In 2018, the owner of Two-Bit History, a site dedicated to computer history, wrote a successful article about mathematician Ada Lovelace, who some credit as being the first computer programmer. Sadly, if you search Google for that article today you won’t find it. Some idiotic anti-piracy company had it deleted because it dared to use the word “did.” TorrentFreak reports: In…
Tag: piracy
Twitch Has Become a Haven For Live Sports Piracy
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Twitch has been and remains home to illicit sports broadcasts; a late December boxing match attracted over 86,000 viewers — some of whom spammed ASCII genitalia in chat — and a mid-January soccer match drew over 70,000 over three livestreams. Although Twitch often stomps them out mid-match, plenty of livestreams posted by throwaway…
Streaming Services Reckon With Password-Sharing ‘Havoc’
In 2019, companies lost about $9.1 billion to password piracy and sharing. From a report: On Dec. 9, Charter Communications CEO Tom Rutledge took aim at the “content companies” entering the direct-to-consumer streaming business. The cable executive told a roomful of investment bankers in Manhattan that these new streamers are “creating havoc in the ecosystem.” Rutledge wasn’t talking about the proliferation…
FBI Busts Massive Pirate Streaming Service With More Content Than Netflix
An anonymous reader quotes USA Today: Two programmers in Las Vegas recently admitted to running two of the largest illegal television and movie streaming services in the country, according to federal officials… An FBI investigation led officials to Darryl Polo, 36, and Luis Villarino, 40, who have pleaded guilty to copyright infringement charges for operating iStreamItAll, a subscription-based streaming site, and…
Ask Slashdot: Would You Pay To Subscribe To YouTube?
Long-time Slashdot reader shanen writes:
If you don’t watch YouTube, then more power to you, but if you do watch it, then I bet you have noticed more and more intrusive and noisy and much longer ads along with frequent reminders that you can pay up and make the noise go away. Feels like extortion to me and I’m not going to…
EU Study Shows Online Piracy is Complex and Not Easy To Grasp
The European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) has released a new study which suggests that piracy is dropping in Europe. While the research is limited to site-based piracy, it has some interesting findings. Countries with a lower average income per person visit pirate sites more often, for example. In addition, the study shows that awareness of legal options doesn’t always decrease…
Federal Court Approves First ‘Pirate’ Site Blockade In Canada
A group of major broadcasters and telco giants, including Rogers and Bell, have obtained the first Canadian pirate site blocking order. TorrentFreak reports: Last year, a coalition of copyright holders and major players in the telco industry asked the Canadian Government to institute a national pirate site blocking scheme. The Fairplay coalition argued that such measures would be required to effectively…
Disney + and ‘The Mandalorian’ Are Driving People Back To Torrenting
An anonymous reader shares a report: A simple glance at torrent websites shows that plenty of people are stealing from the brand new steaming services — episodes of The Mandalorian and Dickinson all have hundreds or thousands of seeders and are among the most popular shows on torrent sites. I reached out specifically to Disney, Apple, and Netflix to ask what…
US Court Shields Internet Subscribers From Futile Piracy Complaints
A New Jersey district court has issued a devastating order against Strike 3 Holdings, the most active filer of piracy lawsuits in the US. In four separate cases, the court denied a request to obtain identities of alleged BitTorrent pirates. The court argues that the underlying complaints are futile. Even if they held up, other issues such as the privacy of…
Top MPAA Lawyer, Mastermind Behind Its Plan To Attack the Internet, Arrested On Blackmail and Sexual Assault Charges
Steven Fabrizio, a top executive at the Motion Picture Association of America, has been fired following charges of second degree sexual abuse and blackmail. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Techdirt report, written by Mike Masnick: Beyond being the MPAA’s top legal attack dog for nearly a decade, the Sony Pictures email leak showed that Fabrizio was the mastermind…