Hasta La Gadget!

Authorities and copyright holders all over the world tried their damnedest to kill the Pirate Bay, but as data reported by TorrentFreak proves, the file sharing hub is a rogue ship that won’t sink.

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Google, the world’s biggest search engine, receives vast quantities of takedown requests, where individuals and entities can request that Google take down a link containing allegedly infringing content in 2013. … Continue reading

Is the piracy of music a big deal? On the business side of things, sure. Music downloaded basically equals to album/single sales that have been potentially lost. After all if you can have it for free, why bother paying for it, right? Record labels, publishers, and some artists see it that way, but then again there are also those who don’t think of it as too big a deal, and legendary British metal band, Iron Maiden, is one of them. The band relied on data-mining company, Musicmetric, to monitor its growth on social media websites and found that there was a spike in popularity over in Latin America.

Ironically enough Latin America is also where a large amount of Iron Maiden’s materials get pirated, but instead of using those metrics to hunt the pirates down, Iron Maiden decided to fly down there and put on a show for them. Their efforts, instead of pursuing the legal option, have actually managed to net the band around $2.5 million in revenue from a single show that was recently held in Sao Paulo, Brazil. This move also managed to garner the band an additional 5 million followers on its social media pages from 2012 to 2013.

Artists typically make a huge bulk of their money from touring and selling merchandize. While album sales are important, they are typically used to help recoup expenses made by the record label in the production and marketing of the album, with cuts typically favoring the label (although this depends on the contract between the artist and the label). Iron Maiden is also well-established which means that this would be easier for them to pull off compared to an up and coming artist, but what do you guys think?

Iron Maiden’s Response To Piracy Has Actually Gained Them More Fans original content from Ubergizmo.

It would appear that bands that have gotten over the madness hump that is the realization that their music is being pirated have begun taking advantage of that fact. One … Continue reading

AT&T has been awarded a patent that would let the company track subscriber browsing behavior, assign them a “reputation score”, and then block “high-risk” subscribers from being able to access file-sharing services. The patent is called “Methods, devices and computer program products for regulating network activity using a subscriber scoring system”. In other words, the […]