BeautyandBoost.com
4:59pm
Music
‘piracy’ Archives
Clever girl
Downloading a pirated anti-malware program is just like wearing a stabvest made of daggers. Even if you can't be stabbed, you're gonna get blood all over your chest.
Google buying UAV drones for Street View spying?
Over at the Telstar Logistics blog, BB pal Todd Lappin points to a a German news report that Google has purchased small UAV "microdrone" aircraft manufactured by Germany's microdrone GmbH, perhaps for use to augment the company's Street View mapping data. From the cited report: The UAVs being flogged are mini helicopters with cameras [...]
Canadian cinema fined $10,000 for privacy invasion over bag search
A Canadian cinema has been fined C$10,000 for invasion of privacy when it searched a mother and daughter's bags for video cameras, but instead pulled out birth control pills from the daughter's purse. The mother had no idea. She sued. She won. Staff at the theater were searching customers' bags for video equipment that could be used for movie [...]
Official “This website seized by feds” graphic
Check out the new US Government official takedown graphic-- the thing you'll see when a filesharing site (or some similar site which has run afoul of the law) is yanked. The example here can also be seen on tvshack.net, one of nine websites recently seized by the feds over pirated movies. The warrants for those takedowns were issued in [...]
The Pirate Party: We will host The Pirate Bay inside the Swedish parliament
I wonder if this will last? The Swedish Pirate Party: We want to make use of parliamentary immunity from prosecution to protect The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Party recently started to deliver Internet bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, a bittorrent search engine. It is a website that helps people to share digital content, regardless of form. Since The [...]
White Berbarian ready to put movie execs in Hurt Locker
For $250, the Arizona law firm White Berberian will represent people accused of illegal file sharing by "U.S. Copyright Group" (aka Dunlap Grubb & Weaver), the firm filing lawsuits on behalf of The Hurt Locker filmmakers and others who claim their movies have been widely pirated by P2P downloaders. "U.S. Copyright Group" says it intends [...]
Finnish record industry’s regrettable new anti-piracy mascot
The Finnish record industry lobby has produced a series of excruciatingly bad videos to educate the general populace about the evils of piracy. Starring "Captain Nation," they combine moralizing, crummy CGI, bad irony, and worse music.
“The Hurt Locker” producers about to sue an army of pirates
Voltage Pictures, the production company behind The Hurt Locker, is gearing up to sue thousands—no, tens of thousands—of individuals who pirated the film online. Get ready for a huge escalation in the war on P2P. The suit could hit as early as tomorrow, according to The Hollywood Reporter, as Voltage teams up with the US Copyright Group to [...]
Coupon Fraud Grows
On the Internet, shoppers can view an image of the coupon, then print it themselves. That has given some computer-savvy consumers the opportunity to create their own coupons resembling legitimate ones. Some of the new bogus coupons use design templates ripped from couponing Web sites, while others were concocted independently. The makers of [...]
U.S. Lets Hollywood Disable Home TV Outputs to Prevent Piracy
The film industry can block outputs on home television equipment so studios can offer first-run movies while preventing viewers from making illicit copies, U.S. regulators said. Temporarily disabling the outputs will "enable a new business model" that wouldn’t develop in the absence of such anti-piracy protection, the Federal Communications [...]
Porn stars decry piracy
Adult film stars and directors take a stand against internet piracy of adult content. Cast (in order of appearance): Lisa Ann, Julie Meadows, Kaylani Lei, Sinnamon Love, Axel Braun, Nicki Hunter, Ron Jeremy, Alektra Blue, Kimberly Kane, Will Ryder, Cousin Stevie, Joanna Angel, and Charlie Laine. Performer? Next they'll be calling themselves [...]
The most pirated movie of 2009 makes heaps of money
Here's the financial breakdown, courtesy of The Numbers.com, which gathers financial data for movie industry analysts: Production costs: $140m Promotion costs: ~$100m Global box office revenues: $385m U.S. TV syndication rights: $30m DVD & Bluray revenues (anticipated, based on sales and rentals since Nov. 2009): [...]
Chinese pirates launch Ubuntu that looks exactly like Windows XP
From the Chinese pirate masters of the non-sea-faring variety comes... Ylmf OS! Not happy with pirating Windows XP itself, these creative Chinese have gone one step further and hacked Ubuntu to look exactly like Windows XP. Why have they moved to Ubuntu? Because their previous release, a pirate version of Windows XP itself, is being cracked down [...]
Heavy illegal downloaders buy more music
A new British independent poll conducted by Ipsos Mori concluded that the people who do the most illegal downloading also buy the most music. This is in line with many other studies elsewhere and is easy to understand: people who are music superfans do more of everything to do with music: they see more live shows, listen to more radio, buy more [...]
Rapper 50 Cent: Piracy is a part of the marketing
Famed rapper 50 Cent (Curtis Jackson) was apparently on CNBC recently talking about his "business acumen." I have to admit that having three different people all trying to interview him at once is rather annoying -- as they almost never let him complete a thought. However, when they ask him about piracy, and whether or not it makes him angry [...]
What real piracy looks like: Biopirate loses patent over century-old latinamerican staple crop
You hear a lot of talk about piracy in the developing world, about Nigerian markets filled with bootleg DVDs or Chinese iPod knockoffs. But if you want to see what real piracy looks like, look at the bio-pirates, people and corporations who receive patents on common life-forms from the developing world (abetted by the sleepy and lackadaisical [...]
The Pirate Bay sold!
Software company Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) says it is in the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay and file-sharing technology company Peerialism. GGF claims to have the biggest network of internet cafés and gaming centers in the world. The changeover of ownership is scheduled for August 2009, whereby GGF will take over the operation of the [...]
Business Software Alliance says that adopting copyright treaties doesn’t decrease piracy
Copyright laws don't reduce piracy. In other news: raindances don't cause rain. The Business Software Alliance is out today with their annual report on global piracy in 2008. The data shows declining numbers in many countries (the report covers 110 countries), though there is an overall increase due to very high rates in parts of the world.Two [...]
Warner Music claims Larry Lessig is a pirate
Last night, Larry Lessig tweeted that Warner Music had sent a takedown notice to YouTube over one of his presentations, claiming that it infringed their copyright. Lessig, of course, is one of the nation's leading legal scholars, particularly when it comes to fair use and electronic media. His presentations are filled with examples of companies [...]
