RLIndex Pirate News

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.

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.

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

Ubisoft has announced its new solution to prevent pirates from playing their games. The upcoming DRM will require gamers to be online when playing the game. If no Internet connection is available it means that the game wont work, period. As with most DRM, Ubisoft’s new anti-piracy solution needlessly hurts legitimate customers

Using pirated films as promotional material to sell consumer electronics is nothing new. The John Lewis store has used aXXo rips to sell iMacs in the past and Saturn, Europe’s largest retailer of consumer electronics, showed pirated films to sell Macbooks. In these previous cases the pirated films were only on display in the stores, but the multinational electronics company LG takes it a step further.

Written and directed by Jamin Winans, Ink is an indie movie about a mercenary who appears in the dreams of a comatose 8 year old girl. As with most movies, one part of the story was particularly predictable. It was quickly ripped and ended up on BitTorrent. Just over a week after becoming available online in early November 2009, Ink pushed into TorrentFreak’s chart of top 10 most pirated movies with an incredible 400,000 downloads .

Avatar has been an enormous success. The film has broken nearly all records at the box-office, and together with The Hurt Locker it was last night’s big winner raking in nine Academy Award nominations. James Cameron and the rest of the Avatar crew probably cracked open a few bottles of Champagne to celebrate, but today they will wake up with a serious hangover.

Waxy’s Andy Baio has been collecting detailed piracy stats for every Oscar-nominated movie since 2003. Much to the delight of the MPAA, his most recent statistics show that, compared to previous years, fewer Oscar nominees have leaked online. The statistics for all 2010 nominees , except documentary and foreign films, show that 27 of the 34 films were available on BitTorrent in DVD quality last night. Nearly half of the films have leaked as a screener and 10 of those are estimated to be leaked by Academy members. Although the majority of the Oscar nominees are available online, the movie industry has certainly scored a small victory. Last year all films leaked in one format or another