Piracy doesn’t always pay.
Nintendo has settled a federal lawsuit with a 24-year-old Australian who got his hands on the popular Mario game, then shared it with the world.
James Burt, who bought “Super Mario Brothers Wii” early in Australia after a local store mistakenly made it available days before its official release, promptly hacked the game [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Piracy'
News: Nintendo scores piracy win: Australian owes $1.3M for leaking ‘Super Mario Brothers Wii’ Online
February 11th, 2010 No Comments
Tags: Copyright Infringement · Nintendo Wii · Piracy · Video Games
News: Hollywood Studios Lose Australian Movie Piracy Suit
February 5th, 2010 No Comments
Feb. 4 (Bloomberg) — Hollywood’s biggest movie studios, including Walt Disney Co. and Paramount Pictures, lost a suit seeking to stop customers of Australia’s Iinet Ltd. from illegally downloading movies in a ruling that may set a precedent for the industry.
Iinet, Australia’s third-biggest Internet service provider, didn’t authorize copyright infringements and shouldn’t be held liable [...]
Tags: Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft · BitTorrent · Internet Piracy · ISPs · Paramount Pictures · Piracy · Walt Disney Co.
News: Canada: Internet Piracy Haven
December 23rd, 2009 No Comments
Internet piracy is rampant in China, right? And Russia is known to be a hotbed of infringing activities as well. It may come as a surprise to some that the current No. 1 site for BitTorrent file-sharing — often of the copyright-infringing kind — is Canada-based Isohunt. In fact, the Obama administration put Canada on [...]
Tags: BitTorrent · Canada · Copyright Infringement · illegal downloads · Illegal File-sharing · Intellectual Property Rights · Internet Piracy · ISOHunt · P2P software · Piracy
News: French Court Thwarts Google Digital Book Project
December 23rd, 2009 No Comments
A Paris court ruled Friday that Google Inc.’s expansion into digital books breaks France’s copyright laws, and a judge slapped the Internet search leader with a euro10,000-a-day fine until it stops showing literary snippets.
Besides being fined the equivalent of $14,300 for each day in violation, Google was ordered to pay euro300,000 ($430,000) in damages and [...]
Tags: Copyright Infringement · copyright laws · digital books · digital library · France · Google · Piracy
News: 1 Million XBox Live Players Banned
November 16th, 2009 No Comments
Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) this week booted as many as 1 million players from its Xbox Live gaming service due to the company’s belief that they modified their consoles to play games illegally downloaded from file sharing sites.
“All consumers should know that piracy is illegal and that modifying their Xbox 360 console to play pirated discs [...]
Tags: digital rights management (DRM) · file sharing · illegal downloads · Infinity Ward · Microsoft · modded consoles · Modern Warfare 2 · Piracy · pirated games · XBox
News: Iger, Emanuel agree on piracy’s dangers
October 22nd, 2009 No Comments
Piracy is the entertainment industry’s biggest menace, according to two of showbiz’s most prominent players — Disney CEO Robert Iger and WME co-topper Ari Emanuel.
Iger sounded the alarm Saturday during his keynote address to the daylong business and entertainment confab hosted by the USC Gould School of Law and Beverly Hills Bar Assn.
In markets where [...]
Tags: Disney · entertainment industry · film piracy · Illegal Downloading · Piracy · WME
News: Will Piracy Become a Problem for E-Books?
October 8th, 2009 No Comments
You can buy “The Lost Symbol,” by Dan Brown, as an e-book for $9.99 at Amazon.com.
Or you can don a pirate’s cap and snatch a free copy from another online user at RapidShare, Megaupload, Hotfile and other file-storage sites.
Until now, few readers have preferred e-books to printed or audible versions, so the public availability of [...]
Tags: Association of American Publishers · book publishers · e-books · e-readers · file sharing · Piracy · RapidShare · Simon & Schuster
News: UK government: crack down on file sharing, cut off suspected pirates’ Internet connections
September 4th, 2009 No Comments
Illegal peer-to-peer sharing of movies, music and software is currently estimated to comprise more than half the world’s Internet traffic – and copyright holders are up in arms, saying that CD, movie and software sales are taking a devastating hit from the quick, convenient and anonymous piracy options the broadband age has opened up. Now, [...]
Tags: Digital Economy bill · file sharing · peer-to-peer · Piracy · RIAA
News: Police bust Harry Potter piracy ring
August 6th, 2009 No Comments
Police say they have smashed two movie piracy rings and seized 35,000 pirated DVDs in Sydney.
Detectives discovered thousands of illegal copies of films currently showing at Australian cinemas, including Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.
Raids were carried out simultaneously at three video shops and two homes by NSW police and the Australian Federation Against [...]
Tags: Australia · DVDs · Harry Potter · Piracy
News: Amazon to World: We are Not Evil Totalitarians
July 21st, 2009 No Comments
A mini-scandal broke last week when it was reported that Amazon deleted copies of certain novels from its e-reader, the Kindle, including George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, the dystopian tome where “Big Brother” controls information flow. Creepy! Information-controlling companies want to avoid the label Orwellian, but it certainly doesn’t help when the thing you’re [...]
