Music downloading penalties are harsher than arson, theft, or starting a dogfighting ring

Boing Boing:

“Jesus Diaz looks at the $1.92m fine Jammie Thomas faces for downloading 1700 songs and compares it to the penalties for other crimes in America (valuing jail time at $50,233, the median US household income in 2007):

• Child abduction: Fine of $25,000 and up to three years in prison, which can be accounted as $50,233 per year (that was the median household income in 2007, probably down because of the economic crisis). Total: $175,699.

• Steal the CDs: A total of $275,000, $52,500 fine for the CDs.

• Steal a lawnmower from your neighbour: A total of $375,000.

• Burn someone’s house while playing The Doors: Another $375,000.

• Stalk a Gizmodo editor (yes, you know who you are): A Class 4 felony that will result in just $175,000.

• Start a dogfighting ring: $50,000.

• Murder someone on the second degree, a Class 1 felony: $778,495, which accounts for a $25,000 fine and four to 15 years in prison.”

Second Degree Murder and Six Other Crimes Cheaper than Pirating Music (via O’Reilly Radar)

ItsHidden Offers Free and Anonymous Torrenting

Lifehacker:

“If you’re of the mindset that what you do with your BitTorrent client is your business and not that of people snooping, sniffing, and prying at your packets along the way, ItsHidden offers free VPN server to anonymize your activity.

Photo by Paulpod.

ItsHidden uses 128-bit encryption on the secure tunnel created between you and the ItsHidden servers. Based out of the Netherlands, ItsHidden takes advantage of the legal climate there and doesn’t log any activity passed through its servers.

To access the ItsHidden VPN, you need to sign up for a free account and make a small configuration tweak to your respective operating system to enable the VPN. They include step by step instructions for Windows XP, users of other systems will either have to use them as a template or look up the specific steps for their OS. ItsHidden requires no software installation.

During our test run with a large Linux distribution, connection speeds with the ItsHidden VPN enabled were only negligibly decreased from our standard torrent speeds without the VPN in place. Check out the link below for more information and if you know of another service for anonymizing your internet activity—torrent-related or otherwise—let’s hear about it in the comments.”

ItsHidden [via TorrentFreak]

The Pirate Bay Raises The White Flag, Goes Legit

/Film:

“It’s hardly the last bastion of online piracy, but Swedish bit torrent tracker The Pirate Bay is certainly the most visible face of illegal movie and music trading. Now it is going legit. Swedish company Global Gaming Factor, which the LA Times says operates gaming cafes, has bought the site for $7.8m, with the goal of offering legal downloads. We’ve seen this trick before (Napster being the most memorable version) but there’s a catch this time: GGF says they’ll pay users to download material legally.

In April, site founders and owners Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundstrom were convicted of being accessories to copyright infringement. The prime movers in the case against them were movie studios, with music labels chiming in. Warner Bros., MGM, Columbia Pictures, Fox, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI all wanted damages.

The idea now is to work with those same studios and record labels to create a legit business. Global Gaming Factor isn’t naive enough to think that users accustomed to getting everything for free are going to be enamored of the new business model, so they’ve cooked up a scheme to pay them back. “To compete with free file sharing, you have to beat it,” said GGF CEO Hans Pandeya. “What’s better than zero? Well, that’s paying somebody $1.” Not that he discloses much to the Times about where that money is going to come from; the suggestion is that the money won’t be paid out directly, but into an in-house account and used towards purchases of media downloads on the new Pirate Bay. From here, that looks and sounds like an ambitious, unsustainable plan.

What does this mean for online movie piracy? Sadly, probably not a damn thing. Taking a leak like Wolverine as an example, there were innumerable outlets for snagging the film once it was out in the wild for a few hours. Losing a highly visible site like The Pirate Bay might keep neophyte downloaders from grabbing movies and shows quite so easily, but the fight to contain illegal distribution of movies is far from over.”

Canadian music pirates of 1897

Boing Boing:

“This NYT article from 1897 about Canadian music piracy is awfully familiar sounding — search-and-replace “Canadian” with “Swedish” and “post office” with “ISP” and you get… The Long War: Music Piracy in 1897 (NYTimes) “

BitTorrent Site The Pirate Bay Admins Found Guilty, Sentenced to a Year

Lifehacker:

“Administrators at popular BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay were found guilty of contributory copyright infringement by a Swedish court this morning and sentenced to a year in prison, according to Wired. The guilty gentlemen were also ordered to pay 3.6 million in damages to several entertainment companies—a big win for Hollywood. The folks at The Pirate Bay keep their spirits up, responding with the embedded video and their classic sense of humor:

But as in all good movies, the heroes lose in the beginning but have an epic victory in the end anyhow. That’s the only thing hollywood ever taught us.”

[Wired]

U2’s manager wants the power to cut off your Internet connection

Boing Boing:

“JZ sez,

The Guardian looks at the French Three Strikes law, whose final discussion will happen today in both chambers of the French parliament. I thought you might be interested into making a reply to it. It’s pure mantra and doesn’t talk about the most disturbing points:

– it gives the entertainment industries the power to police the internet by themselves

– the whole procedure is based on immaterial, unverifiable, unopposable proofs (IP address listings)

– you cannot claim your innocence before the sanction is ordered.

Innocents will inevitably be disconnected.

As the NYT reported today: “Nonetheless, Internet advocates call the French proposal legally unsound on the ground that there are inadequate the provisions for challenging an action, and because it gives industry groups the power to police the Internet. Others question whether the law would unfairly penalize those whose wireless broadband accounts are misused by others. The French law tries to anticipate this by making it a civil infraction for citizens to fail to ’secure’ their broadband accounts by using approved filtering technology.”

The Guardian piece consists of U2’s manager talking about how it would be great if private corporations — phone companies and music labels — got the power to take away your Internet connection on the basis of unproven accusations of copyright infringement.

I’ve written about this subject rather a lot here (see below), but I think this is the most cogent response:

In the past week, I’ve only used the internet to contact my employers around the world, my MP in the UK, to participate in a European Commission expert proceeding, to find out why my infant daughter has broken out in tiny pink polka-dots, to communicate with a government whistle-blower who wants to know if I can help publish evidence of official corruption, to provide references for one former student (and follow-up advice to another), book my plane tickets, access my banking records, navigate the new Home Office immigration rules governing my visa, wire money to help pay for the headstone for my great uncle’s grave in Russia, and to send several Father’s Day cards (and receive some of my own).

The internet is only that wire that delivers freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press in a single connection. It’s only vital to the livelihood, social lives, health, civic engagement, education and leisure of hundreds of millions of people (and growing every day).

This trivial bit of kit is so unimportant that it’s only natural that we equip the companies that brought us Police Academy 11, Windows Vista, Milli Vanilli and Celebrity Dancing With the Stars with wire-cutters that allow them to disconnect anyone in the country on their own say-so, without proving a solitary act of wrongdoing.”

Why France has the solution to online piracy

Pirate Bay To Offer VPN For $7 a Month

Slashdot: “Death Metal sends along an Ars Technica piece about The Pirate Bay’s plans for a virtual private network service to help ensure its users’ privacy. “The Pirate Bay is planning to launch a paid VPN service for users looking to cover their tracks when torrenting. The new service will be called IPREDator, named after the Swedish Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) that will go into effect in April. IPREDator is currently in private beta and is expected to go public next week for €5 per month. … IPREDator’s website says that it won’t store any traffic data, as its entire goal is to help people stay anonymous on the web. Without any data to hand over, copyright owners won’t be able to find individuals to target. … The question remains, however, if any significant portion of The Pirate Bay’s users will decide to fork over 5 per month solely to remain anonymous. It seems more likely that the majority either won’t care, or will simply start looking for lesser-known torrent trackers to use.”

Pirate Bay Witness’ Wife Overwhelmed With Flowers

Piracy = flowers……

Torrentfreak: “Professor and media researcher Roger Wallis appeared as an expert witness at the Pirate Bay trial yesterday. He was questioned on the link between the decline of album sales and filesharing. Wallis told the court that his research has shown that there is no relation between the two.

He was heavily attacked by industry lawyers Danowsky, Pontén and Wadsted who did everything they could to discredit and slander his reputation. When Wallis was asked whether he wanted to be reimbursed for travel expenses etc, he light-heartedly suggested sending some flowers to his wife.

His statement was picked up by the large audience listening in to the live audio from the trial and flowers soon began arriving at the Wallis’ house.

Roger’s wife, Görel Wallis, wasn’t surprised by her husband’s whim in court:

“We have been married for 38 years. He proposed half an hour after we met and I said maybe. After a day, he had convinced me”, she said.

At a local flower store in Stockholm they had received 100 orders by 20.30 last night. Owner Kristian Skald said that two nearby stores had received an equal amount of orders.

“Last delivery was 33 bouquets Thursday night. There will be more to come on Friday,” the owner of the flower shop commented.

Today, Friday, the couple celebrates their wedding day anniversary and on Saturday it’s Görel’s birthday. Roger Wallis feels she is worth all the flowers she gets.

“She was very worried before the trial. They questioned my competence and that made her very sad. She hadn’t slept for two days,” Roger said.

A web page has been set up that collects what has been given so far, complete with an ever-growing stack of CDs that show how many sales the music-industry has lost by slandering the Professor. Thus far, in an amazing show of generosity from a section of society labeled by the music industry as ‘thieves’, more than 4100 Euros worth of flowers, chocolate and gifts have been sent to the couple. The Wallis’ soon ran out of vases for the flowers but Görel knows that sharing is caring and will distribute the flowers to all residents in their apartment building.

“We will make sure it will be beautiful here.”

Tracking the Piracy of 2008 Oscar-Nominated Films

/Film:

“Ever since the advent of DVD and bittorrent technology, it’s been
inevitable: Studios that send out screeners to Academy members
inevitably see those films end up pirated and downloaded on torrent
sites. But just how extensive is the problem, and how has its
pervasiveness changed over time?

In his post, “Pirating the 2009 Oscars,”
Andy Baio from Waxy.org has put together a stunning and comprehensive
analysis. Baio has been monitoring Oscar films and their rates of
piracy for the past 6 years, most recently adding the 26 nominees for
this year’s upcoming Oscar ceremony, which makes his list encompass a
solid 211 films in total. Hit the jump for some of this year’s
statistics.

• Over the past few years, the vast majority of Oscar-nominated films
  have typically been available online in a high-quality format come
  Oscar time. This year doesn’t change that trend at all. Out of the 26 films that received Oscar nominations, 24 of them are available online in DVD quality (the only ones excluded are Rachel Getting Married and Changeling, the latter of which is available as a low quality telecine transfer).
• Academy members received screeners for at least 20 out of the 26 nominated films.
• The average time from the time high-quality screeners are received by Academy members to the time they are leaked online is 6 days.
• Compared to past years, Oscar-nominated movies this year actually
  took longer to show up online in any format (such as a cam) after their
  initial theatrical release, with the median time clocking in at 11
  days. Baio attributes this to either a crackdown on cameras in
  theaters, or less online demand for Oscar nominated films in general
  this year.

Make sure you check out the full post
for all the details, and the Google Doc that tracks the raw data and
statistics. If you’re into movies, statistics, piracy, or some
combination of those three, this post is your dream come true.”

Cruise Ship outruns Pirates

Digg: “Pirates chased and shot at a U.S. cruise liner with more than 1,000
people on board but failed to hijack the vessel as it sailed along a
corridor patrolled by international warships, a maritime official said
Tuesday.”