass, our deepest fears confirmed and one of the worst possible texts adopted. The Digital Economy Bill has gone through the wash-up process in the very last day of this Parliament. I am expecting others to go into the detail of [...]

Copyright infringement is not theft

Tired of hearing copyright infringement called “theft” by all sort of people in the content industries? James Murdoch of News Corp is just the latest in a long line of  industry shills who favour this wrong-headed argument. I could write a long retort to that statement, but I will simply reproduce a comment from The Guardian [...]

What's up with the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement?

"I find your lack of copyright enforcement disturbing"

If you follow technology news services and blogs that are vaguely interested in digital rights issues, you must already have heard about ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. This is a multilateral trade agreement between the EU, the US, Mexico, Canada, Australia, South Korea, New Zealand and a few [...]

Landmark ISP liability case decided in Australia

What did you say Skippy? ISPs are not liable for the infringement committed by their customers?

As was mentioned last week, we have been expecting an important ruling with regards to internet service provider (ISP) liability from Australia.  Behold Roadshow Films Pty Ltd v iiNet Limited [2010] FCA 24.  This is a case of tremendous importance [...]

Is deep-packet inspection a criminal offence?

"These are not the packets you are looking for"

Things are heating up in the fight against piracy in the UK.  Virgin Media has announced that it will use deep packet inspection (DPI) software to analyse whether its customers are sharing copyright infringing material.  Privacy International has brought this practice to the attention of both the [...]

The war on storage?

As usual, xkcd makes an excellent point:

With sizes of up to 64GB contained in a tiny card the size of a coin, I wonder why the content industries are not concentrating more on such storage devices, and continue to insist that the war on piracy is an online endeavour.  When I can copy my entire music [...]