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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): >$100m

Based on these figures, film industry analyst Bruce Nash at The Numbers predicts a [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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According to gaming company Global Gaming Factory X, it is in the the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8m (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners.

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Here’s a development from The Pirate Bay crew that is bound to send shock waves through the entertainment industry. Over the weekend, The Pirate Bay quietly released a new feature that enables direct torrent linking to a user’s Facebook profile.
There’s never been anything preventing a torrent link on Facebook, so the concept itself isn’t very [...]

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Even before the popularization of Napster in the late 1990s, the Internet was an extremely efficient way to share content, including pirated material. The net has made it easy to share files digitally, which has also led people to pirate them illegally. The result has been a struggle between governments, interest groups, and users.
The debate [...]

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FoxNews columnist Roger Friedman recently downloaded an illegal copy of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” reviewed the film and then posted that review on the FoxNews website. In his article, which has already been taken down, he claims that the movie is so good that 20th Century Fox does not need to worry about the film appearing [...]

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The FBI are investigating the online leak of an almost finished copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a month before the film’s cinema release.
The Hugh Jackman film was downloaded an estimated several 100,000 times from file sharing websites on Tuesday.
20th Century Fox confirmed the copy had now been removed and the FBI informed.
The studio behind Wolverine [...]

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Internet traffic in Sweden fell by 33% as the country’s new anti-piracy law came into effect, reports suggest.
Sweden’s new policy – the Local IPRED law – allows copyright holders to force internet service providers (ISP) to reveal details of users sharing files.
According to figures released by the government statistics agency – Statistics Sweden – 8% [...]

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$200 iTunes Gift Certificates are selling for less than $3 in China now that a group of local hackers has circumvented Apple’s algorithm for creating the digital vouchers and built their own gift certificate generators.
According to Outdustry, a website which describes itself as a music industry consultancy specializing in the Chinese music business, sellers on [...]

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“Home taping is killing the music industry. Instead of making billions and billions of dollars, we are only making billions of dollars.” -Matt Groening
“Video would be the death of Hollywood?”
Well, specifically, the death of the movie industry. Here is Jack Valenti’s testimony before congress in 1982, foretelling the downfall of the movie industry resulting [...]

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For the “computer illiterate”: burying folders is not as effective as burying treasure chests.

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During the early days of P2P, many companies such as Morpheus attempted to promote up and coming artists as a way of deflecting criticism. This was fine and all, but in the end who and what got promoted was generally up StreamCast. But the arrival of BitTorrent has changed much of this in favor of [...]

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If you frequently open NFO files, NFOPad is a small Windows Notepad clone designed to display them properly.
NFOPad selects the font style based on the file extension, so you can freely switch between basic text files and NFO files without the hassle of changing settings. In the screenshot above, the same file has been opened [...]

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NRK, the Norwegian public broadcaster, has had to pull its legal MP3 archive of all 212 Beatles songs. Turns out the agreement they had with the local rights society didn’t mean what they thought it meant.
Our new agreement with rights holder TONO gives us rights to publish radio and TV shows we aired a long [...]

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