NBC Plots Crackdown On Olympic Pirates
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The 2008 Summer Olympics were a huge hit online, both through legal and illegal channels. NBC streamed a record breaking 2,200 hours of live video to the delight of millions of people, but strangely enough this year the network will limit its live coverage to hockey and curling.
An NBC representative explained that the network will only cover the highlights because people “are not dying to watch lots of long-form content on a 13-inch screen.” However, at the same time NBC contradicts itself by announcing that it will do all it can to prevent people from accessing unauthorized live feeds or downloads of Olympic broadcasts.
While NBC doesn’t believe there is much demand for live coverage, it will do all it can to prevent the ‘few’ people who do from downloading or streaming the events online. “Our aim is to make access to pirated material inconvenient, low quality and hard to find,” said Rick Cotton, NBC’s Executive Vice President commenting on their Olympic mission.
Once again one of the major entertainment industry outfits has got it entirely wrong. If NBC really wants to prevent piracy they have to offer at least some sort of alternative. Cutting 2,200 hours of live web coverage back to just a few hundred is certainly not going to help in stopping piracy.
NBC reportedly has teamed up with Ustream and Justin.tv, two popular live streaming sites, to use filtering schemes in order to prevent illegal broadcasts. However, it is inevitable that they won’t be able to stop them all since there are dozens of live streaming sites. Preventing torrents from being uploaded will turn out to be even more problematic for the network.
During the Beijing Olympics two years ago, The International Olympic Committee (IOC) asked for “assistance” from the Swedish government with preventing video clips from the Olympics in Beijing being shared via The Pirate Bay. This didn’t help much and during the weeks that followed millions of people continued to download broadcasts of Olympic events.
We assume that in the coming weeks most events will again appear online, despite NBC’s efforts to prevent the Olympics from being pirated.
Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.
Interview: Halestorm — “Def Leppard isn’t playing tonight…”
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Interview: Hugo Weaving of The Wolfman — “We’ve forgotten about the animal side of our nature…”
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Interview: HIM — “Screamworks is kind of like a David Lynch movie…”
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Pirate Movie Privacy Case Set For The Supreme Court
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Released in 2008, Max Manus is a Norwegian World War II movie based on the real-life events of resistance fighter Max Manus. Created at a cost of NOK 55,000,000 it was the most expensive Norwegian film production to date.
Shortly after the movie’s 19th December release date an illicit copy of the movie appeared on the Internet. According to producer John M. Jacobsen the recording was made in an empty theater, prompting suspicions that a projectionist was involved.
“I think this is totally reprehensible, and I wish we knew who is behind it,” Jacobsen told Norwegian media. “Anyway we will go after those who have done this quite mercilessly. There are ways to track these things down.”
An investigation was immediately launched by the Filmkameratene studio, to be handled by the Simonsen law firm with notorious pirate hunter Espen Tøndel at the helm. Technicians went to work, systematically going through every copy of the movie sent out to find a match – that meant checking 103 analog and 20 digital copies.
Their detective work paid off. Simonsen said they had not only tracked the correct copy but also identified the IP-address from where the movie was first uploaded to the Internet. They took the information to the police but were notified that the case would not be a priority for them. Simonsen responded by taking the case to the courts.
Simonsen, a law firm which since 2006 had held a license to monitor alleged pirates and collect their IP-addresses, demanded that the ISP connected with the IP-address hand over the identity of the subscriber, something it had thus far refused to do. The request had the support of the Norwegian telecoms authorities which in this case made a special exception to the country’s Privacy Act, enabling the person’s identity to be handed to a group other than the police – if the court agreed.
On May 5th 2009, Simonsen received the decision from the court but the verdict was kept a secret from the public. Espen Tøndel said this was to prevent the possibility of evidence being spoiled. This lack of transparency caused an uproar, with thousands of Internet citizens demanding to know the verdict in this important case. Many argued that if there was evidence to be spoiled, it would’ve been spoiled by now.
Today in 2010, the verdict is still a mystery to the public, but at least one of the parties is disappointed with the court’s decision.
“I can confirm that the case is being appealed to the Supreme Court, but I can not confirm which of the parties has submitted the appeal, as that may indicate what the results were in the previous hearing,” said movie industry lawyer Rune Ljøstad.
The Supreme Court will now have to decide if it’s acceptable for privately owned companies with financial interests in the outcome of a case to be given the power to obtain the identity of an Internet subscriber behind an IP-address, whether or not they committed the alleged offense.
Despite the leak, Max Manus did incredibly well in Norway, breaking all records. Its 2009 theater run yielded almost NOK 200 million across 1.16 million tickets and the DVD sold 400,000 copies in the same year. From recording a loss in 2008, movie company Filmkameratene made a profit in 2009.
“There is a dramatic change for the better for us in 2009,” said producer Sveinung Golimo. “So we are not now concerned about the future.”
Privacy campaigners will look toward the forthcoming Supreme Court decision before sharing in his optimism.
Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.
Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent
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This week there are only two newcomers in the top 10. Avatar came out as a DVD screener this week and is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent again. The Hurt Locker, the other big winner at the Oscar nominations, reappeared in the charts in fourth place.
The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise.
RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.
| Ranking | (last week) | Movie | Rating / Trailer |
|---|---|---|---|
| torrentfreak.com | |||
| 1 | (6) | Avatar (DVDscr) | 8.6 / trailer |
| 2 | (1) | Sherlock Holmes (DVDscr) | 7.7 / trailer |
| 3 | (2) | Daybreakers (DVDscr) | 7.0 / trailer |
| 4 | (…) | The Hurt Locker | 8.0 / trailer |
| 5 | (4) | Zombieland | 7.9 / trailer |
| 6 | (3) | The Men Who Stare at Goats (R5) | 6.8 / trailer |
| 7 | (7) | Couples Retreat | 5.5/ trailer |
| 8 | (…) | Nine (DVDscr) | 6.6/ trailer |
| 9 | (5) | The Book of Eli (TS) | 7.4/ trailer |
| 10 | (8) | The Informant! | 7.1 / trailer |
Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.
I Am…Yours An Intimate Performance at Wynn Las Vegas – full album stream
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The Pirate Bay To Be Censored in Italy, Again
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The Pirate Bay was first ‘censored’ in Italy in the summer of 2008, when ISPs were ordered to prevent millions of Italians from accessing the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker.
The Pirate Bay chose to appeal the decision and eventually won the court case. The Court of Bergamo ruled that no foreign website can be censored for alleged copyright infringement and the block was lifted temporarily as the case was appealed once again.
A few weeks ago the Supreme Court reviewed the case and ruled that ISPs can be forced to block BitTorrent sites, even if they are not hosted in Italy or operated by Italian citizens. According to the decision by the Supreme Court, sites offering torrent files that link to copyrighted material are engaging in criminal activity.
This week the case once again appeared before the Court of Bergamo where it was decided that all Italian ISPs will have to deny their customers access to The Pirate Bay.
Pirate Bay lawyers Giovanni Battista Gallus, Giuseppe Campanelli and Francesco Micozzi told TorrentFreak that the Court followed the same reasoning as the Supreme Court, and deemed it unnecessary to bring the case before the European Court of Justice.
According to the two lawyers The Pirate Bay is still considering whether to appeal this decision or not, but that will not prevent or delay the block. “We don’t know when Italian ISPs will begin to re-apply the Pirate Bay filters, but we think that this will happen very soon,” Micozzi commented.
Aside from appealing to the Supreme Court, the Pirate Bay’s legal team is also considering bringing the case before the European Court of Justice.
It is doubtful that the verdict will have a strong impact on the piracy rate in Italy. The proposed DNS-filtering scheme can be easily bypassed by Pirate Bay users and there are hundreds of alternative torrent sites that can replace The Pirate Bay.
Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.